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Q&A with Lance Oppenheim and Merritt Wever

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Primetime.

This is an incredible, confident film. You come from a strong documentary tradition. Why did you choose this to be your first narrative feature?
Lance Oppenheim: Well, it’s funny. I grew up To Catch a Predator, and I discovered it through parodies like South Park and eBaum’s World, that comedy website. So, I discovered the show through these imitations of it, and then the show made such an impression on me when I actually watched it. I must have been around 11 or 12 years old. I saw it on YouTube, and Chris Hansen was a mythological figure. He wasn’t just a normal journalist. He was like Scarface. He was like Tony Montana, with those one-liners. There was something that stuck with me about it—the theatricality of it, the mixture of truth and fiction, the artifice, the actors pretending to be children, the props and the cookies. I saw the show before I saw Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, which is a favorite movie of mine, and in a weird way, they kind of rhyme for me as a filmmaker. I don’t know if I’d be making the types of films that I make, that I’m interested in making, if it wasn’t for this television show.

this part had a very different emotional core and smell to it

Merritt, what drew you to the project?
Merritt Wever: I think—like most actors probably—that once you do a certain kind of part, or you’re offered a certain kind of role for a while, you start itching to do something different. I had come off a string of roles where, while I wasn’t exactly representing goodness, I was using the right part of my heart. I was loving. I was caring. And this part had a very different emotional core and smell to it. When I got involved, the script was still shifting and finding itself, but the shape of the character of Andie never changed. The arc never changed. She’s a woman who was drawn to a very specific kind of material and who works with a very specific kind of man and is given the opportunity to maybe change her life and make a different choice, and she decides not to take that opportunity. We always had that as the container, and then it was a matter of exploring maybe why she didn’t take that chance at a different kind of life—a lighter life, maybe, in my estimation, a better life.

There’s a wealth of archive for Chris Hansen. But for this character, for Andie, there really isn’t that much material. So how did you two build that character together?
MW: It was always clear to me that she was going to be fictional. I like to work based off the page. I know that the best or most important resource for me is always going to be whatever starts to happen between what’s on the paper and like… my chest or something. But I also do a lot of research, and I have to be careful when I’m doing research not to start running off in the wrong direction. I can start following something that isn’t, at the end of the day, what we’re doing, and it’ll live over there, and I’ll get attached. And then when I try to marry the two things, they may not be cohesive. I spoke to two longtime TV news producers who’d been doing it long enough, and in a high-up capacity. Speaking to them about the nature of their jobs, and hearing about the kind of caretaker, babysitter, therapist, handler, manipulator, rag doll, multifaceted role they have to play for the talent was particularly helpful.

Why was it important to bring in this character in such a significant role?
LO: One of the things that was interesting to me in making the movie was wanting to create this institutional portrait of this apparatus. We have Chris Hansen, and we have the internal and external struggle of what he’s going through. We have Decoy Dan, and we have Andie Bender. And Andie’s the one who is running and operating the apparatus. There’s no show without her, and yet she’s given her entire life to the show. What does she receive in return? What is she left with? I like what Merritt was saying. She’s done many, many different characters. The characters that have stuck with me are the ones that are the kindest, and I think of Merritt as a very kind person. And I liked this idea of seeing almost how she would handle the darkness eating away at her. Where’s the humanity? Where does it exist? I thought about this Olivier Assayas movie that I love, Demonlover, and I love every person in that film. And Jem Cohen’s Chain is another one, where you’re seeing the media landscape and this sense of modern life eating away at the people who are doing it. It’s this poisoned, rotten thing that is ripping everything away from everybody—the lightness in them. And with Chris, I was interested in this almost post-traumatic stress that he carries, the way he moves. And I like that Andie is the one who must shoulder and absorb everything, and yet also has to metabolize even the transcript, the words. She knows exactly what Chris is going to do with every single move. And I liked that idea of just observing that. When I watch the movie—and I always say this to Merritt—I’m not watching a performance, I’m just watching a person.

And there were times where I would annoy Merritt by bombarding her with too many references. She works from the page. I’d be like, “Look at this. It’s Mike Wallace’s producer!” and she would be like, “I’m reading the page. I’m reading the page.”

MW: But I watched it. I watched everything.

LO: I was like, “Look at Demonlover. Look at this, the score.” Sometimes the references would become so opaque, she’d be like, “What is this relevant to?” [laughs]. “Watch. Just watch it. It doesn’t matter.”

