“By Design” Director Asks Sundance Audience To Flirt With Their Chairs at Premiere

By Jordan Crucchiola

As By Design writer-director Amanda Kramer introduces her film for its premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, she has one request for her audience: “When you get up, when you’re done with the movie, I would like for you to stand, turn around, look at your seat, and think, ‘Who are you? And where are you going tonight?’” 

Kramer is not just sensitive to the plight of chairs generally, those inanimate heroes doing the thankless task of providing people ease and comfort across the world. She is uniquely attuned to the yeoman’s work of chairs after making a movie about a woman named Camille (Juliette Lewis) who becomes so besotted with a piece of wooden furniture that her soul leaves her body to exist within its structure. Even though her physical self remains elsewhere as a catatonic husk, Camille’s consciousness exists contentedly in the chair’s bentwood frame. Thus, Kramer reminds her audience to be mindful. “We are all sitting in people right now. So, get cozy. It’s lap time.”

By Design is a film with a simple description (a woman becomes a chair) that belies its complexity, which programmer Ash Hoyle says is exactly what makes it a perfect fit for the NEXT section. “Folks always ask us, what makes a NEXT film? What makes this section what it is? And it’s kind of indefinable, which is the point,” says Hoyle. “But every once in a while a film comes along that feels definitional of this section, and this is definitely one of them. We were drawn to the simplicity and the vigor of this vision, and the pure audacity of making such a movie as this.”

The kernel of Kramer’s unique story first came about when she noticed a group of her friends swooning over an image of Nicole Kidman on someone’s phone. As the filmmaker watched them regale one another with praise for the superstar’s beauty, Kramer wondered why we make a ritual of fawning over people in beautiful adornments when we could be celebrating the adornments themselves. 

“This is a lady in a nice dress with nice hair. You could have a beautiful dress if you paid for it. You could have beautiful hair. Why are we envying the way she looks? Why don’t we envy the dress itself?” Kramer explains. “So, I started pointing at things in the room and everyone was like, ‘Yeah! The mantle! The flowers on the mantle!’ And I actually started to feel like there was beauty everywhere, but we just want Nicole Kidman’s dress. It made me kind of sad. I don’t understand it, but we do it all day long, so I thought why not love something else and want to be something else that’s also beautiful?” 

If you’re asking yourself by now how one makes a movie about a person who existentially becomes a chair that’s coveted by everyone who encounters it, the answer boils down to one organizing principle: Juliette Lewis. With her singular screen presence and all the audacity Hoyle described as intrinsic to NEXT programming, Lewis imbues Camille with longing, heartbreak, desire, and even rage as her body — deserted for the confines of the chair — limply stretches across each frame. 

Friends played by Robin Tunney and Samantha Mathis plead with her to snap out of her mysteriously silent repose as they selfishly complain to Camille about their lives; they miss the woman who absorbs all their worries without her own complaint. Even Camille’s mother (Betty Buckley) hardly notices any difference in her as she begins rearranging her daughter’s shoe closet while Camille’s lifeless body lays with eyes wide open on the bed. But for all the absurdity of By Design’s premise, Lewis says it was the film’s heart and emotional truth that brought her to tears when she first read the script.

“I had only read part of the script,” Lewis says before interrupting herself to burst out laughing, “and I said yes. And then the most wonderful thing happened, which is I read the rest of it! And I was like ‘Oh, you’re doing nothing for the majority of the movie!’ Then even more I was like, what a subversive pleasure to have me trying to do nothing but doing something all the time.” Lewis added that despite the outlandish conceit, the life and struggles of Camille resonated with her. 

Mamoudou Athie, who plays the chair’s owner-by-chance, Olivier, says he, too, felt an entirely natural connection with the material, even if it might seem strange to others. Olivier is gifted the chair by his former girlfriend and becomes infatuated with it — having no knowledge of the fact that Camille’s soul lives inside the wood. Athie saw Olivier as someone who struggles to connect with people, and so channels all the desire he is uncomfortable sharing with another person onto an object instead. It’s a coping mechanism he has in common with Camille, a woman drifting through life with superficial friendships and who longs in her deepest core to live as a beloved chair or a beautiful place instead of as a person. 

As Lewis says, “It’s really a movie, I guess at the end, where I saw someone who wants to be seen and isn’t seen, and just every dimension of the film I felt I related to.”