1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

My interest in filmmaking is new and really exciting. I grew up absolutely needing to perform and by the time I was an adult I figured that meant I should be an actress. I didn't identify with a lot of the actors I met in my theatre classes in Los Angeles for college, so I moved on to comedy in New York when I graduated. Doing live comedy felt like a much better fit, but I still didn't fully connect with my fellow comedians that felt passionate about things like standup and improv. When I started writing and performing my own material though (kind of like a hybrid of what I learned from theatre school and what I learned from comedy training) that's when everything started feeling right.

2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?

Like a lot of us, I went to move in with my family in March of 2020. The shift just made each of my days feel like a sitcom--everything was so heightened and I started acting like a caricature of myself because it was so weird living with my family. So I started writing down and mentally noting some of the ridiculous scenarios I got myself in, and funny exchanges with my family. I would sometimes take those as inspiration and make up little scenes in my head, too. Simultaneously I had been meeting with a writers group once a week to swap pages and share work, so I wrote a few of these scenarios down and talked them over with the group. From there it was clear that these scenes could be strung together and that's how I wrote the script!

3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?

No film school, no budget and no crew would have to be the biggest challenges! I'm lucky to have been on enough sets to have had a base knowledge of how shooting 15 pages works, but the mistakes I made through the shoot were laughable in the edit. Thankfully I learned a lot of valuable lessons from that though; lessons that I'm glad I learned without professionals watching me make the mistakes. The hardest part was scheduling, which I did successfully in the end, but not without starting about 3 family-wide fights and having to explain about 15 times how a call sheet works. The easiest part, strangely, was writing and editing.

4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

I just rewatched Waiting for Guffman, which I hadn't seen in about five years. Christopher Guest has had one of the biggest influences on me artistically (this is extremely evident in my last film Mary Beth's Sex Tape) but Guffman in particular really speaks to me where am at now with comedy. That's the type of stuff I want to make. Oh god I love his performance as Korky St. Clair, too. What a name! And Parker Posey, how special she is! Not to mention Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara... the late Fred Willard... why are they all so perfect? The scenario too: small town, big dreams, no self-awareness. Couldn't identify more!

5) What’s next for you?

In 2019 I wrote and toured a musical called Trey the Play based off of Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus songs from the 2007 hit album "Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus." I've been told it's a real treat for the fans of that era of Disney, but also fun if you don't get the references. It's pretty camp and heightened and stylized in a very "me" way, if that makes sense. Adapting that script into a more accessible film version, perhaps one without copyrighted Disney tunes, is something I'm working on next!

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