MW: I think we both worked very hard to understand each other, but sometimes it created a dust storm instead of clarity. But very well-intentioned! I also think that Lance is not the first director to, in a sense, Trojan horse some evil into me. I have a very milk-fed, nice face, and like you said, I’ve played nice girls. And sometimes directors find that container useful. You don’t see the nastiness coming. I did a film with Michel Franco, Memory, where I think I served that kind of purpose as well.

The visual language of the film is so intentional. How did you approach the look of the film with your cinematographer?
LO: David [Bolen], who shot this, did an amazing job. I was his best man at his wedding. I’ve been working with him since I was 17. And he also shot the You Can See Everything film that we did with Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes. But that was a very different experience.

For this one, we kept talking about how when you turn something as dark as this subject into a form of entertainment, what does that do to you? That was the animating idea that influenced every decision. We went back and looked at Michael Mann’s movies like The Insider and Manhunter, and then we were looking at Natural Born Killers and U Turn and JFK and Demonlover. Vanilla Sky, my favorite film of all time. That was also David’s favorite film of all time. There’s this kind of sense in these movies from the early 2000s. Tony Scott’s movies have it, too, even Michael Bay to some degree, where there’s this concept of the surveillance state and how kinetic and frenetic and scary it can be. I liked the idea of attempting to capture that. I also liked the idea of making a colorful movie, and almost all the colors are sick and rotten. I thought about Happiness, the Todd Solondz movie, which I love so much too. There were a lot of references. You’d come into my office and you’d see, on the set, and I had a wall. I ran out of space with all the images that were there. And sometimes people would not know what they were looking at or how these things would all come together. A Pandora’s box was opened when they created entertainment out of this thing, and I wanted it to feel almost like they’ve unleashed, or they are experiencing, a form of evil. That was the animating idea. When you get so close to something so dark, how does that rub off on you?

Jacob’s Ladder was another one we were thinking a lot about. We also wanted to explore, how can you kind of create an experience where you’re trapped inside, like, a television? And that’s also what I felt like for Chris and for Andie. When you know how dark this gigantic monster is that they’re creating, what does that do to someone like Skyler’s [Gisondo] character, Decoy Dan, who’s like the offering or a sacrifice? You’ve learned in the movie that other people who have filled his shoes didn’t make it very far.

LORE PARTNERS WITH NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW TO AWARD FAN EDITORS

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NEW YORK, NY (Sept. 23, 2026) – Lore and The National Board of Review (NBR) today announced the inaugural class of the NBR Supercut Fellowship, presented by Lore. This new honor is an annual grant recognizing fan editors whose work shapes contemporary film culture. The awarded Fellows are Chris Fong (Sacramento, CA), Zohair Khan (Berkshire, UK), Keona Lau (Sydney, AUS), and Lorenzo Rosa (Glendale, CA).

Supercuts (social-first edits that stitch film scenes together through music and common themes) have rapidly evolved from a niche form of content into an increasingly influential mode of storytelling. They revive interest in older studio catalogues, drive streaming discovery, and generate excitement around new releases.

“The NBR legacy has always been about awarding the talent of today while spotlighting the talent of tomorrow. We’re proud to carry this mission forward by recognizing the distinct creative voices of these four young editors as we support their future careers in filmmaking,” said Annie Schulhof, NBR President.

The inaugural Fellowship is presented by Lore, a fandom research platform built for subjective search and deeper fan discovery. The partnership reflects a shared recognition of the increasingly active role audiences play in shaping film culture. Lore’s support will provide each inaugural Fellow with a grant, while NBR will provide institutional recognition, mentorship, and opportunities for Fellows to share original work with NBR audiences.

“Fans are the market makers of this industry. The conviction they put into a film is what outlasts opening weekend and turns a story into a world worth billions. Viral fan edits foster belief, the only asset in Hollywood that compounds, and these editors are the ones deciding which films get to keep it. That power deserves recognition,” said Zehra Naqvi, founder and CEO of Lore.

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ABOUT LORE
Founded in 2025 by lifelong fangirl Zehra Naqvi, Lore is a fandom research platform that helps users explore their favorite stories through structured nodes, organizing context from across the internet into one organized place. It is designed to allow fans to go deeper into what they love without jumping between dozens of tabs or dealing with noise and chaos. Press Contact: Mitch Messinger, press@loreobsessed.com

ABOUT THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW
Since 1909, the National Board of Review has dedicated its efforts to supporting film, domestic and foreign, as both art and entertainment. Each year, NBR recognizes outstanding achievements in filmmaking through its annual awards and supports the next generation of filmmakers through its annual student grants and educational initiatives. Press Contact: Evan Santiago, evan@nbrmp.org

Q&A with Olivia Wilde and Edward Norton

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Invite.

