Lucy Powers & Delilah Napier – Riding the Floating Carousel
- PopEntertainment
- Oct 15
- 11 min read
Lucy Powers & Delilah Napier
Riding the Floating Carousel
By Jay S. Jacobs
It all started with some bad dates. Lucy Powers and Delilah Napier, long-time friends and collaborators who have made the indie films Voyeur, “The Compound” and “Victor vs. the Metaverse” together, found the inspiration for their latest feature film when they both went on the same bad date with the same guy, just a week apart.
They weren’t alone. All of their friends were telling them their own dating horror stories. As they explained in the press kit, they were stuck by the questions: “Is love in NY futile?” “Is Hinge only bound to be un-hinged?” “Why is Soho House offering a workshop on surviving the trauma of being ghosted?”
The pair – who regularly work together as actors, writers and directors – decided to explore the decline of romance and personal connections in their latest film. Floating Carousel is their exploration of dating and sex in modern Manhattan, an ensemble piece in which several characters look for connection in a world where love can be determined by whether someone swipes left or right.
The cast includes the pair of filmmakers, as well such interesting characters as Dylan Baker (The Good Wife), Gus Birney (Black Rabbit), Jessica Hecht (Friends), Michael Cyril Creighton (Only Murders in the Building), Elsie Hewitt (Turnt), Catherine Curtin (Orange Is the New Black), Julian Cihi (Only Murders in the Building), Reg Rogers (The Blacklist) and Jon Rudnitsky (Saturday Night Live).
Soon before the premiere of Floating Carousel at the Woodstock Film Festival, we sat down with the writers, directors and stars Lucy Powers and Delilah Napier to discuss their movies, their careers and single life in millennial New York.
The two of you have been working together making films for several years now. How did you start creating together?
Lucy Powers: We met in college, 10 years ago this fall. We were Theater Studies majors and did eight plays together and lived together in a house we called Drama House, which became our production company, Drama House Pictures. Our senior year, for our senior thesis in theater studies, we decided we were going to make a feature film, which was the first time someone had done that, but we were able to finagle it, because the film was about theater. That completely bonded us. We spent like, 1000s of hours working on that film together, very indie. We made it for $4,000 and then have made two films since then, and this is our fourth.
Beyond Floating Carousel, I went back and watched both Voyeur and “Victor Versus the Metaverse.” I noticed that in all three films, Lucy's characters tend to be the more impulsive one and willing to push things, while Delilah's characters tend to be more cautious, but when she commits to something, she's all in. Do your personal dynamics reflect those traits?
Deliliah Napier: Interesting. I'm trying to think. Sometimes actually, with Voyeur, for example, we immediately when we were conceiving it thought that we should play the parts we played. But then a lot of people assumed that we were playing the opposite role, because I was from the city, and Lucy was from Connecticut. So people thought like, “oh, the girl from the city is probably Delilah. The girl from Connecticut, it's probably Lucy.” But meanwhile, no, we wrote different back stories, but we were still playing those parts. I feel like in our personal dynamic, though, I think we're both very similar. Our sensibilities are so similar because we find we love sharing stories. We love laughing at things that are just awkward, often. That's how we dramatize a lot of our own experiences as scenes and share it. That's how our writing process has started together. Writing things that have happened and then seeing where we can take it from there.
Lucy Powers: We sometimes like to play a part that's a little different or has different traits that either you want to emulate or are different than yourselves. I think Delilah does such a brilliant job of like the comedic innocent sometimes. (laughs) I wouldn't necessarily think of you as that.
Deliliah Napier: Yeah, I feel like I'm quite cynical in real life. What's interesting is because I think in some ways, I am more innocent, and then in other ways, I sometimes think I am more cynical than Lucy, too.
Lucy Powers: I trust too easily. (laughs)
Deliliah Napier: It's in different ways. We also used to think one person's more into reminding people about emailing. One person is more creatively aligned. One person's better at Excel spreadsheets and emailing. But that isn't really true anymore. I think both of us remember to bump certain people different days, and our creative alignment is very in sync.
Lucy Powers: Exactly.
Floating Carousel and your previous films were all ensemble pieces. You two played two of the main characters, but there are lots of other characters revolving around outside, almost like a Robert Altman film. Why do you find this kind of storytelling intriguing?
