In Meet Me in Montenegro Alex Holdridge and Linnea Saasen play Anderson and Lina, two drifters who meet by chance in Berlin and have a torrid fling that takes them to the title Balkan country. One day she disappears leaving only a note behind. Fast forward a couple of years and they’re once more united by fate, but will their holiday romance into something more? Shot over three years in various European locations, the film is a quasi documentary that playfully chronicles the real life relationship between Holdridge and Saasen, who also co-directed the film.

So far Meet Me in Montenegro has played in various international festivals and on the eve of its Stateside theatrical debut we had a chance to sit down with its stars and directors.

How was it like to star and direct the film at the same time? Did you find yourselves fighting like the couple in the film?

Linnea: I think it was definitely more calm than that, we seldom fought. It was quite an organic process.

Alex: That was not the hard part, the hard part was trying to make the film and make it not feel cheesy. We were more two concerned people really, really focusing and trying to do something well. We needed to figure out how to do it, things like the drawings in the film which Linnea made, as well as things like altering the skies digitally to make them look better...all things people don’t notice but which matter. Shooting the other actors was easier, we just needed to find the right time to do it because they are very busy and we were going to shoot in all these places, so we couldn’t bring everyone with us. We decided to be in Montenegro and shoot at our own pace, to capture as much as we could. We were living out of backpacks so it was easier to do this.

In terms of co-directing, did you have a dynamic in which all the tasks were divided equally?

Linnea: No, we never had a schedule, it was much more organic, we just figured things out in the best way we could do things.

Alex: There was never a discussion of “you do this, I’ll do this”, it’s like a beast with two heads kind of situation, we just went with the best ideas.

Linnea: We reached the places and had to make do with what we had, for example some days we didn’t have a sound guy so we had to figure things out.

Alex: This is my fourth film and Linnea’s first so it was interesting to work together. You know how some people always sleep on the same side of the bed and some don’t, it was something like that with us.

What elements of Montenegro were important for you to put on screen?

Linnea: We met in Berlin, I was living there at the time, Alex came on holiday, without knowing each other well we took a trip to the Balkans and ended up in Montenegro. Neither of us had been there before and it was so beautiful, mindblowing. While we were there our lives were kind of falling apart, I was supposed to go to art school and had left my apartment and everything, was ready to move to Amsterdam and I got a message saying I was not accepted.

Alex: I  was living in Los Angeles and working on a big passion project that was years in the making. We had a table read and we were going to shoot it in New York, but then we got a call letting us know the film wouldn’t be made anymore. It was like falling in love, standing on a cliff carrying everything you own in the world, so it was a funny way to start a romance. We wrote in Sarajevo and Berlin, sent it to Rupert [Friend] and he said he was in, we brought it to the rest of the actors and within no time we were in a sex club filming our movie.

Linnea: Montenegro is where we fell in love, and we also fell in love with the country.

Alex: In some ways it looks like Norway where Linnea is from, but way hotter. It’s a little more rugged too and less touristy. It was nice to have a throwback to an old fashioned romantic film. There is a theme of “is romance dead?” which was a paradigm people talked about when I wss living in Los Angeles, and I don’t think romance is over, I wanted to make a romantic film.

Were you worried that the film would turn into a travelogue?

Alex: We shot so much! We had a five hour cut that made us wonder if we should turn it into a series, because we had all these characters and subplots. In a series your characters go from point A to point A.0000, while in a movie they need to go from point A to Z, so we wanted to make people see what these characters went through. We wanted to have the cinematic wow that would justify why we were shooting on location.

Alex, your films have a recurring theme. In Sexless your character is moving, in Searching for a Midnight Kiss we have the end of the year which is a transition in itself. Your characters always seem to be running towards something that’s always out of their grasp.

Alex: Two things, for one decisive moments in life are nicely dramatic. There’s a lot of boring stuff that happens in life but there are moments when you have to decide what to do and those moments are nice to dramatize. Adding a limited time frame also helps adds drama.

Something related to fate maybe?

Alex: I don’t believe in fate at all, but I do think that we have meandering experiences that take us to unexpected places.

Linnea: Sometimes life just decides for you and takes you down different paths than you expected.

Was it intimidating to put so much of yourselves in these characters?

Alex: (Laughs) oh yes! We don’t recommend it to anybody. It became more and more personal as it came along, which was something we never really planned on. It felt right to do this with this movie though.

The film has had a successful festival run and it’s refreshing because this is a romantic film and festivals usually are filled with dark, serious dramas. How has this been?

Alex: It’s the most fun film to bring to festivals because everybody is so happy to watch a romantic film after having seen some tragedy about people in Ukraine.

Linnea: After seeing five depressing films and then they see ours, people are very happy.

Alex: We also put some optimism along with our cynicism, which for an indie film seems to be almost more daring, so festival reactions have been fun.

Meet Me in Montenegro opens in theaters on July 10.