It’s so unusual these days to have a comedy made by adults, for adults, in theaters! Tell us about when you first encountered the script, and how the movie evolved.
Olivia Wilde: It’s Sentimental in Spain, released here as The People Upstairs, and it’s based on a play written and directed by the same person. Cesc Gay made the play and made the film, and it’s one Edward and I had both seen and really liked. I then found out it had been reinterpreted in several different countries, including Korea, Italy, France, and Poland, and probably more. And I thought, “what is so true about this story that it could be interpreted in so many different languages?” I think that truth is that relationships are really difficult in every language. But it was very exciting to then read Rashida and Will’s adaptation. They were hired to write the English version, and that felt like an unbelievably exciting jumping-off point to create our own. And Edward had loved the original film, and knew about it way before I did.

Edward Norton: The premise is the same, the armature is the same, but what you just saw is very different in many dimensions. I’ve never worked on a film that was as improvisational. We were asked, in essence, to write our own characters, create the specifics of them, their backstories, and bring it all into this kind of whiteboard session. It was almost like a closed-circle intimacy share. Olivia even suggested that we each hold on to details about our characters that we didn’t share with the rest of us, and bring them into the scenes. So there’s a lot that goes on in the film that is highly improvisatory. You can see us being surprised by each other in some really substantial ways. It was far and away the most trust invested in a cast by a director that I’ve ever been a part of.

If we were making a movie about space, we’d probably call an astrophysicist

The film is beautifully controlled and composed, not what you’d expect from something with so much improvisation. How did you hold both at once?
OW: Even some of our references for the film are more vérité. You think of Husbands and Wives, obviously. What I love about that film is that you hear jokes barely on camera; sometimes the funniest punchline is off camera. It’s almost better to feel like you weren’t served it on a platter. You noticed it, and that’s thrilling. I wanted some of those elements, but with a very intentional style, a controlled chaos. That was a joy to create with our production designer, Jade Healy, who built that set on stage. She designed it over one weekend, because we were moving at such a clip, and she understood the assignment. Everyone did. The crew would stand around watching rehearsals for each scene, so engaged it was like they were watching little plays, because they didn’t know what was going to happen. Our sound mixer, Steve Morrow, was the same. I said, “I want everyone to be able to speak freely. I never want anyone to hold a line.” And so he’s live-mixing that dialogue and creating such clean tracks that in the edit I had no problem making it clear.

No one tells Seth Rogen how to lounge with his pants around his ankles.
OW: He just does it. I dare you to try!

Esther Perel was involved as a consultant. Without the truth of what Penélope’s character says toward the end, the film doesn’t quite work. Can you talk about that?
OW: If you’re going to be lobbing out these ideas about relationships, they should be based in research and fact. If we were making a movie about space, we’d probably call an astrophysicist.

EN: We are patients, not therapists.

OW: We are patients and never therapists, although now I consider myself a Perel disciple, the way I’ve been doling out advice. When I first read Will and Rashida’s adaptation, I saw the seeds of a Perelian philosophy in there, and I asked, “have you spoken to Esther?” They hadn’t yet, so I said, “let’s bring her in.” So many of the big shifts we made came from wanting to hone in on some of her ideas that have resonated with me for a long time. Things like, “you can have more than one relationship with the same person,” “taking responsibility for your own happiness,” “sex is not a thing you do, it’s a place you go,” compersion. These are all straight from her mouth, and I wanted her to help us stay honest and authentic. I also loved that Penélope bonded with her immediately and based Piña on Esther in many ways, including her hair.

EN: I don’t think she picked the wig until a week before shooting.

OW: Imagine being a director and hearing a week before shooting that your lead actress is going to use a wig, and how terrifying that was for a moment, until I saw it. I was like, but you’re Penélope, you don’t need a wig, you’re perfect.

EN: I remember you literally saying something on set. You were like, “It’s Penélope Cruz, she can’t look any more beautiful.” And then she put the wig on, and you were like, “Oh, yes she does.” Somehow she made it more beautiful.

OW: She put on the wig and it was like she transformed. She suddenly just became her.

