HEY MAN
DIRECTOR & WRITER
I had fallen in love with Liz Cooper and the Stampede’s sound as soon as I had heard their Audiotree session. When I was a kid, I was absolutely obsessed with Gwen Stefani. She was my first exposure to a female lead singer of a rock band. I used to make cassette mixtapes of "Spiderwebs" and "Don't Speak" and dance like a crazy person in my bedroom. In addition, I have a lot of mixed emotions and feelings about what it means and looks like to be a woman, especially as a female filmmaker. Both of those parts of myself collided in this visual deconstruction of the perfect woman.
Playing air guitar, lip-syncing into her hairbrush microphone and jumping around her room, the downstairs perfection comes completely unhinged as mom and her friends succumb to the music and the energy coming from the floor above. Someone's bra comes off, cakes are smashed, donuts are stuffed into mouths, and everyone proceeds to get wild. It's the ultimate twist to a rock and roll tale.
BRUCE WARREN, NPR WORLD CAFE
18 girls auditioned to play the lead role. Having directed lots of kids in the past, I knew that this girl needed to be versatile and give crazy amounts of performance variety. Dancers, stage actors, and experienced commercial child actors were all amongst the audition pool. I ultimately cast 11 year old Madysen, a young stage actress who blew me away with her performance.
For the women, I mainly drew from the Chicago comedy community because I wanted actresses who wouldn’t be afraid to give me weird. Lindee, who plays the queen bee mom, confided in me at her audition that she was sick and tired of being cast as the perfect suburban mom and wanted an opportunity to break the mold.
I collaborated with director of photography Sebastian Lama on bringing this project to life. We wanted to make sure Maydsen could utilize the entire bedroom space without restriction on every single take, so we shot almost all of her portion on a gimbal and lit the whole room. My idea was that Madysen’s character had a rock-god mentality who felt like she was on stage and not in her bedroom, reflected in the slick gimbal movement.
Downstairs, we wanted it to feel like a stiff contrast between the worlds. Everything was in its place and styled into this Suburbia perfection. I drew some style inspiration for the women from Edward Scissorhands and Mad Men, which hair and makeup artist Tiffany Anderson absolutely knocked out of the park. It was such a blast to tear their perfection apart for the final scene and sit at monitor watching the whole thing come together.
One of the production design focal points was a fictional makeup line, “Pretty Girl.” I wove in a lot of dark humor in the product names including “Cheat Day Chocolate” and “Knight in Shining Armor.” I had way too much fun writing the copy.
The project premiered, much to mine and the band’s excitement, on NPR and has also been featured in an array of other publications, including Rolling Stone! It was an honor to get such a detailed shoutout in the article because I felt like so much of me and my point of view went into this project.