Made in the moment

Elena and Jessica

A woman on the run after being forced to contend with a stalker. An old friend with a spooky secret living in a trailer in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Isolation and ghosts and the importance of friendship – all filtered through a narrator whom we may or may not be able to trust. Jethica is an unusual little genre film which made a big impact at festivals before going on general release, and it’s even more interesting when one digs into the story behind it. Director Pete Ohs and stars Andy Faulkner, Ashley Denise Robinson, Callie Hernandez and Will Madden , all of whom wrote, explained how the project was co-created on the spot from nothing but a location and a handful of shared ideas.

“It started with me and Andy,” says Pete. “We had made a couple films prior, and were talking about making another movie. I just said to Andy ‘Where should we do it?’ And he had lived in New Mexico so he suggested that, which led to me then getting on Airbnb and discovering that trailer, and then imagining what story to make within that trailer – and having this group of friends as the action figures I was going to be playing with. Just starting to imagine what story with those people could make sense.

Elena on guard

“Okay, Callie is a woman in this trailer and then I'm saying, for whatever reason, okay, something has happened to her. Just having that little bit of a framework of it, like, there's going to be some ghosts, and there's going to be some high school friends reuniting. And pitching that loose idea to each of them individually, and having a conversation. And then each of them responding with the things about it that they liked, the things that they didn't like, what they would be interested in seeing in a movie and what type of character they would want to play, and all those things getting folded into the outline that we then eventually went to New Mexico with.

“The way it generally worked was, I would write a rough version of the dialogue into my phone in the Notes app. And then at breakfast, or the night before, I would pitch that version of the scene to whichever actors are in that scene. And then immediately they would start writing too. They would change the lines to better fit their mouth or the character’s, or to help make that scene go in a different direction.

“We shot the whole movie in chronological order and we didn't really know what the second half of the movie was until halfway through the shoot, when we stopped and had a bunch of big conversations about what the rest of the movie should be. It was very much an unfolding, a discovery, all with the intention of being active and engaged. This approach will create a fun, meaningful, worthwhile experience, that being the priority even before making a movie.”

“In November 2020, Pete asked me to go along to make a movie in the way that he made Youngstown, in January in New Mexico,” says Will. All he really gave me was ‘You’re a stalker and you’re a ghost.’ I went from there and for a month would just do my normal way of preparing for a role. I guess it was different without without a script, but just having a stalker was enough of the thing to run with and learn about, and I would send Pete videos and voice recordings of me just playing around and trying things, until I found a gait and a voice and this and that. Then I would write love letters as Kevin, to Jessica, as a way to start figuring out what this thing was, and then send them to Pete. That ended up in the movie and Pete used some of those videos in the final film. So for me, it was a lot of that month preparing and having fun in my own little world, and then getting to Mexico and opening up the collaboration to everyone else.”

“Pete and I have been friends for a couple years,” says Callie, as she fends off a large and enthusiastic dog who seems keen to be part of the discussion. “Pete was like, ‘I want to make a movie in Mexico. Any ideas?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah!’ We didn't know the whole film but I knew the basis and then I had an idea for who I thought I would have fun playing. A person that I knew that I thought would be fun to see her in these circumstances. So I drove out to New Mexico.”

“I didn't know anybody at first,” says Ashley. “It was actually Will's brother, Danny, who had worked with Pete before, who I knew from being on set with a different production company that we've all worked for. And Danny messaged me. He said, ‘Hey, my friend Pete is making this movie and he's looking for an actress. Are you interested?’

Elena confronts Kevin

“That was actually right after I said out loud ‘I want more work where somebody just refers me to it.’ I hate auditioning for stuff. And I was like, ‘You know, I'd really love to shoot something outside of LA, and I'd love to help write it.’ And then I got on a Zoom with Pete and that was the meeting. He's like, ‘Yeah, we're shooting this outside of LA, in New Mexico, and we're all going to write it.’ I think his exact words were ‘So do you want to do it?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds great.’

“That was, I don't know, November, December 2020. And then all of us met up at Echo Park, and we all just talked a little bit, and then Pete and I met up and walked around and talked, and then all of us were in two cars driving to New Mexico. So yeah, so I met everybody at once, and Callie and I didn't even meet until we were driving down to New Mexico, which is crazy. I hadn't met Will, either, or Andy, so ee all met the day we drove.”

