0 CommentsOn Monday afternoon, Arts Editor Isa RingswaldEgan sat down with student filmmaker, Trevor Siegel (CC ‘24), and student musician who scored the film, Terry Foley (GS ‘24), to discuss their new movie musical, Explaining Elizabeth.
Explaining Elizabeth is Trevor Siegel’s first feature-length film. It follows the story of a boy named Erik who, having spent his life understanding the world through musical theater, attempts to explain his older sister’s sudden death by devising a theatrical production about her life. The film boasts eight songs and the following main contributors:
Written & Directed by Trevor Siegel (CC’24)
Original Score by Terry Foley (GS ’24)
Choreography by Naomi Namboodiripad (CC ’24)
Cinematography by Skyler Calkins (CC ’24)
Produced by Camila Grunberg (BC ’25) & Lily Imai (CC ’24)
Kieran Lomboy (CC ’26) as ERIK
Monroe Lemaire (CC ’23) as ELIZABETH
Anja Vasa (BC ’25) as MARIA
Rebecca Ho (SoA ’23) as CINDY
Maya Small as ROSE
Vincent Snyder (CC ’23) as ADAM ZAROFF
At The Forum on Monday, I sat down with Trevor Siegel and Terry Foley to discuss the filmmaking process, creative journey, and narrative inspiration of the film. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity and continuity.
Isa RingswaldEgan: Could you explain how you were inspired to write Explaining Elizabeth?
Trevor Siegel: So the day after the premiere of my last film, which was a 45 minute drama. I was taking the day to myself, on my bed, and I decided I was gonna watch this movie Cyrano, that I had been wanting to watch. After watching it, I was in tears. I hadn’t been moved by a film like that in so long, and I realized not only do I want to make my first feature next year—which has always kind of been a goal—but I decided I wanted it to be a musical. Now, people on campus kind of looked at me like I was a bit insane. When I first told them I wanted to make a musical, which I had wanted to do for many years, they told me it was like impossible to do on campus, you would need too many people to be able to commit to that, and that it was just not possible to do. That made me want to do it even more. So that’s how I got started in terms of writing a musical.
Following that, I just started to think about plot points, I didn’t even start to think about a story yet; just the characters I wanted, because in a musical, the music can be amazing, but it means kind of nothing if the characters aren’t driving it. So what I ended up deciding was, I want a sibling relationship, and I want to show the effects of the loss of one of those siblings. I have two brothers, I still have those two brothers, and I love them very dearly. I like to center familial relationships frequently in my stories, because I think that’s the most powerful.
From there, it just kind of started developing the extra characters. I made a character web showing, well here’s the sister, here’s the brother. And it quickly then became, well, I want to do a metastory. Then, I also wanted to make a movie within our budget. And because of that, I couldn’t make a movie that was about adults, I couldn’t make a movie about kids—I had to make a movie about college students. So I decided, why don’t I just make this musical about a group of college students making a musical? That way, we don’t have to get any new sets, we could just use the locations we were already going to use because that’s what college students would use for that sort of thing. And it became a lot easier to write once I kind of had that setting and the vibe. And after that, it was just kind of off to the races. I wrote it pretty quickly. I think I wrote it within a month last year, last spring.
IR: And how long after that did you contact Terry?
TS: So I had written the lyrics into the script. Then after that, I started asking a lot of people like around campus, like who do you know that could help? The composer for my last film was Dan Weitz, who’s a very talented musician. He was just so busy this year, but then he said, you know, my friend Terry’s really good at this. And I think I just—we texted and—weren’t you in, you were in the pit at the Varsity Show when I texted you.
Terry Foley: Yeah, yeah, maybe with Dan?
TS: What was your what was the first reaction you had when I texted you this idea?
TF: I was really impressed by the ambition that you had. You made crystal clear upfront, you were like, “I want to do a full length movie musical. It’s like, other people are doing short films. I don’t want to do a short film. I want a full length movie musical with nine songs. Here’s a script. Here’s all the lyrics… Tell me what you think.” And I was like “Damn, this kid. He’s got a lot going on.” Yeah, I was—I was super impressed by the script. And I’ve never seen someone do that before—write a script with the lyrics, like baked into the plot. I can’t remember what the first thing you asked for was. You asked for, like an audition song or something. What was it I sent you? I think it was “Map to Elsewhere.”
