The Travel Companion

After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, The Travel Companion (2025) has won multiple awards, received strong reviews, and earned a distribution deal from Oscilloscope Laboratories. To quote Indiewire critic Christian Zilko, writer-directors Travis Wood and Alex Mallis capture

the bullshitting, navel gazing, and crushing anxiety of the film world so well that it’s easy to see a future where they find even bigger success by applying their observational skills to broader topics. As much as they understand the minds of directionless filmmakers, there’s no reason to believe they’ll join that group.

Observational skills is a key phrase here, as Wood and Mallis bring extensive experience in documentary filmmaking to their debut narrative feature. I virtually met with the duo last month to discuss The Travel Companion, which is currently on a nationwide tour of theaters and film festivals. Our conversation focused on that transition from documentary to narrative filmmaking and how it shaped the film.

Wood and Mallis’s documentary background becomes apparent in the film’s first shot; The Travel Companion begins and ends with indie documentarian Simon (Tristan Turner) at an awkward film festival Q&A session. To quote Zilko again, this opening scene has true verisimilitude through “the cringe-inducing details — the rambling questions that don’t actually contain a question, the generic platitudes from filmmakers trying to sound smarter than they are.”

In between these bookends, Simon works on his documentary film project, searches for inspiration, and tries to navigate his changing relationship with his best friend/roommate Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck), whose new romantic partner Beatrice (Naomi Asa) begins to transform his life and priorities.

When I watched The Travel Companion, I was struck by just how much it does tackle a broad theme. This is a film about prolonged adolescence, about millennials in their thirties, about friends growing apart. The title, for instance is a perfect, simple metaphor. Airline employee Bruce gets the perk of free standby tickets for one designated travel companion, which is Simon at the start of the film. Travel companions side by side on the same adventure: a certain kind of friendship summed up in three words, in a single mental image.

The Travel Companion resonated with my own life experiences, and a big reason why goes back to documentary filmmaking, to that eye for details and openness to serendipity that makes a cinematic space or relationship feel lived in.

The biggest difference between documentary and narrative filmmaking, as Mallis told me, is that the former is waiting whereas the latter is manifesting.

Both emphasized a major difference in the preproduction process. As Wood put it, narrative film preproduction involves solidifying as much as possible before actually shooting. The duo’s previous documentary experience, on the other hand, involved much more spontaneous, unplanned observation.

Despite this difference, they both sought to bring a documentary aesthetic to The Travel Companion. In Mallis’s words, a documentary filmmaker is a “dancer with a camera:” constantly moving, spontaneously capturing shot after shot. Something similar happens in the film itself. Simon and Bruce’s favorite shared pastime is the “walk around, fuck around,” in which they follow the footsteps of 19^th century flâneurs and devote a block of time to wandering down city streets.

To replicate this sense of unstructured freedom, Mallis and Wood would occasionally tell the cast and crew that “this is doc time now.” Doc time: time for improvisational, intuitive movement through space and trusting that something will emerge from the process.

The duo’s documentary experience makes them bolder than many narrative filmmakers, Wood told me, more willing to just go to a location and start shooting in ways that would leave many other filmmakers mortified. Mallis recalled spontaneously requesting to film in various locations and getting good responses; asking on the spot, he added, gives location owners less of a chance to change their minds.

The duo’s documentary experience also informed their post-production process. “When cutting a documentary,” Mallis told me, “There’s no expectation of the edit matching your original vision. It gets chopped up, reordered. The writing happens in the edit.” This made them open to restructuring The Travel Companion in editing, which they did by reordering the film’s first act.

During the production of The Travel Companion, Wood and Mallis came to realize just how blurry the boundary between documentary and narrative filmmaking is. Mallis compared it to the coastline paradox, where the length of a coastline depends on how minutely you measure its various irregular curves; the high-level distinction between documentary truth and narrative fiction might not hold up for a given scene or shot, which can involve both waiting and manifesting.

“Nothing prepares you for your first feature,” Mallis told me. And, after this learning experience, The Travel Companion won’t be their last. “Traveling around the country meeting new people and sharing the film in dark cinemas has been such an affirming joyous and affirming experience,” he said. “Best of all, people are reacting very positively—even if our protagonist might test the limits of their patience!”

While the duo plan on continuing to make narrative features, they also plan on bringing their documentary sensibility to their next film, which Wood describes as both inspired by real life and a perfect opportunity to “bring things to life we wish we’d filmed in a documentary.”