Taking full responsibility for your actions, and deciding to actively pursue both your personal and professional ambitions, is a powerful message that’s propelling the new romantic comedy-drama, ‘Chronically Metropolitan.’ First-time feature film director, Xavier Manrique, courageously decided to follow his dream of making his own movie, after working as an assistant to the director on other projects. The protagonist in the filmmaker’s first feature, which is being released into select theaters nationwide today by Paladin, is also driven to achieve his professional goal, which includes maintaining steady work as a writer. However, he’s also finally realizing that his job can have a significant impact on his personal relationships, so he must work to find a balance between the two entities.

‘Chronically Metropolitan’ follows promising writer Fenton (Shiloh Fernandez), who has just returned home to Manhattan from San Francisco. He decided to leave the east coast months before for a self-imposed exile on the west coast, after he experienced a painful falling out with his longtime girlfriend, Jessie (Ashely Benson).

Fenton betrayed Jessie’s trust when he published a scathing tell-all story about her family in The New Yorker. But he has now realized the error of his ways, and is determined to win her trust back. However, his optimistic determination is slightly deterred when he discovers that she’s about to marry a British art dealer, Victor (Chris Lowell).

In addition to trying to win Jessie’s love and affection back, Fenton must also contend with the ever-growing problems within his own family, which is even more dysfunctional now than before he left for California. His father, Christopher (Chris Noth), who’s a famous novelist and professor, has always been his literary role model.

However, Fenton is now realizing the errors of his father’s ways, as it’s been publicly revealed that he’s a notorious womanizer. Christopher was recently injured in a car accident that occurred while he was having an affair with one of his young female students. As a result of his transgressions, Christopher’s long-suffering wife, Annabel (Mary-Louise Parker), has found relief in drugs, which she’s receiving from Fenton’s childhood friend, John (Josh Peck). Fenton is also surprised to learn that John is now dating Fenton’s younger sister, Layla (Addison Timlin). The up-and-coming writer realizes that he must finally grow up, and put his chaotic life in perspective, in order to achieve his personal and professional goals.

Manrique generously took the time recently to talk about helming ‘Chronically Metropolitan’ during an exclusive phone interview. Among other things, the filmmaker discussed how he was drawn to making his feature film directorial debut on the comedy-drama, as he’s always been inspired by New York City-set stories that recount the realistically complex conflicts and emotions that plague relationships. The helmer also mentioned how his mentor, ‘Collateral Beauty‘ director, David Frankel, who served as an executive producer on ‘Chronically Metropolitan,’ encouraged him to follow his creative ambitions during the independent movie’s shoot.

The conversation began with Manrique disclosing why he decided to make his feature film directorial debut on ‘Chronically Metropolitan,’ and why he was drawn to bringing writer Nicholas Schutt’s script to the screen. “I have been working as David Frankel’s assistant for nine years. When I first came across this script, it as about three or four years into our collaboration,” Manrique revealed. “So it was around 2011 or 2012 when we started looking for a project that he could executive produce. We wanted to find something that had his sensibilities, particularly those that I was learning while working with him. So we were looking for something that had a sense of humor,” the helmer shared.

Manrique also revealed that the duo was looking for a story that would allow them to have “control over the sets. It would feature a lot of exterior shots, and a lot of the interior shots would play in one or two locations. We were also looking for locations that would allow us to keep a low budget. That’s where the idea of finding a script like (Schutt’s for ‘Chronically Metropolitan’) came from.”

The filmmaker also divulged that “I’ve always been very attracted to New York stories. I always watched a lot of Woody Allen movies growing up. I fell in love with female-driven comedies and dramas.”

So when he first read the screenplay for ‘Chronically Metropolitan,’ he “discovered that it has a father-son story, as well as husband-wife story. I also realized that it has a love story between the two leads, who are played by Shiloh Fernandez and Ashley Benson. It also has one really big location, and the rest of the scenes are set in exteriors. So I felt like this was my chance to make a New York-set dramedy,” the director admitted.

As a result of his instant connect to the script, Manrique began working on pre-production between “2012 and 2015. We rewrote the script, in order to make it a little less mumblecore. I felt like the movie was a little too commercially mumblecore, and it didn’t have a set three-act structure. During that process, we came up with a few different versions of the script, but we didn’t come up with a draft that actors were connecting with right away.”

After the filmmaker worked on redeveloping the story for about two-and-a-half years, “we realized that the original draft was the strongest one, so we went with it. The film then ended up having three completely different casts before it came to life. We previously had John Lithgow attached to play Chris, as well as Rita Wilson playing Annabel. We also had Evan Peters and Sebastian Stan attached to play Shiloh’s character, Fenton, at other points.”