TS: It might have been. And it was basically a song within the screenplay that I had come back to a lot, because it was supposed to represent like the song of the familial bond, so to speak. And I knew it was important, I knew it was, so I was like, before we do anything else, like I need to hear if you understand the same vibe I’m going for. And I think we went like through only two passes before I was like, “Yeah, this is the right guy for the job.” I also knew his work. I did some research like I found how much he’s done for the Columbia community in terms of musicianship. I mean talk about all the stuff you’ve done.
IR: Yeah, can you talk about your previous musical background?
TF: I’ve played in many many pits for musicals at Columbia. I’ve done Varsity Show, Lemon Water, Head Over Heels, In the Heights, and orchestrated a bunch of shows—I orchestrated last year’s XMAS and last year’s Varsity Show, and Lemon Water. I’ve also written, aside from this, three other musicals at Columbia. I wrote this year’s XMAS show and VALENTINEXO, and then we just wrapped Redacted.
TS: I’d like to note that some of the XMAS songs were stuck in my head until February, which was very frustrating.
IR: So what—especially because you’re both here—was the creative development process like? Did you write the screenplay with, sort of, melodies in mind for the lyrics, or—
TS: Only one. That was the “Map to Elsewhere” chorus. I gave him the chorus. Because I knew the exact melodic structure I wanted for the chorus. But like, I didn’t have the verses, I couldn’t do that. And so once he had that chorus, he was able to say like, “Okay, let me connect this to a verse structure. And let me see, let’s build it from there.” And I think that really made it. I think that’s what kind of let it take off. That was our first collaboration moment where I had to cede control over to him for the verses. But also, he was like, “I trust you with the chorus you’re giving me.” At least, I hope he did. *laughing* Another fun, interesting thing about the process in which we created the songs was that we were across the world from each other. I was in South Africa for the entire summer, working on a film set, and he was, you were home, right? Like you were in the States.
TF: Yeah. I was not in South Africa. *laughs*
TS: So we ended up having to do calls, and like text.
TF: We didn’t meet in person until the whole thing was written.
TS: Yeah we didn’t meet in person until the entire thing was written, we never met once, it was all done by phone. It was all done basically, just like with this trust in this unknown face, in the computer. And like it would be super late in South Africa, sometimes, I’d be staying up. I’d just have to come back from a long day on set, and then it would be like the middle of the day for him. He’d be like, “Great, let’s go!” and I was like, fuck, oh god. But, it was really cool to have that experience. It was exciting. And it was thrilling to actually meet in person. And we recorded songs first before. To get live recording like that would be, it would be tough here. And so that made sound recording in general much easier. It took away 50% or so of the actual sound we need to report. That was a big problem last year, in my last film. That’s why I was so nervous about doing a musical. But Terry quickly helped me realize why it was gonna be so important to record beforehand. I kept on saying like, “Nah, man, like, let’s just start filming when we get there.” And like, like, I can’t remember exactly what you said. But you said something like—
TF: The reason it was a big deal that Les Mis did that is because people don’t do it. Because it’s a terrible idea. *chuckling*
TS: Cyrano also did that. I was obsessed with that movie. I mean, like, Joe Wright is such a really talented visual director. And I mean, the facial expressions—Peter Dinklage alone in that movie could bring down an ice cold heart. I’d wager that it was Terry’s confidence in the fact that it was not going to be as good if we did it live that made me trust him. Not just in that, but in general. It helped me realize there are gaps in my knowledge, even as the director of this project. This was important for the rest of the project in general. I realized I need to at least consider and take to heart all of the suggestions given to me. And it can’t just be like, “Okay, sure that’s a great suggestion, we’ll put it in there.” Or it’s not just going to be “I don’t like a suggestion, no.” It has to be, “I hear your suggestion. Tell me why. What’s the reason?” If I can give you an adequate reason why not, because of like the story, then it’s not going in. But if I can’t give you a reason why not, and you can give me a good reason for it? Then, then, by all means. That’s what he did. I was trying to like, tell him “Well, I want to do this, I want to do this.” But he gave me a really good reason why not, and I couldn’t give a reason to contradict that. It’s a discussion and I think that’s been the most important thing I got in this creative process, especially for us.
IR: How was the switch from the time that you spent online together to being in person? Did you feel like you were kind of already in a groove? Or was it awkward when you guys first started working?
TF: No, I felt like I knew him pretty well already.