In the beginning, the film is dialogue, but the images are very blurry and uncertain. By the end it’s clear and defined. Can you talk about that choice?
OW: In the beginning of the film, we’re in Joe’s mind, where he’s grasping at these memories of happiness that he can’t quite hold anymore. He knows he has this connection to a time when he felt happy, that there must be an origin to when they found each other and were in love. But they’ve reached a point in the relationship where it feels like a distant echo. And at the end, they’re once again playing that song, twenty years later, but now there is clarity. The clarity may not mean that they’re meant to be together forever, but it’s this understanding of their love for one another, and that it’s real. It’s not the same love they had in their twenties, the initial first blast of attraction. It’s something that’s actually really valuable, textured with all of this experience. I really loved that the Thelonious Monk song “I’m Confessing That I Love You” is what they’re playing at the beginning and the end. I loved that as a bookend, not because the idea is to return to who you were when you first met this person, but as an acknowledgment of its significance. And the score is such a character in this film. Our composer, Dev Hynes, created this Greek chorus of very dramatic, aggressive cello. It’s all one cello, even the percussion is on the cello. It’s discordant, and it represents their nerves. And yet the piano is this softer sound, another character that starts nostalgic and ends feeling very present and clear. There was also the fun of the windows. We start with this framing device in the credits of these compressing windows, and then we play with windows the whole movie — the Rear Window nod to voyeurism and being seen. And then we leave them at the end as neighbors, watching them in the same window.

Q&A with Carla Simón

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Romería.

It’s such a beautiful film with no false notes. I wasn’t surprised to hear it was influenced by personal experience. What was it like to write this and then find someone to portray the protagonist?
Carla Simón: For me, the writing part was quite organic because I had done two previous films that already were inspired by my own story and my family. This was a bit like another chapter. It was interesting because the film was born out of my frustration of not being able to remember my parents because they died when I was a kid. I knew I wanted to make a film about memory, and it allowed me to explore my own family memory, but also how memory works. At the end, it turned into something very freeing. After making the film, I realized that I was grateful to have cinema to create the images that I was lacking. It was a happy process, the writing.

And then to find Marina was quite difficult because we were looking for someone who had to play both roles in the film. We saw a lot of girls, maybe 3,000. It was crazy. Some of the girls were very good for Marina, some of them were very good for the mom, but it was complicated to find someone who could play both. We ended up doing street casting and that team found Llúcia [Garcia]. She was coming from a Boy Scouts meeting with her backpack. They invited her to come to the casting and she said yes, but she came with some friends because she didn’t know if it was a kind of joke or if we were going to kidnap her or something! When I saw her, I felt that she was very close to the kind of teenager I was. I felt very related to her somehow. It was an intuition. I felt that she was very close to Marina in her curiosity towards the world, but also in her innocence. At the same time, she was about to turn 18, so she also wanted to be mature. And I asked her a question. I asked her, “What are you afraid of?” And she said that she was afraid of looking silly, which gave me the clue that she knew she had two faces. We tried both roles with improvisations during the audition, and I realized that she could also be the mom.

With the boy [Mitch Martín], it was the other way around because Mitch is a musician, he’s a rock star. I knew he could do the dad, but I didn’t know if he actually do the cousin, so I asked him one day to come in with a t-shirt, something plainer than how he usually dresses. That worked and we put them together. I didn’t know if my parents were like them, but for sure there was something between them that was very magnetic. I really wanted to keep watching and see the love story of these two.

Her way to get free from these stories is to do it through imagination

And how did you prepare your young actors to play out this story?
CS: Llúcia had never acted before. I needed to make sure that she could really understand what she was doing and connect with it. The first thing that I did was give her my mom’s letters. Shehad written these letters to her friends and family, and I turned them into the diary for the film. This was a way for her to connect to my own story. And then we improvised moments that could have happened before the story that’s told in the film. I really believe in emotional memory. You can sit with an actor and tell him or her about the background, but you can also make them live it through improvisations, no? And that’s what we did. Some days in the rehearsals they would meet and they were a couple, and we were in the ’80s. We improvised, for example, the moment that he introduced her to his family… the moment that they got hooked on drugs… the moment they didn’t have enough money to pay for more drugs. And so on until their death. This was useful to build a love story. It was useful so that when we shot these scenes for the film, they would have someone to think about in this loss.

