Sarah Pirozek and Her Feminist Genre Opus, #Like

Mellicent’s an awesome human being. When I came up in the business, I used to direct many hip hop music videos. She cast quite a few of them for me. She is like this little firecracker. She’s Puerto Rican, and she’s just a New York girl. She reached out to me and said, “You British beauty, I see you’re doing a movie! Let me help you!” I said, “I would love to work with you, but I can’t. I have no budget for this right now.” I was just going to do a call-out on Backstage or something and figure it out. She said, “My British beauty, I got you. I got your back.” She’s just the best. She said, “I’ll do it for free, but you have to rent a space and pay my assistant, John, and help run the sessions.”

I just rented a cheap black-box casting place. You can rent a room. A small room is about twenty or thirty bucks an hour, tops. Then you have a space to do it in. She just reached out to tons of people and ran the thing for me.

I wanted to ask about Sarah Rich, who plays Rosie. Is she from here (NYC) or Woodstock, where it was shot?
Oh, good question. I had another girl who was booked to play Rosie, and she pulled out at the last minute, so I was freaking out. This was a girl who had some TV success, so she was my other–not a big name but a face. I thought, “That’s going to be great because I’ve got two faces in it.” She pulled out about a week before I was going to shoot. Ian Ames is this guy who manages Marc, and he said, “I have this girl, do you want to see her.” I was feeling, “Oh, why are you making me do this? I don’t want to look at your person.” Then they sent me a self-tape that she had done for another audition. She was so great in it, and I said, “Oh, well, I’d love to meet her.” Then I met her for coffee, and she was great. Do you know when someone’s on a good frequency? She’s on a good frequency. She’s not from New York, she’s from the Virginia Beach area, and now she’s in L.A., actually. I can’t say enough good about her. How good she is, how smart she is, how professional she is. You know when you meet someone, and they’re just a nicely brought up “solid citizen” type of person? She’s that. She’s intelligent. She’s emotionally intelligent. She’s just a great person.

That was two of three things that you always need to look at. Does she have the talent? I saw that in the self-tape. 2, would you like working with her, does she have good energy, and is she not an a**hole? I don’t want to work with anyone who is a princess or an a**hole. It’s hard particularly when you’re doing microbudget, because you don’t have the time and the space to deal with all that sh*t. The third thing is, can you work with her? Can you adjust her? Can you give her feedback? Will it be received well?

“I did want to make something that’s memorable. Something that’s going to piss people off.”

So, then I asked her to come in with Mellicent. Mellicent got me everybody else. So she got me all the kids, Rory, Drea, Stacey, and Samantha, who played Amelia. She got me them. I then had Sarah come in and just do some improvisation with them in the room, and we just played out some scenes together.

I think the whole cast is excellent, but Sarah and Marc together are just crazy good. Most of the scenes with them are very intense and I want to know what the energy like while filming those scenes and did you shoot all those scenes at one time, or were they spread out?
Good question. I knew, again, not having money, it all has to move very seamlessly. You can’t do resets; you can’t do extra time, blah, blah, blah. Because Marc was really busy, we had to push the schedule because we lost the other girl. He was very tight, and his agents were kind of like, “he’s busy, he’s shooting, I don’t think he can do it now.” I was freaking out! Then he said, “No, no, no. I’ll tell them I’m going to do this. We’ll make it work.” So, he managed to piece out some time for me, but I only had eight days with him. We had to shoot everything with him in eight days. So I said, “We’re going to do this like a black-box theater thing. We’re going to shoot everything in order. Because there’s going to be no room for rehearsing or any of that, he’d had the script for a year, so he knew the script, and Sarah knew the script. Sarah is super professional and detailed. Like, she would write everything down in a notebook every night. “Where am I? What’s my character’s drive? Where was I before? Where am I going? She takes it down to the raw materials, almost like the gut renovation of a house. She takes it down to the bare bones and rebuilds her character. She’s very smart.