*both laughing*
TS: Yeah. It was a bit funny, there was a time when we kind of ran into each other. It was like, “Wait, are you?”
TF: “Are you the guy?”
TS: And it was, it was so funny, because we kind of just like, ran into each other before we did anything for the project. We had only met over Zoom, but that was it. And then I remember seeing you on campus and being like, “Holy shit, you’re the guy!” And that was how we first met, like he was just just passing by. And it was a bit awkward, but that was more just because of like, how much time we had actually spent together.
IR: And mental time together, too, I imagine.
TS: Oh, god yeah. And we’d already had some, like, fights about the recording thing. And I think that like, if anything, it just made us better coworkers.
IR: What was your goal in making this film? What about this story did you want to contribute to the world?
TS: So the story itself was hard to fully form until like right before filming, like the ending was shifting. But the main reason I wanted to make this was because it was a story that was just really sad—and yet, I wanted to show that in the depths of the sadness, there can be a glimmer of hope. And there can be a beauty to be found in the absence of someone you love, it just depends on how you find that beauty. And it was tough for me because there were a couple of people who didn’t think—who didn’t like the script at all. Some were very angry that I wrote a script that revolves around the theme of suicide. But I think it’s important to write those stories, because it allows us to—like I said, to recognize that even in the darkest of times, hope, joy, happiness and love can be found.
IR: Did that subject matter come from direct experience?
TS: Like it came from my direct experience in terms of the feeling of like loss, how I conveyed the themes of loss and grief. Like I have lost loved ones in the past, but I have not lost someone like this, but I’ve also seen the effects of something like this on others. And that is why I didn’t want to make this movie in a cinéma vérité style. Like I wasn’t going to make a movie saying, “This is the gritty realistic nature of this.” It is a musical because I actively wanted to hyperbolize the emotion. Because—so my favorite director is Wes Anderson, and one thing I love about him so much is that he creates these ornate visual environments; he makes his own little world in his films. What that does is separate his reality from our reality. But then when you see how people react to, like, dramatic events in that, in his reality, it lends a subtle kind of understanding to us about how we handle it. Yeah, because these people have muted reactions, we understand that in our reality, the unmuted reaction would be bigger. But because we see that muted reality, we’re able to contrast it with our own. So that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to make my own world in this film. And it is—like the way in which we filmed it and the way in which we wrote the music is very much our own little personal bubble of reality, because only one adult shows up. There is very much just like these kids making a musical and everything else is elsewhere.
IR: What about Cyrano specifically impacted you in this way compared to other movie musicals? What stood out so much?
TS: I think it came at the right time. I love movie musicals. I mean, one of the most important films of my childhood was Les Mis from 2012. I vividly remember the hold, the iron clad hold that had on me for years. And I mean, I grew up as a theater kid; I grew up doing musicals at a professional regional theater near where I grew up, and I loved it. But then I started to realize pretty late into my time in high school like—but it’s film. I want to tell stories like this forever. This is what I do. Like I can act I can write, I used to write books too, but like no, like, I want to be a filmmaker. I want to tell stories in the—through the medium that I think is the greatest of all mediums. And yeah, overall, it was the power of Cyrano came at that exact right time. I needed a story. And that kickstarted me into looking at the emotion, not just the narrative.
IR: And what was the specific narrative message that you wanted to convey through Explaining Elizabeth?
TS: The theme of Explaining Elizabeth was for me two-fold. The theme of the narrative is about how art can help us see things that the world around us, that reality can’t. I think that is true on multiple levels—art can show us things that we may not have realized about our own personal emotional experiences. And then the main character is using art in an attempt to understand something he doesn’t understand. That was the main kind of like, overarching theme of the film.
My personal reason for making this film was, I wanted to show this community that it’s possible. It can be done. I haven’t—like I don’t know anyone here who’s ever done a feature length film, like not even a musical but feature length film, here as an undergrad with this many—there’s about I think 40 plus Columbia students attached to this. There’s no teacher involved. There’s no, like, administration, it’s all students. And that was, that was purposeful. I wanted to be the sole source of funding so that I knew that the story I wanted could be made without interference without someone saying, you know, “You can’t use that classroom actually. No you can’t film from this time to this time. No, you can’t use that equipment,” like all these small things, and especially like them saying, “No, you can’t make a feature.” Like my friends had said it. Teachers have said that. And I said why not?