Lucy Powers: We both grew up in eccentric families, I'll say. (laughs) Where there is always a cast of characters rotating around. That's something that has inspired us. Of course, also filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson too, who bring in this cast around them.
Deliliah Napier: Yeah, like Magnolia. We rewatched [it] just thinking about really successful ensemble films. We love Happiness by Todd Solondz. We wanted to do this story, particularly as an ensemble piece, but also wanted it to be cohesive. We wanted everyone to tie back together and have one big theme, but there were just so many stories. We wanted it to be in a bit of a time capsule. We wanted so many dates to be in the film, to give it the sense of this is happening everywhere. It's not just me and Lucy's world where we're having weird dates. This is something like a dating dystopia that has become endemic across New York City. It's widespread, and that's when we wanted – just many different types of people. Part of the joke in the central [character Shanay] is that this guy had a type. He liked blondes. Lucy and I sometimes have been compared; oh, you guys are kind of similar types. We think we're quite different, but on the face of it, we are a little bit. We met in college. We went to the same school. We both love theater and film. But we just wanted different types of people that were also leads and big parts.
Lucy Powers: Each story we heard was so delicious that we couldn't resist putting it in, and suddenly you have a 44-person cast.
The press release refers to the fact that this has been called the loneliest century. Do you feel that it is?
Deliliah Napier: I can't compare it to other centuries. (laughs) I have not really lived in them, but I do think that there is a huge existential dread in the world right now. Just given where we are. Politically, our society as a whole, rates of depression and people just feeling really lonely. So many people don't want to be with other partners. I think there was a crazy study of, like, I think it might be more, like one in five people say they have no friends. Which the people in our film, at least the leads, have friends. But someone like the Shanay character, does he have a friend? Probably, I don't know. It was like our vibe of that.
Lucy Powers: We were thinking like in today's day and age, what we wanted to explore is you have access to millions of strangers online, on dating apps, you can connect to anyone if you want. It's almost like intimacy on demand. But is it intimate? Because ultimately, what you're experiencing is not real connection.
One interesting thing I noted is in Olivia's terrible date with Shanay, she's telling him about a film that she had made, which was Voyeur. Are you trying to create a little universe with certain through lines going on it, or was that just sort of a fun little thing easter egg for yourself and your fans?
Deliliah Napier: I think it's a combination because the film is somewhat self-referential, a little bit Floating Carousel. Something that Lucy and I kept harping on was that both of us told Shanay, because it was right after making Voyeur, like a year later, we had gone this date. It was the pandemic. It was our first date after the pandemic. Both of us told him the plot of Voyeur, and yet he still didn't put it together that we were friends. It's like both of these girls tell him the exact same plot of a movie they made. But our whole thing with that was like, he's not listening. He'll ask certain questions; you can go on. You'll think, is he listening or not? But it all just literally goes right through him, which was another just example to us of this type of dating that's robotic and you're only looking at next destination. It's like, now I'm going to ask her this. When she finishes that, I'm going to ask this, and then we're going to go.
Was the real-life Shanay your worst date? Or have you either had or heard about even more disastrous dates than that?
Lucy Powers: I think that one was the most coincidental. A date both of us had with the same guy, like, what are the odds? A lot of the other strange ones we put into the movie, even if it didn't exactly happen to us, or we just had it happen to other characters. Since then, unfortunately, there has been more to add, so we'll have to make a sequel. (laughs)
No matter how bad a date is, can infestation ever be the answer?
Deliliah Napier: (both laugh) We're using the infestation as a metaphor. Kind of like as this disease that spread across New York. Also, we didn't want to really refer to the pandemic, but we do think that the pandemic created this ether in the air that affected everyone. Do you know what I mean? Our dating lives, and people were used to just getting things online and creating roboticism in terms of approaching human relationships. So the infestation, we used it in the film, but we wanted it to be kind of a metaphor for both, like the disease across New York.
Lucy Powers: Instead of people inside it is pushing everyone out.
Speaking of metaphors, the movie is called Floating Carousel, and at the end, the characters find a carousel horse which is washed up on the beach. Also, Ruby tells a story about her mother seeing a carousel that's underwater while scuba diving. What intrigues you about that, symbolically?
