By Franca Lafosse for Film In Revolt
A look behind the making of this arthouse horror comedy meta-commentary feature, which premiered last month at SXSW Sydney and follows two rival actors who find themselves trapped in a theatre after their director fails to show up for their audition. Break a Leg dissects the artist’s burden within the entertainment industry in a blend of comedy and tragedy, blurring the line between reality and illusion as is the nature of the theatre.
Kaitlyn, congratulations on your debut feature film! The first question I want to ask is, from the initial idea, through to making the film, to now sharing it with audiences – you’ve been to OZ Comic-Con and premiered at SXSW Sydney – how long has this project been living with you for?
Great question, so I directed Break A Leg and Brendan Kelly is my co-writer, co-actor, co-producer (you wear a lot of hats in indie film!) and we were both living in Canberra over the Covid period, and we’re both professional actors so as self-test partners we would meet up on a weekly basis either to do auditions together or to just do self-tapes and build our portfolio. Through that process, two things happened: primarily we had this dynamic that we really loved and we thought was funny, but we would also talk a lot about the struggle of being an actor and, for Brendan and I particularly, we kind of get branded as ‘quirky’ actors a lot. I don’t know, that’s kind of our niche, but it just means we were a bit hungry for a meatier sort of role. And so, we had that mutual interest in writing something for ourselves and continuing on with this dynamic. That was midway through 2023.
April to July is when we really started writing – it was going to be a short film and then we were both like “we’ve done that, we’ve done a short film”… and I am one of those people who is always wondering what the next logical step is, and the last short film I made was about 20 minutes and we had grant support for that, so the next logical step felt like a low to no-budget feature. Just to see if we could do it! Very quickly we realised, if it’s low to no-budget, we’re probably looking at a two-hander, single location – which worked out well with the dynamic we were playing with.
It’s interesting though because even though it’s a horror, there’s a lot of comedy in it too, it constantly toes the line between the two, sometimes even in the same line of dialogue. Was that all in the original script or was any of it discovered throughout shooting?
Yeah, I think with the horror element, I really wanted to explore my own relationship with horror… and I think the comedy just came naturally! Because we both have a very comedic lens, it’s sort of funny how our favourite jokes are ones that came through either on the day or in the lead up. I feel very fortunate to have had this process and to have done it in this way with Brendan because we’re such good friends and the writing started as a conversation; it started as “what are your biggest fears?”, “what are your biggest hopes and dreams?”, when we were looking at this world and these characters. We drew from ourselves and from our own experience, but the writing itself – you know, the film is a conversation, so we wrote through conversation, like Brendan would write and say something and I would respond as Molly or vice-versa.
I suppose that was the biggest intention, when you’re making something low to no-budget you have no choice but to work within your means, which is what we wanted because you’re forced to be more creative. And we knew that the biggest ‘means’ that we had, the one thing that me and Brendan felt like we could confidently do to carry a story for that long – is act. So we wrote the script as something that, if we needed to do it as a stage play, we could do it. That was kind of the rule: can we carry this story, just us?
That then became very important as a director, to curate that environment and be really particular with the people we brought on to make sure that environment felt safe, and we could be laughing in and out of takes, and that comfortability was able to be prioritised. That created the environment to just play, in fact that’s how one of my favourite lines came about – Brendan booked a period piece shooting before and after our shoot, so he had to look however he was going to look for this period role. They had him grow his facial hair, and we were like “Nooo, we don’t see Patrick with a beard!”… and then he went for hair and makeup, and he called me saying “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is: no beard, the bad news is… there’s going to be a moustache”. So, that became a big in-joke for us, and honestly the moustache is one of the most iconic parts of Break A Leg. There’s that moment where Molly holds up his headshot – which obviously doesn’t have a moustache – and he points to it so smugly and says “grew it for the role.” That’s such a funny moment to me, which we wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Hilarious, and you would never know because that is the reality of being an actor and constantly changing your appearance. Which made me wonder, since this film is centred so much around the ‘acting’ experience, how has it been received by non-actors and what do you hope they will take away from the film?
I do get that feedback a lot, that it’s so niche and it’s very much an actor’s film and there’s a lot of industry jokes – but I think at the core for me it’s so character-driven, and it’s looking at… dreams. Looking at what we become when we prioritise that, our tagline is “will you die for your dream, or will you die because of it?”. So, dissecting the ways in which we abandon ourselves, we abandon each other, or we exploit each other in order to make this stuff happen. That’s the horror of it. My hope is that that element is relatable, everyone knows that “what if?”… everyone has a dream and knows the question of “what are you willing to sacrifice for it?”.
Yes, and I love how you also challenged this notion of “Once I make it. Once x, y, z happens, I will have ‘made it’ and things will be… easy?” And yet here we see a character who has gone past that imaginary threshold and still unlocks a whole other set of challenges and problems.
