“Marissa Viola [the actress playing Ellie] and I knew if we could get in each other’s heads we wouldn’t come up empty,” Linder said. “It was like a real-life relationship. You have to learn to not push… if you

pushed it wouldn’t work.”

In various scenes, a viewer can see parallels to Linder’s life and Emily’s experience with her own father’s death. Linder found out just before filming began that he had a brain tumor. Emily’s father suffered for almost a decade with late-stage Lyme disease.
But the parallels seen in the film can really be made to many people’s lives affected by terminal illness, Emily said.
When Ellie asks her father, “How was your day?” the audience sees flashes of activity – Roy singing, comparing the length of nails, napping in a hammock.
Yet, Roy can’t seem to put together the pieces.
Meanwhile, as he struggles internally to understand the gaps of time in his life, Ellie struggles with who she is and what she needs to be for her dad, her boss and for her love interest, Mike.
The audience sees how their lives demand quick transitions from trying to go on as normal and the emotions of a disease bubbling up between the crevices.
The life the Alexanders lead is not tidy and easily lived.
Roy tells his daughter, “Tomorrow – we’ll get better tomorrow.”
“Get Better,” the title of the film, has layers of meaning.
On one level it’s about the nice but almost careless greeting given to someone who is sick, Chris said. But “Get Better” is not just about getting better from a disease, nor does “getting better” occur the way people expect.
Emily said her hope is for audiences to see the need for more understanding about how people with illnesses are treated. She hopes society will “get better” in relation to how they see disease.
“I like blending stories and science not because I think a poet would make a good surgeon or because I think making a great film will cure cancer… It’s because truths have to exist at the level of story before they’ll ever exist at the level of history,” said Emily. “It’s because great stories always envision and necessitate new technologies and new sciences — never the other way around. It’s because stories, not science or technology, but stories, are always on the leading-edge.”
On the leading edge is also the way in which this film will be distributed.
“We’re here to bring movies to people like yourself and not just through theaters but the Internet as well,” Chris said.
In the near future, the film will be available for direct streaming from the site. In the meantime, the DVD of the film can be purchased  at www.GetBetterTheMovie.com. The Tryon Film Society will also bring the film back for a second viewing at the Tryon Theatre Aug. 27-28.