And then we also improvised some moments that happened in the 2000s. where we worked a lot on the family dynamics. They learned how to behave with one another. And they started to love each other as well. I feel that if you spend enough time together, you get to an intimacy that for me is very useful when it comes to shooting. Because if you get there and you’re told, “Okay, this is your father and this is your brother,” but you haven’t played these roles, it’s hard to feel it.  When we’re shooting, we follow the script, because I like to follow the script. But I give them some room for improvisation. And if we’ve done this previous work, then it’s usually right when they improvise. I cannot ask an actor to invent dialogue. But if they know their characters already, everything belongs to the universe that we created together.

What is it like as a director when you’re working a story that’s so personal?
CS: When I’m directing, I’m very focused on getting what we need at the end of the day. That makes is much less emotional. Obviously, I connect on what we need for the story, but I don’t have the time to think so much about how I connect with all of it. That may happen more in the rehearsal process, as I mentioned. There are some moments that may hit me, but in general, I’m very focused on guiding the actors, and then in the shooting, I’m focused on getting the footage we need. Then, in the beginning of the process in the editing room, I’m kind of sweating to make sure that it’s going to work as a film. But at some point, I start feeling that the emotions that I am having are very similar to the ones that we are showing, and this is when I feel like, okay, we do have a film. But I do have to maintain a certain objectivity while directing, in order to capture what we need.

I’d love to hear more about how you choregraphed the departure from the present day and the reality of this story. There are so many evocative moments in that last act, especially that image of the people at the party with the sheets over them. How did you find your way to construct this part of the story?
CS: I think that when I realized that I wanted to make a film about memory, it was the moment that I found the structure of the film. It made a lot of sense to have a character who tries to reconstruct a narrative about her parents through other people’s stories. Because these memories are very stained by the taboo and the stigma of heroin and AIDS, as she tries to put the pieces together, it doesn’t work. That’s also how memory works. When we remember, we don’t remember the actual event, we remember the last time we accessed that memory. If you have big emotions attached to this memory, they keep transforming in your own mind up until the point that you really believe that this thing happened like that, and maybe it has nothing to do with the real moment.

It was interesting to build this quest in a way that the pieces just don’t match. And she arrives to the conclusion that there are many gaps that she will not be able to fill, and that she has her own imagination to fill them. Her way to get free from these stories is to do it through imagination. And for me as a filmmaker is to do it through cinema, you know? It made sense to have this structure where when you feel that the film is about to finish, another film starts, and this is the story that she imagines. I study a lot about how imagination works, and it’s very interesting because it works in a very similar way to dreams. Imagining is dreaming when you’re awake. We imagine and dream with elements or moments that we have lived recently. For me, this was a nice thing to create because I always feel like a mirror. If I try to think of my parents, I cannot imagine them moving. I don’t have enough photos or videos to do that. So, it made sense that she transforms to her mom and the cousin transforms to her dad. Then this happens in all the places that she’s been visiting on the trip. She films some images that are exactly the same as in the imagination part, but with the characters inside or some objects that travel from reality to imagination. Having this mirror to build was very beautiful. While I was imagining that party, I said, “Why not go use music,” because the music in the ’80s was very important in Spain. What we used was from a band from Vigo, the city where my father was from and the city where we shot. I was trying to look for an image that would explain that this is not only the story of these two characters, but of a whole generation.

Q&A with Rashad Frett

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Ricky.

Let’s start with the script, because it’s so beautifully rendered. It’s co-written, and I don’t believe the short film this grew out of was co-written. Can you talk about that?
Rashad Frett: This was during COVID, 2020. Lin Que Ayoung was a classmate at NYU, a year ahead of me, and she became the co-writer. Initially I was just going to graduate with the feature script for King, another film I’d been working on. Lin Que was like, “Why not make another short and graduate with as much material as possible?” I knew so many Rickys growing up in Hartford, Connecticut. It was a huge Caribbean community. I’m Caribbean myself. So we did the short. I had no intention of this being a feature at all. I kid you not.

The first person to say it could be a feature was our professor, Mick Casale. He teaches screenwriting in grad film. Simultaneously, while I was waiting to shoot the short, Cary Fukunaga started a grant at NYU. I submitted, and ended up winning. Normally you write a thank you letter and that’s that, but he actually wanted to meet and talk about the script. I was like, “Oh, man.” He gave a lot of great notes. From there he posted me on his Instagram, and his agent at William Morris, Craig Kestel, saw it and reached out. When I had a cut of the film, I sent it to him. I’m an editor, but I edit real slow… like, frame by frame. As soon as he watched it, I got signed to William Morris.