Once the actors were cast in the comedy-drama, having significant rehearsal time “was a difficult thing to pull off,” the director acknowledged. “We only had three weeks to prep the film while we were raising funds and closing actors. We then shot in three weeks, so we didn’t have any rehearsals.”

But Manrique “was able to speak with Ashley, Shiloh and Josh Peck before we began filming. But I didn’t meet Mary-Louise Parker until a few days before we went to camera. I also wasn’t able to speak with Chris Noth until about a week into production. We had to shoot his scenes later, because I think he was working on another job around the same time as we started on our film,” the helmer explained. “But they’re great actors, so they know what they’re doing. Luckily, the magic really happened among the actors when we were shooting.”

“We had 17 days of shooting” for principal photography with the actors, as well as “one day of B-roll. We averaged about six or seven pages of the script a day. But everything went well, and it was everything that I expected,” Manrique declared.

Following up on the experience of shooting the movie independently on location across New York City, the director noted that it “was a great experience. I think we got some of our best shots because we didn’t know where we were going to shoot right away.”

But finding the locations was difficult at time, because “I think that the official statistic for the city during the time we shot, in February and March 2015, was that it was the coldest winter in 80 years.” The filmmakers had multiple exterior shots that were planned for ‘Chronically Metropolitan.’ But they had to change many of the locations at the last minute, “because it wouldn’t be fair to the cast and crew. So we often found ourselves having to recreate a shot in an interior with very minimal light.”

Manrique also admitted that they had to film some of those scenes quickly, however, because “we weren’t permitted to shoot in certain locations…But some of them ended up being some of the coolest shots in the entire movie. Since we had to shoot the scenes quickly, we had to be more creative, and that’s where the magic happened!”

The helmer then further spoke about his experience of working with Frankel, and how their professional relationship influenced his directorial style on his first feature. “From the beginning of our time working together, his style of teaching was always about him inviting me to sit with him, and watch his work. He always said that I was invited to join his conversations with the cast and crew. He encouraged me to take in all of the information that I could,” Manrique revealed.

“A lot of the way that I approached making my first film was influenced by David. If you see him on a set, you may think that he’s just sitting there. But he had already done a lot of the work during pre-production,” the filmmaker also divulged about his mentor. “He finds the best department heads to work with on his movies.”

Manrique added that the best advice that he has ever received from Frankel is the need “to cast the actors who fit the closest to what’s in the script. That way, you can just let them act, and you don’t have to mold them. Then they can bring the most authentic version of the character” to the screen. “So he said that casting is 90 percent of directing…That’s the David Frankel way of directing. He’s a great storyteller and director, and those were the types of things that I would try to learn from him while I was shadowing him. Hopefully that translates into my film.”

While working with Frankel on the production of ‘Chronically Metropolitan’ in New York City helped inform Manrique’s style as a filmmaker, pondering his own professional and personal futures in his hometown also influenced Fenton’s personality, as well. “When I first envisioned this cast, I was going for a more comedic delivery, à la Woody Allen. The character was also going to have quicker-paced dialogue. When I then approached Shiloh to be in the film, he challenged me on why I wanted to cast him, as he’s not a comedic actor,” the helmer revealed.

“But I started to study him, I realized that there’s a depth to Shiloh that would be great for this type of character. Fenton self-exiled himself to the other coast, and now he’s coming back home. He realized that he’s made mistakes. But instead of being self-deprecating, Shiloh did a good job of being internal about it,” Manrique pointed out. “There’s a dark space about him that really worked for Fenton. So I really pushed Shiloh in that direction, and I think he did a great job with it.”

With ‘Chronically Metropolitan’ being a New York-driven story, the director then mentioned how the comedy-drama was well received at northeastern-based film festivals. He admitted that “It definitely is a nerving-racking experience to not know if an audience is going to like something that you created…But New Yorkers really seemed to appreciate this kind of comedy, more so than when the movie played in Texas (at the Austin Film Festival), Miami (at the Miami International Film Festival) or in San Diego (at the San Diego Film Festival),” he admitted.

Manrique also divulged that “more people seemed to sit through, and ask questions at, the Q&As in the northeast. I think it played very well in Nantucket (at the Nantucket Film Festival, where the comedy-drama had its World Premiere in early summer 2016), because a lot of New Yorkers were there on vacation. So the audience there felt as though they knew, and understood, the family. It also played extremely well in Woodstock (at the Woodstock Film Festival), for the same reason. People in the New York area seem to know (Fenton’s) family better” than other parts of America. “So I was really happy that New Yorkers really understand this family and their story.”