I think that’s one of the most interesting things for me, especially from that psychological perspective: that it is never enough. We say that in the movie and whether that’s driven by you or externally, I think that duality was a really interesting part of the writing process. Because we have these two characters who… theoretically, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t get along, they have so much in common, and yet they just meet each other at different points in their lives and careers, and that ego and that threat – because they’re so obsessed with their dream – is enough to challenge them. That’s ultimately what brings them to where they end up (no spoilers).
And there’s also another interesting feeling, that I remember experiencing quite early out of acting school, was that feeling of competitiveness as soon as we graduated… but for what? I think that there is room for everyone… The industry can pin us against each other in a weird way because it can feel so scarce, but it’s not. That’s the outside of Break A Leg, on the production side, a big motivator for me is making it feel possible, make your own stuff, a lot of us are in this industry because we have something to say, and I always just want artists to feel liberated in that.
Absolutely! And how did you find the experience of wearing multiple hats in the production?
This is the longest time I’ve spent with a project, I think it’s been two and a half years since we started writing through to post-production, and different challenges come up depending on the stage that you’re at. I love production, I love directing, that’s something that makes a lot of sense for me and will always be one of the greatest privileges that I’ve ever had, being able to lead the set in that way. The idea of getting these enthusiastic people – we had the best crew, we were so fortunate with the people that came on board, just to do it, and just to have fun, who were at a similar stage to us and shared that contagious passion to make something – and putting everyone in a container for three and a half weeks… it’s a very big honour to have been able to lead that and to nurture it. That was a really big word for me at the time, I wanted to nurture this film into existence. Because I find in this industry, it can be so hard and fast and brutal, but it doesn’t have to be. So that was huge for me, to see if that’s possible: can it feel fun? And gentle? The motto on set was: “it’s just a movie”.
And then post-production was a challenge in its own right, as it would be for any indie film. There’s this thing that happens when you’re an artist where you create something because you have a question to answer, and when you answer it you get a new question, and your standard kind of raises… So I felt the pressure of staying with this project that was now a representation of a previous question I had, for as long as I had to (over the year and a half process of post-production), and trying to bring it to this new-found standard but at some point having to accept that it’s going to be what it’s going to be. And I’m so proud of the film, of what it represents, of Brendan, and our producers Bianca K. Nunez, Denai Gracie, Janelle McMenamin, and our crew, but I have also been reflecting a lot lately on when we did the first table read and I had some people suggest “you don’t have to rush it, you can wait another year”. But that’s the duality of an artist, part of me is like “if I’d know we were going to premiere at SXSW, maybe I would have spent another year”… but would we have been here if we hadn’t acted on that? I think this is the type of film I couldn’t afford to sit on; it’s the boldest opinion I’ve ever let myself have, so I’m very grateful for where it’s taken us.
Yes, you never know! I’m also a big believer in just going for it, learning along the way because then you can always make another! I love how you talk about bringing the right people together to make this project, did you already have this team in mind?
So, Brendan and I were writing, we booked our location – Canberra has such a beautiful film community, that is so insanely talented, I don’t know if it would have been possible to do what we did, to the degree that we did it, anywhere other than Canberra, just because of the film culture there. So essentially, throughout the writing process we were making a master list of our dream crew and it was based on people we’d worked with previously.
One of the first people I called while we were still writing was our composer Kenneth Lampl, because he’s such a good example of this quality that I talk about, this contagious passion to just make stuff. He composed for another horror film I did called The Furies, and I hadn’t met him until the screening, so after the film screened he came up to me, and we had such a beautiful conversation about the film that only ended when we got kicked out, we didn’t stop talking! And that had such a big impact on me because… you need people like that in this industry. So, he was one of the first people I called and said, “in one to two years I might have a film, would you do the music for it?” and he was so enthusiastic and ready to come on board.
It was the same thing with Miguel Gallagher, who’s our DOP, one of our other producers Denai Gracie proposed it to him, and he was immediately texting back with ideas so she said “why don’t you just call Kaitlyn?” And he did, and again, he just arrived, he was there talking to me about ideas before we even locked him in and he was very intuitive, so it made a lot of sense.
I think it fluctuated but the biggest crew we would have at any given day was 15 people on set, those were our biggest days. And through production we talked a lot about the fact that this film is so indie, no one here has to come back tomorrow if they don’t want to. So even the first ADs and the producers were very intentional with making sure that people wanted to come back, curating that environment, making sure that it was fun and making people feel appreciated.
Wow, that’s a great approach I’ve never heard of that way of working, it seems a bit daunting!