As Andy was a co creator from the start, I ask if he always knew that he was going to have a character.

“I hoped I was going to have a character,” he says. “I mean, Pete and I worked on a couple of things in the past, a feature and a short. We’d talked about shooting a movie in New Mexico and there was just no way I was going to say no to that. So there wasn't really a decision. But yeah, I mean, he could have just said, ‘We're shooting a bunch of random beauty shots in the desert.’ It doesn't matter. I would have said yes.”

His character seems quite challenging to play, because we don’t spend much time with him and he’s very withdrawn.

“When you’re living in New Mexico, you meet some characters that are burnouts and live off the grid and have that kind of slow cadence,” he says. “You actually meet that kind of person in the desert. So that was the starting point, and from there, I thought that maybe – not too many spoilers – but what if you get hit by a car and there's some sort of brain damage that happens before you die, would you be stuck with a little bit of brain damage also? So I think that's also part of the character as well. He doesn't have the same sort of life that Kevin has. He's half conscious, and depressed and sad. And I think that that landscape kind of brings it out. It's really beautiful but the scale is so humbling that it makes you feel small and kind of alone, you know?”

Ashley faced different challenges with the character of Jessica, because after having dealt with a stalker she’s put up a lot of barriers to stop anybody from getting close yo her, and yet she has to be at least somewhat accessible to viewers.

“Sure,” she says. “Yeah, she's running away from a few different things. There's also just this exhaustion of it all that I feel like I really let her sink into because it's no longer a fight. It almost seems like okay, now she can rest a little bit. She's met up with this friend and it happens to work out. ‘Hey, yeah, let me stay here for a bit, let me just hang out.’ And then it all gets riled up again, but it's like, ‘Oh my God, I'm still way too tired to deal with this.’

Jethica

“That was a conversation we had about the scene at the table with Elena [Callie’s character] and Jessica, with Elena saying ‘You rest, you've done enough so let me handle it.’ So just being able to sink into the exhaustion of what that feels like. That also helps to justify why she did what she did. She felt like she ultimately had to do it to get her life back. And, you know, this was 2021, so a year into the pandemic, we were all feeling this exhaustion of, ‘I've been doing so much stuff and then there is this kind of taking a break from things, but I still have to go on and do stuff.’ And I can be channelling a lot of that as well.”

Callie and I briefly discuss Elena’s background in traditions associated with the supernatural, but she says that the idea originated with Pete.

“I enjoy all kinds of movies, but if I'm going to make a movie, I want there to be something that is not just normal life, hopefully something that makes it feel like real life could be more magical,” he says. “So I like when there is a supernatural element that is small in some way, like you could be driving down the road and see a hitchhiker and think, ‘Is that a ghost? That very much could be a ghost.’ I want that in the movie. And then you have to say, like, ‘Okay what are the rules of this? How does this happen? Who knows? Who doesn't know? How are we going to get the audience to know these sorts of things?’

“That just sort of sifted into place, that there would be this character who is at the centre of it, who understood it all and was fazed by none of it because she grew up with it, which was just kind of fun and exciting and cool, because I would love to meet that person in my life. You know, the person who has all their little witchy things that like, aren't crazy, they're real. So that made me excited to have in a movie, and I think Callie is kind of witchy herself. She knows all about this kind of stuff. She grew up in Texas.”

Callie laughs and protests, and he accepts that but continues.

“She's similar to her character, she was familiar with this world, this is not new to her.” He looks across at her. “I think you were able to ground it in a way that doesn't make it seem like this person is weird or kooky, that this is all matter of fact stuff and is completely real, because maybe it is, who are we to say?”

Being the character who tells us the central story, is Elena also an unreliable narrator?

“I think it's present throughout the whole movie, the ambiguity of what is real, what isn't real? Who did what? What is wrong, what is right? It's all grey,” he says.” And so the idea that Callie's character is telling the story of the movie to someone that she doesn't seem to know that well adds that ambiguity. This might all be a lie. The story that we're watching might be a fabrication, it might just be a ghost story, it might just be her sitting around a campfire telling a story to spook somebody, to give somebody some chills. I liked that her character and this framing device brought in the tradition of ghost story telling.”