Then Michelle Satter from Sundance heard about the short and invited me to apply for the Writer’s Lab. I didn’t have a script. Like I said, I’d just made this film to graduate. Lin Que and I work so well together, so I asked her to co-write. Michelle skipped us around because I guess the first round had already passed, so she gave us three weeks to submit a script. We wrote every day for three weeks. We were like, “We’re not gonna not write.” A couple weeks later we got interviewed, and then it went dark again. Then another interview a month after that, and we found out we got into the Writer’s Lab. But simultaneously, we got into the Sundance Film Festival for the short. I’d been trying to get into Sundance for fifteen years, so it was a shocker. Truly grateful for that experience. From there, it just kept getting bigger and bigger. I’m still trying to catch up with it even being out in theaters. You know when you walk a dog and the dog is pretty strong, and it’s dragging you? That’s the analogy.

Who’s walking who?

Yeah, pretty much.

I wanted it to feel as authentic as possible

Sheryl Lee Ralph plays Ricky’s parole officer, and she caught me off guard when she code-switched. I had to Google her, and I was stunned to learn that she’s Caribbean. I never knew that about her.
RF: It’s interesting. When we first met on Zoom, within the first three minutes, our accents… you know when you talk to somebody from where you’re from and your accent unknowingly switches? We were speaking in soft patois and I didn’t realize it until afterwards. The majority of the cast were of Caribbean descent. Where I’m from, Hartford, it’s a huge Caribbean population. It wasn’t ironic… It was preordained.

I noticed the Artery logo in the credits. Were there invisible VFX shots?
RF: For sure, tons of VFX. Perfect example: I’m ex-military, and I’m big on safety. We shot at my cousin’s house, the scene where Ricky is cutting my nephew’s hair on the porch, and my cousin’s actual address was on the slab. I was like, “We gotta get that out of there.” People will take one little thing and go check it out. So we made up a street, Creek Street, whatever it was, and put that on instead.

We had a 20-day shoot, so everything was go, go, go. I don’t like to be rushed, but the film was making itself tight. I’ll tell you a story… About a month or two before shooting, I had a dream. I walked onto set, and the film was being made without me. Imagine, as a director, you walk onto set and they’re just making your film without you. I was like, “No. No, you’re not.” I woke up, called my producer, I was like, “I had this crazy dream.” And then there were situations on set… similar. I was like, “Wait a minute, this is the dream.” I said it out loud: “This is the dream.” But we worked it out. We smoothed it out, diplomatically.

Talk more about Hartford as a Caribbean community. I had no idea.
RF: At one point Hartford was… well, New York City was number one, then I think Florida was number two, and Hartford was number three. The reason was Hartford was known for picking tobacco back in the day. Even Martin Luther King, as a teenager, went up there to pick tobacco, in Simsbury. That’s how people started settling, back in the 1940s. My family came to this country in the late ’70s, and I was born right when they came up. A lot of history up there.

Can you discuss the inclusion of other consultants in the film itself?
RF: All right, I’m gonna keep it real. I’ve known Felix Soto for a long time. Go back fifteen years. 2010 is when I met Mark Manson, who was a Hartford cop at the time, retired now. Mark wrote a TV show with Felix. Mark had arrested Felix. Felix was part of the Hells Angels, and when I met Mark, Felix was doing fed time for robbing a bank. He got out in 2019. He changed his life. He’s in the church now, has his own carpentry business. I really wanted him in the film. There are certain things I saw growing up, or I knew people who went through it, but to actually speak to Felix… and from the police side, Mark, and my father, the corrections side, and judges, attorneys — I wanted it to feel as authentic as possible. Lin Que and I made sure of that. Our biggest fear was for it to not feel authentic.

So this past fall we got invited to screen at the San Quentin Film Festival. It was me, Mrs. Ralph, Lin Que, and we were in a chapel with eighty, ninety inmates watching the film. I was like, “If we didn’t do it right, we’ll know.” I almost had a panic attack. I think it started mentally. I was like, “Wow, I’m literally in here with…” But by the end, so many of them came up and said, “Wow, this is literally my story.” I was at a loss for words. So much of what I’ve seen out there glamorizes this stuff. Anything I do, I want it to have truth in it. Even if I’m doing genre, some kind of truth in it.