Well, I think for me as well… director’s guilt is also such a real thing, ever since I started making films. I don’t know where it comes from, if it’s partially having a female experience in this industry, and finding my voice in some ways… and I think film can be both amazing but also, you do suffer, it’s really hard not to. I find that there’s always that threshold on a set where, the first four days are full of enthusiasm and love and as a director you feel the crew going “Wow, this is so great! Yay, we’re here because of you!” and then day four comes and it turns into “We’re here because of YOU!”. But it’s because you’re getting a team of creatives and artists, and we’re all sensitive, and then you put us in a container for 8, 10, 12 hours a day – in our case 6 days a week for the key team – things will come up. But film is therapy, and it’s a process, and you’re never going to have that same group of people again, so they each bring on different things. I suppose that’s where it comes from, why it can be very easy to feel guilt. Because film is necessary… but you never want people to suffer for a movie.
So, it’s been a big driving force to not get scared of that feeling but to sit with it and dissect it. Even though I’d been acting for about seven years before Break A Leg, and I’d done a number of features, this was the first feature I’d done that was directed by a woman. I wonder if that was part of it too because… I had never seen it before and it is different; you handle things differently and the process changes. I think that drives me to continue on, remembering my ‘why’, which revolves around challenging the culture I’ve seen in film so far when it comes to exploitation – because I think it should be a fun process, it should be a therapeutic process, a nurturing process, and it should be safe, people should feel safe to create. That’s a very big thing for me.
I love that, and it’s great to hear you’ve been able to achieve that on this set. You mentioned Kenneth, your composer, and I just wanted to go back to that because the sound did so much of the world-building in the film, like the scene where we hear that crowd in the theatre as we slowly pan around Brendan, was that the composer’s work as well?
That scene that you referenced was the very first image that popped into my head. When Brendan and I decided to make something, we went off and pitched – so he wrote some stuff down, and I was meant to write some stuff down but I didn’t… I went away for a while and then I got this vision of Brendan in a moment of stage fright – which is that exact shot that you’re talking about, and that’s all I had! So we had our little pitch session, and he had the best two-hander ideas with these breakdowns – which we’ll still do – and I didn’t write anything down so I just stood up and I was like “Ok, here’s the image”, and I painted the picture of that exact moment and then went “…so maybe two actors trapped in a theatre?”. And then that was it. So, we wrote the film around that exact moment. And yes, I love the question of “is it real or is it just in his head?”, especially at this point in the film because so many crazy things are happening, and the prospect of not being able to see the audience because the spotlight is so bright.
That was Sound Design primarily, our sound designers were a video production house in Canberra called Good Shout and they were awesome, so Max and the team lead that. In that scene we wanted to hear the cheering, that then evolved into the laughing, that then evolved into the booing… and that’s actually the one scene that our composer didn’t touch, it’s all sound design. The inspiration for that was jarring sounds, dissonant, weird, janky music that doesn’t sound like music. We looked at a lot of Ari Aster sound design, I feel like that really embodies the disjointed, disconnected sound that suffocates you, which is what we were going for… and Long Legs was also a reference, the sound in that film.
Amazing, so to finish up… reflecting on the whole process of what you thought it would be like to do a feature and what it turned out to be, did you have any unexpected highlights and any curveballs that were more difficult that you imagined?
Totally, I think I’ll be integrating a lot of the lessons for a while… which is good. A lot of things got confirmed for me, which is my love for community – to me film is community, horror is community and I do this for community, to be able to make something but then also be a part of that culture that celebrates it – that’s my Oscar, you know. That’s everything to me, and I think that process has reiterated that to me over and over again – how important people are, and the knowledge that we don’t have anything if we don’t have each other, and how impossible all of this would have been if it was just me.
And then on the flip side of that, it’s funny, because it’s also been one of the most isolating processes, I’ve ever done. It’s been quite lonely, and not because the support wasn’t there, it’s just such a crazy thing to do to make a film, to direct it and to carry it through! And then another big one – and I think this is the thing I would say if I were to give advice to young directors – is… trust your gut, trust your instinct. Always follow your instincts. It’s a bit cliché to say “just go out and make stuff with your friends” but… you know, it’s the artistic drive in you when your gut’s telling you to do something, or follow through with something, or you’re getting pushback. Come back to yourself, keep building that relationship with yourself, I think that’s been a very big thing for me. Because, again, things come up… but film is therapy, so treat it like therapy, approach everything with curiosity. Challenges can be part of the process, like in these two and a half years, yes, I’ve made a movie, but I’ve also evolved into a new version of myself because I practiced curiosity at the same time and made it about the evolution. The process is the point. We’re here to grow, and making films is a way to do it!
Yeah, it is! So, is there anything coming up next that you want to share with us?
Yes, I’m developing some other stuff that I’m really excited about! I’ve got another comedy in development with Brendan, which is his concept and very cool, and I’m also developing another horror myself, I’m writing that so I’m excited to take next year to sit with it while continuing with the Break A Leg arc – we’re hoping to do some more festivals, get it in front of some new audiences, and then ultimately secure distribution.
Amazing, that’s so exciting! Thank you so much for chatting with us Kaitlyn, and to everybody reading keep your eyes peeled for the next Break A Leg screening 🙂