Jessica gets ready for action

I ask Will how he contended with the role of the stalker, Kevin, in which he has to deliver some lengthy, very involved monologues.

“The spotlight scene in the darkness was improvised, and the dawn continuing monologue was improvised,” he says. “I would steal little things, phrases and quotes that I heard from people who are stalkers, talking about victims. They would take a little blurb and riff on it, and I’d steeped myself enough in that world for a month to just kind of go. When in doubt, you can say anything and it would be in alignment with how some of these guys think. The majority of the improvisation was when I'm ranting and raving. Pete and Andy kicked me into the spotlight, they knew that Kevin needed to be unleashed. So much of what we realised the character to be just came from doing, which was one of the most fun aspects of doing the whole film improvised.”

It seems to me that the most difficult question for the film overall was how to strike a balance between showing us the ddistress kevin caused to Jessica and letting us feel some sympathy for him as a broken person. Pete agrees.

“I think the fact that that is working for people shows that that balance has been found. It’s a testament to the collaboration of this project, of how so much of it was made through discussion, through communication with each other, through challenging each other about our ideas of what it should or shouldn't be, to arrive at a place that feels appropriate and respectful and interesting.

“Everything about this movie is a product of the process. I'm not necessarily a big horror fan. I like good movies. When horror as well done, tt's as good as any good movie, but I'm not necessarily studying the tropes of what is a horror movie or what isn't a horror movie. When we were making this, I wasn't thinking ‘We're making a horror movie.’ The whole M.O. was ‘Don't try, just enjoy.’ For me just as a human, I want to have empathy for every body as much as possible, and horrible, horrible things happen in the world, to people on all different sides. And I don't know, it's like the challenge to try to understand it is our great challenge as human beings.

“When telling the story, I'm trying to do that, and then thankfully I'm surrounded by these other smart, intelligent, empathetic humans who are coming from their perspectives and are able to help me figure it out. I know Ashley as the co-lead, who is very much at the crux of the situation, your insight into your character and what the story needed to be and should be, was essential to this thing. Who knows where it could have ended up without your your contribution?”

“It was about understanding the need for empathy for everybody, but also the justice that needed to happen first,” Ashley says. “Kevin can't just get off. First of all, we have to stop. And then second of all, it can't just be that he did this thing and there's no remorse. So it’s about making sure that he could feel what I felt so that he so that he knew what it was. That was a huge discussion. And being able to come to that and feel complete in that in a way, and then it's like, okay, that's complete, then you can move on to somebody else.”

It’s rare to see this kind of kindness taking centre stage in a genre film, I say.

Jethica poster

“Definitely,” says Pete. “For me, if we're making stuff and putting it out into the world and encouraging kindness, we're doing a good thing.”

They’re all very excited about the attention which the film has garnered.

“Being able to also talk about how it was done makes it even more heavy hitting to people,” says Ashley. “But you know, I've said this before: I feel like even with a bigger budget and more cast members or whatever, it would still be the same story. It doesn't look like five people went out into the desert and made a movie in two and a half weeks. You know, it doesn't work like that, which I think is really awesome about it. It's not just the storytelling. It's not just the final process. It's the whole entire process and everything that went into it as well. Yes, it's exciting. It's just riding the wave of this thing that we don't know where It's going to go, and it's gone so much further in the last two years than any of us ever thought it would.”

“The reception of it, and that people are liking it, that it has distribution, that people in other countries are talking to us about it is all icing on the cake,” says Pete, “but I think we really made this without expectations. For me anyways, when we were leaving New Mexico after having that time we spent, it was already a success. It already felt like I'm glad I did that with my life. So the idea that it's a movie that other people can watch, I love that. I don't like when people feel like it was a waste of time. But the fact that lots of people are getting value from it as well is wonderful icing on the cake, and honestly feels good.”

“I think if anything, it's just a reinforcer of like, when you follow your own tastes and impulses and your own truth moment to moment, that feels good and right,” says Will. “That is like the kernel of what it is that we do, and that's the thing that people resonate with.”