IR: What about film, specifically as a medium, allowed you to tell the story in a unique way?
TS: I’m so glad you asked. One aspect is the relationship between the brother and sister at the heart of this film. I wanted to tell that from the perspective of the past, because I wanted to have an emotional image for the audience to look back on to see—this is where the main character, the boy, this is where he was, this is the incredible relationship he had. And all these years later, this is what happens when he loses that. And, I believe film is so special, because not only is it able to take the theatrical qualities of theater, where you’re able to present the world in a way in which you can show people dancing and singing and music can surround them and you have these vibrant sets.
Film takes that and then allows you to sculpt time. It allows you to jump between time and space to show exactly what you want to be shown. So that I can focus on things that you can’t focus on through theater—on close ups of eyes, on wide shots of vast landscapes. Like you just can’t do that in theater. Film is this beautiful tool in which you get to combine all of the different artistic forms of art into one beautiful thing. Wagner called his opera, total works of art, because it was like combining all the different art forms of his time. I think film is now our total work of art. And that’s why I love making movies so much.
TF: I totally agree with you about everything you just said. But why have them sing, Trevor?
TS: Well, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you why. I love how in film, and how in musicals, you speak until the emotion grows too strong, and then you start singing, and then when that emotion grows even stronger, you start dancing. That was it for me. I wanted to have—like the thing I loved about Cyrano was how, like, you could so clearly tell like he’s talking, talking, and then—boom, something shifts and he’s singing. When I was writing—when I was writing the screenplay, I put those moments in specifically, I didn’t just say like, “Oh, let’s talk for a little bit and then the song starts.” I needed the scene to build and build and build until the emotion got to that point. It needs to either be a cathartic release of emotion, or it needs to be something to show us what the character is thinking and a crucial moment of decision. Yeah, that’s why I love musicals so much.
IR: That’s amazing. And what was the difference for you in trying to score something like theater versus a movie? How did you approach it differently?
TF: In a sense, I sort of orchestrated this also, I played—wait I don’t wanna something that’s not true—I think I played every instrument so far on the recording. We’re gonna have strings also but I recorded the piano and the drums, the bass and the guitar, and like a whole bunch of MIDI stuff. *pause* I don’t know? When you try and get your head into the space of like,” What is this show trying to convey?” I think a really funny difference would be like, VALENTINESXO. So, I composed that which I also lyricized, so there’s, there’s elements that I do differently there. Like, that’s just a completely goofball, one hour show that people want to come to and have a nice time. So I basically just wrote a bunch of dirty sex jokes for an hour, and had a lot of fun with it, because that was what we were trying to achieve with that format.
For something like this it’s like, you just read the script over and over and I’m like, “Okay, I think I understand what he’s doing.” Like, a lot of musicals now I feel like are so over the idea of musicals that they become postmodern and ironic. And this was the exact opposite of that. Like, when I read the script, I was like, what Trevor is going for is absolute sincerity and sadness. So like, getting into how you accomplish that, musically is like having minor chords or making it slower. But trying to understand exactly what the theme of the show is, and conveying that in music was a lot of fun in a very different way than other shows like VALENTINESXO have been, if that makes sense.
IR: Yeah, that absolutely makes sense, and going off of that, was the approach to writing music for such a serious topic based in direct aspects of music theory, like minor chords and slowing things down? Or were there elements that you tried to juxtapose or to subvert?
TS: She just hit you with juxtapose.
TF: Juxtapose. Sorry, can you repeat the question? Juxtapose what?
IR: When you were writing the score for this movie, was there a direct and intentional choice to go with musical conventions like using minor chords? Or did you want to subvert that to complicate the feel of a serious topic?
TF: No, I don’t think I subverted anything, and like, we all sit around in music theory class arguing about the merits of taking classes on music at all. Like, why don’t we just go based on our gut all the time—people have really strong feelings about that, and I do kind of think it’s a mix of both, like, there are certain things that work in music, and we understand why they work. And then there’s certain things you play, and you’re like, “Ooh, that feels kind of sad, right there. I’m not sure I can explain why.” But a little bit of both, but no, I wasn’t trying to subvert anything like that. I was really making a conscious effort to try and match the emotions and tones and themes of the story in a really on-the-nose way because it felt like a really sincere show that should not have ironic juxtapositions like that.
IR: Was that nostalgia present in the style of music you were writing? Or how did you guys try to convey that nostalgia?
