Write Personal
Another axiom that shapes an Amy Seimetz film: Write as personally as possible. She picked it up from experimental filmmaker James Benning, who appears at the end of She Dies Tomorrow. “I remember him telling me a long time ago that the personal is universal,” she says. “The closer you can get to your own personal truth, even if that’s super ugly, the more universal it will be.”
This advice proved especially important when she started developing She Dies Tomorrow, a film that is in some ways even more personal than her previous one. Seimetz used her own name for the protagonist and surreptitiously worked her birthday into the script.
“This could be really scary, to make it as personal as possible,” says Seimetz. “But once I embraced that her name’s Amy and fuck it, nobody’s ever going to know unless I’m doing these interviews and telling everyone that it’s dealing directly with my own existential anxiety…it just became fun and everything became easier.”
To keep the story personal, Seimetz’s new home served as a primary filming location. “Everything you see in my house, which is the beginning of the movie, is my house, and the way Kate’s behaving is my relationship to being a new homeowner,” she explained.
Working with friends added to the intimate feel of the set. Seimetz wrote most of the roles in She Dies Tomorrow for specific actors she knows personally. That contributed to what she calls “the meta-ness of the whole experience. It just felt like the film was a cohesion of complete family and support.”
“Because they’re my friends, it makes directing very easy,” she says. “They know my personality, my dark sense of humor. They know where I want to push it.”
Seimetz also tends to cast independent film directors who are used to wearing as many hats as she is. Most of the principal and supporting cast of She Dies Tomorrow, including Benning and Adam Wingard, have a number of directorial credits. Harmony Korine appeared in The Girlfriend Experience, the show Seimetz co-created for Starz in 2016.
She says the preference stems from her own approach to acting, which developed when she first started out and wasn’t particularly interested in pursuing it. At first, Seimetz viewed herself as less of an actor and more of a person who happened to act in her friends’ films. “I always approached acting as a filmmaker, as in, ‘What do you need me to do to get the movie made?’”
Though Seimetz eventually changed her mind about acting, her pragmatic approach stuck. “As an actor, I’m good because I’m a director,” she explained. “I find it’s really helpful if there’s a lot of space as opposed to responding immediately. I’ll pay attention to what lens they’re using. If it’s my close up, I do it in a different cadence, because I know it will be helpful for them in the edit.”
In turn, Seimetz is a good director because she is an actor.
“I won’t ever write words down on a page that I think will be difficult for an actor to say out loud, right? Even on set when I’m directing them, if I can see they’re having trouble delivering lines, I realize it’s a problem in the writing.”
Working on independent films with groups of actors “who understand the technical parts of film acting” is best suited to Seimetz’s directorial style. “I have a very specific way of doing things that works for me,” she explains. “And when I say specific, it means I just allow it to change every second. I know the edit, but if something’s more interesting in front of me, I shoot that.”
That happened while she shot the ending of She Dies Tomorrow. Based on a suggestion from one of her actors, Seimetz quickly rewrote the scene and moved the set to a friend’s swimming pool. The surreal and darkly funny sequence they ended up shooting worked much better than the one she had originally planned, she says. “I think the more confident I get as a filmmaker, the more experimental I get.”
With every project, regardless of its size or her level of involvement, Seimetz learns something that shapes her approach to filmmaking. In the early years of her career, this meant learning “how to get something made for no money.” That was the most inspiring takeaway from “all the filmmakers that were making, for lack of a better term, mumblecore,” she says, referring to the school of low-budget, dialogue-driven moviemaking that spawned Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, among others.
Kate Lyn Sheil on the set of She Dies Tomorrow, directed by Amy Seimetz
Though she’s grown more confident in her style, “I’m still developing my voice, I mean, it’s an ever-changing thing,” she explained. “Anything I go on to, I learned something, whether it’s how to communicate to actors — or I love watching how they’re going to edit the scene together.”
Be a Spy
Acting in larger-scale productions over the past few years has benefited Seimetz by allowing her to “be a spy.” “It’s great to be able to go on and secretly be spying on the whole process of other people’s sets to know what to avoid, but also know how to bring something positive to my own,” she explains.
With each new set she visits, “filmmaking loses its mystique in a good way, in a way that it’s not elusive anymore,” she says. “Whether that’s Stranger Things or Alien or this James Comey miniseries I just shot in Toronto, I’m still constantly learning how to run larger sets, but it also takes the intimidation out of it, in a way.”
In particular, Seimetz says the experience of working on Alien: Covenant (2017) blew her mind. “It opened up this whole horizon of this massive crew. Learning from the best, Ridley Scott, who can wield those machines like no other, really opened up my brain to think about how to make things, how to use the machine as opposed to rejecting it,” she says.
Would she ever consider directing a studio pic? “I definitely want to be a little more secure as a name so that I don’t have to fight with the studios,” says Seimetz. “I mean, it’s cool to watch Ridley Scott run around and be really punk rock with $150 million, but he’s Ridley Scott, you know?”
Still, even if Seimetz ended up working with a big studio, she would “still have the itch to go off and make independent films because you just relate to it differently,” she says. “Anyone that’s ever made an independent film, there’s nothing that really can quite replace that intimacy that you get from making the film.”
Problem Solving
The COVID-19 closures and quarantine have given her time to reflect on the changing landscape of independent film. (“Honestly, in quarantine, time doesn’t exist to me,” she says.) She was sorry that She Dies Tomorrow couldn’t premiere at the SXSW Film Festival.
“Not having the independent film screen with an audience and all that was really sad,” she says. “I’m just fortunate that I finished the film a week before South By and then the quarantine happened.”
From the beginning, Seimetz says she saw the virus lasting for “a very long time.” Ever the problem-solver, Seimetz wasted no time putting her film on the market. “With this movie in particular, there was nothing traditional about how we sold the movie at all,” Seimetz says. “Because the festival didn’t happen, I just went ahead and sent the screener out.”
On March 25, NEON bought the worldwide rights to She Dies Tomorrow. Instead of feeling disheartened by the film’s delayed theatrical release, Seimetz is eager to see what will happen.
“We’re coming up with these new ways to have a ‘screening,’ but I’m just excited to see how it looks when you just drop it on all the digital platforms,” she says. “I can’t wait for theaters to open in a safe way, because I love going to the movies, but it doesn’t make me upset. I get excited about the idea that you can make these small films and engage with people.”
As the world waits to return to normal, whatever that may look like, don’t be surprised if Amy Seimetz emerges from quarantine with her next big idea or two, or a whole new film. That seems to be her way.
“I have a hard time sitting still and waiting for things to happen,” she says.
She Dies Tomorrow, directed by Amy Seimetz, opens in select drive-ins Friday and is available on VOD on August 7, 2020, from NEON.
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