Hollyshorts - Smile: A Musical
When Hazel fails to connect with her clinically-depressed father, she goes on a journey to make him smile.
Interview with Writer/Director Sarah Phillips
Congratulations! Why did you make your film?
Thank you! Well, the script won at a couple of screenplay competitions, and the story is near to my heart, and we found funding for this story in light of its awards and focus on mental illness but also in the musical genre, so the timing felt right to us to make this beautiful story.
Imagine I’m a member of the audience. Why should I watch this film?
"Smile: A Musical" approaches mental illness from the empathy of both the person suffering, but also the people around them, and the way it can affect them. Specifically, this man's daughter, at nine or ten years old, deals with the limited information surrounding this man that she loves, and her subconscious deals with what she knows and creates a solution, which I have found often happens in young people when they are dealing with voiced or unvoiced concerns in their lives.
Also, our production company, Phileon Productions, is a female-led production company in Los Angeles that focuses on increasing the number of women in front of, and behind, the camera - our crews as per our internal guidelines are 50% women, but in actuality hit around 65% women, and we really strive to be inclusive in our casting and think outside of what usually is, and more toward what can be.
How do personal and universal themes work in your film?
My mind has always tended toward the big-picture stories, certainly, and that's where universal themes come in - joy, love, hope, pain, sadness... And I like analyzing my personal feelings in certain moments, then breaking those down into wider and wider building blocks until the personal is stripped away, and the truth of the emotion is revealed - so then I often find beautiful correlation in the base theme of something that can be specifically applied in intimate and incredibly human moments.
Specific themes that I find recurring in my work involve mental illness, certainly, because it has affected many people dear to me as well as an enormous percentage of the population, both diagnosed and not. Also, my initial inclination with a story is to musicalize it, because I genuinely believe that it's the most honest way to tell a story. And then I almost always center my stories on a powerful woman who looks stronger than she is, whether in musicals, science fiction, historical pieces, or even comedy, and really love delving into the human element of her coping mechanisms and eccentricities. But I'm also a slave to story structure, so between plot and those things, I find it exciting to create new stories.
How have the script and film evolved over the course of their development?
I cooked the script in my head for about six months, which Is normal for me, and then sat down to write it all in one sitting. Musical shorts can be wonky sometimes, because for musicals, you normally have the first ten minutes for the audience to suspend their disbelief about the musical world they're diving into... In a short, ten minutes is about a minute shy of the credits rolling. So a lot of the development notes had to do with that, how to get people immersed quickly, but believably. Other than that, most of it had to do with the lyrics and composition. Since I'm the writer and director, and Laetitia and I produce from the beginning of a project, what I ended up with in post was more or less what I had written on screen, with a few exceptions, as per the norm.
What type of feedback have you received so far?
So far, it's been fascinating. Basically, if someone has had someone close to them deal with depression, it hits them hard. I've had many people come up to me afterward and say they couldn't stop crying through the film, even though, for the most part, it's pretty uplifting and saturated - but I think that's possibly the most beautiful thing, is that the seed at the center of the film is this deep hard thing in all of us, and the levity around it only coaxes it out more. Lovers of musicals love our classic approach to musicals - while I certainly put my interpretation there and see it through the lens of Story, my deep-rooted musicals obsession is integral to my approach to filmmaking as a whole - and so there is also an appreciation for the Busby Berkeley-esque composition, etc.
Has the feedback surprised or challenged your point of view?
Well, innately I'm a confident person, but there's nothing like having your work on a massive screen in front of an audience to make you question everything you've ever done. We've been met with OVERWHELMING support, love, meetings, and new friendships based on "Smile: A Musical" that I never would have expected. So, if anything, it has encouraged us to keep doing what we're doing.
What are you looking to achieve by having your film more visible on www.wearemovingstories.com?
We are excited to have our film on We Are Moving Stories because we feel we are on the same wavelength regarding inclusivity in the industry. Equality, inclusivity, diversity, and niche films are SO important in this current landscape, because audiences are no longer tolerant of films that they can't see themselves in - mostly because they can find something somewhere where they can. I've always been such a champion of humans - we can always do more than we think we can, if we can find the courage. Stick your courage to the sticking place, right?
Who do you need to come on board (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists) to amplify this film’s message?
Currently, we're looking for distributors for this film, as well as film festival directors, and we always love doing interviews because we feel our mission is so important - we love starting a dialogue about women in film, as well as inclusivity.
What type of impact and/or reception would you like this film to have?
We would love this film to open doors for more musicals, as well as talking about the stigma of depression - how prevalent it is, how to love people near you who suffer from it, and how to deal with it yourself. But also, we want to keep making films! So we'd love for people to get hyped up on it, and want to make more content with us.
What’s a key question that will help spark a debate or begin a conversation about this film?
What do you think is the least-talked about side-effect of depression?
Would you like to add anything else?
We just won an award at the AT&T Shape Create-A-Thon competition for our short film "Separation of Church and Livia," a sci-fi short that we are developing as a series that focuses on a woman's cross-world search for her lost sister in a dystopian time-traveling future.
What other projects are the key creatives developing or working on now?
Phileon Productions is attached to two features - "The Un-Eff-Able Sam Bistritzky" with Maggie Herskowitz, which is an adorable indie script that deals with a young woman coming to terms with her asexuality, and "Sterling" by Ken LaZebnik, which deals with a mother as she battles not only her soldier son's death overseas, but the reaction of religious radicals to his funeral. In addition, we are talking with a few web series.
Interview: August 2017
_______________________________________________________________________________
We Are Moving Stories embraces new voices in drama, documentary, animation, TV, web series and music video. If you have just made a film - we'd love to hear from you. Or if you know a filmmaker - can you recommend us? More info: Carmela
_______________________________________________________________________________
Smile: A Musical
When Hazel fails to connect with her clinically-depressed father, she goes on a journey to make him smile.
Length:13:22
Director: Sarah Phillips
Producer: Phileon Productions (Laetitia Leon & Sarah Phillips)
Writer: Sarah Phillips
About the writer, director and producer: Sarah Phillips is a writer and director in Los Angeles. Her website is sarahephillips.com. Laetitia Leon is an actress and producer in Los Angeles. Her website is laetitialeon.com.
Key cast:
Maya Grace Fischbein (Fun Home on Broadway)
Desmond Newson (Memphis on Broadway, West Coast Touring company of Hamilton)
Aaron McPherson (A Million Ways to Die in the West, Longmire)
Susan May Pratt (10 Things I Hate About You, Center Stage)
Gina Hecht (Seinfeld, Mork & Mindy, 7 Pounds)
Looking for (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists): Distributors, film festival directors, journalists
Social media handles: @phileonproductions @sarahphillipsphoto @laetitia_alix
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/phileonproductions/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/phileonprods