TS: I can tell from my point of view, I did it in multiple ways. I cast my younger brother and filmed at my house in New Hampshire. I cast my younger brother as the younger version of the main character, filmed in my house, for the flashback scenes. I spent a weekend there with just the cinematographer and the lead actress. And it was special for me because it felt like I was putting my own life onto camera in a way, and that was how I was able to get my sense of nostalgia into it. I felt like I was able to. Because I know my house and I know that place I know my brother so well. I felt like I was able to really just sit there in the moment and say, “How can I make this look as if it looked when I was four years old and looking at this place”. And that’s kind of what I did, I kind of said, “Well, I was a bit shorter at this point, I want to get lower camera angles. I remember always being focused on the beauty of the leaves up here. So I’m going to make sure we always have a good angle of the leaves,” and I constantly was just trying to have the camera stand in for my youth, and my nostalgic view of my own house and my little brother and all that.
IR: That’s lovely. Was there a sonic aspect to that, like how to convey nostalgia through sound?
TF: So, actually, I just had to write a paper for music class as a reaction to an article written by my professor about nostalgia in music. So, funny question. I think that the best way that I, or in people in general, can do that in music is by writing really clearly defined themes, either for characters or for emotional moments that happen, and then having those themes recur. So just repetition. The second time you hear it you’re like, “Well, that sounds kind of familiar,” then by the third or fourth time you get to the very end of the show, and you keep hearing the themes over and over again, it becomes kind of like an hour and a half moment of nostalgia for you a little bit.
So that’s how I tried to convey it is by making sure that the prominent characters had their own themes, and that there are certain themes that happened when really important, you know, when really important things happen, certain themes happen. And there’s a lot of repetition, especially when you get to the end of the show, you start overlapping certain themes on top of each other. So you get kind of triple levels of emotion. But that’s how I connected nostalgia with music.
TS: Yeah, and we didn’t just do that with the music. I think that use of like repeated themes, comes through a lot in the costume design as well. One thing I love that Wes Anderson does and I kind of co-opted is something called character uniforms. The characters wear something the entire time. So they might change for, like, a specific event. The main character wears a suit at the end. But for the most part, he’s wearing a purple flannel, with khaki pants. And I never wanted to change that and all the characters have their own very specific costumes. Almost subconsciously that allows us to understand the character, and allows us to feel as if we’re part of the characters world, because this is how we identify them. Furthermore, because this is a musical in which we are having characters appear both as themselves but then also as versions of the main characters’ imagination on stage, I had to make sure that we had costumes that were recognizable to the audience. I needed the character playing Eric’s father to have the same cane that we use in flashback scenes, and then a later scene later on, to make sure that the audience could clearly see, okay, I can understand not only through what they’re telling me, but visually, that this is the dad.
IR: Going further into the visuals of the film, we’ve talked a lot about the story and narrative elements and the sound, but how did you approach the stylistic aspect of the visuals? I mean, I know that you worked with a cinematographer, but—
TS: I’m so glad you asked. So the cinematographer is a very close friend of mine called Skyler Calkins, very talented. She and I, pretty early on into this process of me even writing this, we were in the same class, just a random film class. She saw me write this she’s like, “Oh, what is that,” and we started talking about it. Then we pretty quickly came to realize that we have a lot of the same visual aesthetic tastes. Specifically, symmetrical shots in film are beautiful to me. That’s why I love Wes Anderson so much—also smooth camera work, work that has camera movements that’s not just like, like swirling around, but specifically like flat camera movements, stuff that makes it almost feel as if you were looking at a dollhouse of a work.
I also am very inspired by Spielberg because what Spielberg does is that, instead of cutting to a close up, he’ll just move into one. I love that; I love the idea of the camera as an unblinking eye. Of course you do need to cut like I am not the kind of filmmaker to be like, “Let’s get this entire thing in one take.” Like that was impossible for us for a lot of scenes. Some scenes we do that, because I like that and it is fun, but not all the time. And sometimes it doesn’t work out. We actually filmed a five-and-a-half-minute one-take that we didn’t end up using because it was really technically impressive but it gave story information that we got in a more subtle way later on, which is more powerful. I didn’t want to just give it to the audience I want to leave them breadcrumbs.
TF: What was the longest take that made it in the movie?
