Sarah Pirozek and Her Feminist Genre Opus, #Like

Marc is also very smart, but he’s a little bit different. He’s more of a working professional in television and film. So his way is, “I don’t really want to rehearse. I just want to hit the ground running. I understand what the character’s motivations are. I know who these people are,” and I said, “Okay, great. Sarah, are you good with that?” and she said, “Great!”

So we did a couple of read-throughs. Any questions they had, we answered. Then, we literally shot it in order. Which is great because they can develop their character arcs, and they don’t have to go back and be like, “Where was I? What was that?” Sarah had more of a complicated job because she had to go back after Marc. We said, “Bye-bye, Marc!” He went, and we had to do all the inserts. You know, the key on the chain, the nail on the floor, the phone, the little clues. We had to revisit them again. When Marc falls over, and she goes through his pockets, that’s someone else. We had to do that about a week and a half later. Anything we needed Marc for, we shot and everything else we filled in later. Which was really complex because, obviously, if you forget anything…In a thriller, every little beat you had to hit. There were other little beats in there that I had that we just didn’t have the time to hit properly. Then in the edit, I was like, “This isn’t working. It’s corny or clunky. We just need to take it out!” You have to smooth everything over, you know.

I think that the finished product is pretty seamless. You don’t feel anything missing from the film when you watch it.
You understand how filmmaking goes. It’s so hard. That was the one thing I thought. “This film, everyone is giving their all to it, and I really want to make sure it feels professional and smooth and that it delivers a lot of satisfaction to the viewer.”

I feel like every woman who watches it, especially, is like, “Hell Yeah!” I know that I was.
Let me tell you something funny. When I showed it at Cinequest, that’s where it premiered, out in San Jose. That line, where Rosie says, “No one likes to swallow,” two women on two different sides of the cinema just burst out snorting laughing, and it made my day. Because the only person who ever laughs at that line is me. So yeah

“…not having money, it all has to move very seamlessly…”

No, that’s awesome. I wanted to ask because of everything going on with Covid, did you plan to release this earlier? Or how was this release affected by Covid?
Well, yeah. First of all, I had premiered it in March, then we wanted to get our East Coast stuff all cleared up, and then I was talking to a bunch of distributors. It’s really weird because “streaming wars,” let’s call it, had already sort of denigrated a lot of the income of a lot of the distributors. Then this whole new thing happened where everybody could access everything on the internet. So, that’s all weird for everyone. Then, I’ve got this low-budget feature with no real names in it that I talked to people about. I had three or four distributors interested. One of them was really, real horror. They were just slasher pictures. I didn’t want to put Sarah Rich on the poster next to this girl being killed. I don’t want to do that.

So that was not going to work. Then, everyone freaked out because COVID started happening. I freaked out. We didn’t know if we were going to be dead, did we? Then I thought, instead of just trying to shove it out there, let’s calm down for a minute, take a breath, and figure out what we’re doing. I ended up getting a couple of offers from big distributors. Big indie distributors. There was no money. It was kind of a lukewarm offer for both. I just thought that after the dust had settled at the end of the day, Deborah Kampmeier had premiered Tape on OTT on Vimeo, and then it got picked up. I can’t remember who distributed it. So I thought, based on her success, that I can’t sit on this forever. Let’s just get this moving. So then I geared back up, but it just sort of sat fallow for about six months, unfortunately. But, in a way, good, because I don’t want to get caught up in all the noise of COVID. Now we have the other noise, we have the Trumpy noise happening, so you know. Everything is weird.

So, long story short, yes. I did stop for COVID, but then I thought I need to reboot. Because it’s like quicksand. The same pie is being cut up by everyone now. It’s all virtual. So virtual theatrical. It’s really not a different pie. Then you’ve got your TVOD, which many people don’t understand the difference between TVOD, AVOD (advertising-based video on demand), SVOD (subscription-based video on demand), and then possibly other paid platforms. We’re in very weird times. So, I thought, let me just get it out there. Because I have all these other projects, I’m trying to do.