Lucy Powers: Totally. When we were conceiving of the title, we were really thinking of New York itself as the carousel, spinning these characters around and being the characters. Just being on this endless loop. Sometimes, you can't step off of that because you're scared, you're going to miss out, or you're scared to let something go. The image of this broken, wrecked carousel under the water, Olivia's character asked, “Did she think it was creepy?” No, she thought it was beautiful. Because there's also moments with this spinning world where you can still take that experience and say, I learned from that, or that was fun, or there was some beauty in it, even if, ultimately, this fun thing has a rottenness to it.
Deliliah Napier: Yeah, it's like nothing can last forever. This idea of the wrecked carousel being the passage of time and how you can take these relics and put them away to learn from or share as a story later. Just felt like what we were doing.
The film was mostly filmed in New York, except for the end, which I believe was in Cape Cod.
Lucy Powers: Yes.
How do you feel that the settings add to the feel of the film, get your points across and just add to the personality of the film?
Deliliah Napier: We felt like we needed to film in New York City. One producer was like, “you could do this for cheaper in Chicago.” We were like, no, because all our actors are in New York, and we wanted to use some quintessential New York locations.
Lucy Powers: From Washington Square Park to places that people go to. Also we got permission to use almost all the names of the actual places in the film, which lends that this veritas, this reality. We were just really careful, like Delilah and I did almost all the location scouting ourselves, which sometimes meant walking around from place to place one afternoon. Just going to different bookshops, asking if people would let us film there for cheap.
One setting that was kind of cool for me to see was the Laurie Beechman Theater, because my stepfather was good friends with Laurie Beechman 's mother. Every time I walk past it on the way to the Port Authority parking lot, I always think about that.
It was really important to us that there was that crazed feeling of New York at night and in all these different places all over. Also the claustrophobia of walking up those apartment steps like drunk at the end of the night going into someone's tiny apartment. Then also, Eric's beautiful townhouse in the middle of New York also exists. Just like the greediness of inside but outside, but also what happens behind closed apartment doors, was something that was interesting to us.
How did you get some of the people involved in the project as far as actors, people like Michael Cyril Creighton and Dylan Baker and Jessica Hecht and Reg Rogers. What were you looking for in your casting?
Deliliah Napier: Michael Cyril, the role of Lewis went out on breakdowns, and his reps actually pitched him to our casting directors. Then we met with him and loved him. Then a lot of it, like Jessica Hecht I had done a play with. Dylan Baker, I did one reading with, and he just wrote the sweetest email after to me being like, “I loved reading with you all. If I can help in any way…” We were casting this film at the time, and it was a written by a Ukrainian high schooler, the play, to raise money for Ukraine. I just was like, “Hey, actually, if you want, I'm casting this indie film.” He was lovely, thought the role was really fun and was down. So it was a lot of trying things like that. Actually, Reg Rogers, I ran into at an audition for a play. I saw him in the hallway, and we're still casting this role. It was literally happenstance. We were like, maybe he's a little old for the role. Because initially we thought the part would be like 40s, but he would be so funny, because he's so amazing. I went to go see him in Merrily We Roll Along that night, because he had an extra ticket, because I had done a reading with him. I was like, let's offer it to Reg. Then he was down.
Lucy Powers: They were all such fun. It ultimately had comedic bones, funny people who can really lend levity, because we're dealing with sometimes dark themes, but we wanted it all to have a funny, offbeat humor. And every actor who came in had real comedic gift.
Deliliah Napier: It's strange, the more I think about it now, it's almost like the luck of time and place, which is a lot about our film, too. In New York City, where you run into people constantly, and because you ran into this one person, you're now going to their show that night. There’s so much like that, which I think we capture in the film too. But that was truly, even just Reg and Dylan Baker thinking of those stories, that was literally a lucky moment. We are casting this film. Come be a part.
Just one last question. Do you have anything coming up that you're working on next?
Lucy Powers: Yes, we write together every day, basically. We have a script that's optioned, and one that we're working on, that is more of a dark comedy thriller, takes place on a yacht, and that one we may hope to direct, too. So we have different projects that are maybe just writing, or just, writing, directing, and not necessarily acting. Depends on how it goes. We're constantly making new things, and we're constantly experiencing new stories we want to put into pieces as well.
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Photos ©2025. Courtesy of Drama House Pictures. All rights reserved.