TS: I want to say just over three minutes, which is still pretty great but the five-and-a-half-minute one was really fun to do. We had a stabilizer because I hate shaky cam. I loathe shaky cam. In some movies it’s cool, but not mine. And I love just getting to see these moments where characters and the cameras seem to be interacting as one. The camera only moves when a character moves on their step. Like I remember there was a couple of times where I could have shot like 15 times because even though the acting was perfect, the camera wasn’t moving on the step. And I hated that. And the actors were mad at me, but like, that’s part of it. There were a fair share of times that I ran into, like, actors being like, “Why are we doing this again? I thought we had it.” And it’s one of those things I had to explain, “It’s not what you did wrong. We’re just not getting it.” And part of it was because a lot of these actors are based in theater, and they’re not used to being like, “What do you mean? Like, we got the acting like, what else is there?” And I have to say, like, the camera is another character in my films, like the camera has to have as much choreography and blocking as the actors or else it’s gonna feel like we’re just looking in on something else. On someone else’s film, not mine.
IR: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Even though that five-and-a-half-minute take didn’t make it into the film, do you think it informed the rest of the process?
TS: For sure. It was the first day of shooting, actually. It taught us how to better use our focus, the camera focus that is, and our actual focus. It helped the main characters kind of start to get to know each other better, both in the terms of like the actors, and also just like how they interact as characters. It was an exciting experience to be on set for the first time. And it was kind of like our test run, so to speak. I view it as our test, like, we didn’t use it, but it was damn helpful.
At this point, Foley read a quote from one of the actors, Vincent Snyder, who worked on the film, and has also worked with Siegel on his past projects:
“It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to work alongside Trevor for the past three years. It’s rare to see a student director with as much passion, drive, and dedication as he has. Explaining Elizabeth is obviously his most recent yet ambitious film, and he approached it with unwavering patience and encouragement. Having worked on his most recent three films, I have been able to see how Trevor isn’t only passionate about storytelling, but the community that is formed around it. With each film, I’ve had the pleasure to watch him grow as an artist and create on set environments where friendship thrives.”
TS: I wanted to have that in there, not just for the reason you think. *laughing* Yes, sure, I’m amazing, but really, I don’t understand how some directors, famously like Stanley Kubrick, treat their actors like absolute garbage. In his mind, he’s trying to get them in the right mindset. But for me, it’s all about like—it has to be a community. You’re a family no matter what you do. And you don’t want to be doing stuff with your family if you’re angry at them. So there were times where I would constantly push them like we had 12 hour days sometimes. But I kept on saying, like, “Look, I know you’re tired and don’t want to be here, but here’s why we need to be here.” And I kept on trying to give them like, clear reasons for why I was doing stuff to them. There were a couple days where I acted a bit distant from an actor or two, but that was because they were about to do an emotional scene in which they had to feel distant. So I was like all the actors were gonna be sitting here and chilling, I want you to go out and just sit in the hallway. And that’s why I felt like I had to—how they felt about me impacted how they were performing for the camera. Because these characters needed to feel so connected, I wanted to make sure that we all felt connected, which meant doing movie screenings pretty frequently, just of like my favorite films and films that inspired this film.
IR: Greta Gerwig style.
TS: Oh, yeah. I would also dress in the same things people were wearing on set. Greta Gerwig style. I love Greta Gerwig. Overall, I just wanted to make sure that my passion for film wasn’t diminutized by my obsession with film, because there is a difference. My obsession with film comes in my filmmaking where I’m like, “You didn’t move on the foot, like, I need you to move exactly when this actor moves, or you need to move an inch to the right, because you’re not perfectly symmetrical stuff like that,” or stuff like even, “I need you to close your mouth because it’s giving you more emotion.”
And sometimes they’re really frustrated about that. But when they saw it, they’re like, “I see. I get it.” And I think I slowly but surely was able to gain the trust of actors, and then got to a point where they were like, “We’re tired, kind of hate this, but like, we trust you.” And that’s a lot of pressure for me to have to have that kind of trust of people, to carry people, these actors. And I think that’s why I also wanted to be a community because I want these guys to know that, “Yes, I’m being hard. But I’ve got your back and I care about you. And there’s a reason why I’m doing it.”
Explaining Elizabeth will have an exclusive advanced screening this Sunday which Bwog will be attending and reviewing. The film will be submitted to several film festivals this summer.
Image via Trevor Siegel.
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