When I was a young filmmaker, I sat in a classroom while a poor excuse for a film producer talked to us about making films. At one point, when asked about how to get started in feature filmmaking, he pulled out his phone. He talked about how we all have one of these in our pockets, and how we “just have to get started.” These days, I watch a lot of Q&As on Blu-ray special features and I’ve helped facilitate some myself. This go-to piece of advice is everywhere, and it’s everywhere because it’s lazy. It’s not a real answer. How do you get started in the movies? Either someone bets on you, or you bet on yourself. That’s the real answer. This is the first installment of Blockbuster Bets, an Elements of Madness column exploring one of the biggest stories of 2024 — the people who are betting on themselves.
L-R: Odessa A’zion as Connie, Jennifer Esposito as Francine, Annabella Sciorra as Christine, and Emily Bader as Rose in FRESH KILLS. Photo courtesy of Fresh Kills Production/Quiver Distribution.
This is a business where taking “no” for an answer can be a death sentence. It’s an answer you’ll hear a lot, but there are more “no”s going around these days in Hollywood than usual. With personal greed at an all-time high in the C-suite, profit models wrecked by the idiotic land rush over streaming services, and a return to cultural conservatism in all halls of power in the United States, even historically powerful white men auteurs like Kevin Costner (Dances with Wolves; Open Range) and Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather; Bram Stoker’s Dracula) have been told “no.” So, they’ve bet on themselves and placed headline-grabbing amounts of money on the table and funded their own form-pushing films: Horizon: An American Saga — Part 1 (2024) and Megalopolis (2024). Headlines, however, aren’t the full story. If men as powerful as these are missing opportunities, who else is? The destruction of the mid-budget studio film by Disney’s hostile takeover of the multiplex’s screen allocations and Warner Bros. Discovery’s incurable case of being bad at its job have resulted in the loss of the new director pipeline. There are fewer of new directors because we’re paying fewer of them to stay in the profession.
L-R: Odessa A’zion as Connie and Emily Bader as Rose in FRESH KILLS. Photo courtesy of Fresh Kills Production/Quiver Distribution.
In the ‘90s and again in the early ‘00s, there was a wave of low-budget indie films driven by access to gear and an influx of cash from the home video market. Today, there’s an under-discussed wave of something-turned-directors making their first films. This wave is driven not by an influx of cash, but by a lack of it. They are actors trying to create the vehicles that used to be available to them like Meg Ryan’s (When Harry Met Sally; You’ve Got Mail) What Happens Later (2023), or increasingly often, they are aspiring directors who took on other production roles when they found the ladder to directing pulled up and away. These artists are also mortgaging houses and saving money to bet that their artistic vision will succeed, and they should be discussed in the same breath as Costner and Coppola. They are symptoms of the same phenomenon, but if a starting director makes a bad bet, they’re less likely to bounce back. To kick us off, we’ll be examining Jennifer Esposito (Bluebloods; Crash)’s directorial debut Fresh Kills (2024).
Previously given a hearty recommendation by EoM Founder/Head Writer Douglas Davidson, Fresh Kills is a deconstruction of the gangster film from the point of view of the women in the gangster’s life. In fact, Domenick Lombardozzi (The Irishman; The King of Staten Island) is barely in the film at all as tough Long Island mob boss Joe Larusso. Instead, Emily Bader (My Lady Jane; People We Meet on Vacation) anchors the film as Rose, his youngest daughter, who navigates her rocky relationships with her sister Connie, played by scene-stealing Odessa A’zion (Am I Ok?; Hellraiser) and mother Francine, played by Esposito. It’s a fucked-up coming-of-age story, and a brilliant first film from Esposito. If this was the first film of a 29-year-old dude from Queens, no one would shut up about it. Instead, we’ve decided to recommend it twice, because not enough of you rented it the first time around. Let’s talk about why it was made, and what success looks like for a film like this.
L-R: Emily Bader as Rose and Jennifer Esposito as Francine in FRESH KILLS. Photo courtesy of Fresh Kills Production/Quiver Distribution.
“You get to a certain point in your life and you gotta accept that things aren’t really gonna work out the way you dreamt they were.”
When a burgeoning artist writes their own film with intent to direct, these films are often lean into the hyper-personal so that they have to be directed by the artist. Since financial investors, grant-giving review boards, producers, and studios often use a “lack of directorial experience” to gatekeep the role, a self-starting artist who still answers to a producer or financial backer can substitute an overabundance of personal lived experience to push their way through the gate. This is what the director of another 2024 film did, Didi’s Sean Wang, who (loosely) based the story on his own childhood. Esposito has done the same thing, telling a story about the women she knew growing up on Long Island. Even if the story is more dramatic than her lived childhood, it’s the remembered texture of these people and their homes that shines so brightly in her directing.
Despite all of this, Esposito reports that she was offered a significant amount of the money for the film’s budget, if she’d step aside for a male director. An astonishing idea if you’ve seen the film and felt it’s exceptional point of view, but not surprising if you’ve ever worked any job, ever. If you read the press notes for Fresh Kills, then you’d realize that Esposito was one of the girls bullied by Bader and A’zion in this film. Bader wants to be a TV talent host and tries to go to an open casting call, just as Esposito would have done as a young actress. Her heart is all over the story of this film, and, as she puts it on her live appearance on PIX11 News, she mortgaged her house and combined that with money from some small investors, and she bet on herself.
“You know Streisand was from Brooklyn?”
There’s a certain breed of director whose best film is often raised by a contrarian cinephile as their best with “Why can’t they do ____ again” being a common refrain among the most annoying people you know, myself included. This type of career is often attributed to the first-time filmmaker’s desire to “leave it all on the field,” afraid of never being given a second at-bat and finally being allowed to uncork the build-up of creative energy that has tormented them for so long. However, it can also be attributed to how many directors’ first films remain their most personal. It’s not beloved, but M. Night Shyamalan’s Praying with Anger (1992), is his only semi-autobiographical film. Eraserhead (1977) remains Lynch’s most personal work in any medium, Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) is still widely seen as his best (though I think Nope (2023) is on par), and Clerks (1994) remains the one film of Kevin Smith that everyone can agree on.
One of the most moving anecdotes in the press notes for Fresh Kills is about the mothers of the girls Esposito knew on Long Island.
“I looked around and realized that anger was also carried by most of the women around me and for the exact same reasons. Their true voice had to be silenced along with most of their dreams. The road in front of them was not wide open, there were unspoken rules that seemed to apply to females only.”
Is it any wonder that an actress-turned-director could excel at crafting a story about women who felt like that? Esposito has been in the news this year for discussing an incident 25 years ago where a producer tried to end her career for not playing ball with him on set, telling people around Hollywood that she was a drug addict, costing her roles she’d already booked, her management at the time, and the career path she was going down at the time. Instead of becoming a blockbuster leading lady, Esposito eventually made her way to television and into more supporting film roles. Like so many of the Long Island women she’s written about here, her dreams were changed by the will of a man and people around him. Now, she says, she’s making the film for the girl she was. I’d argue, she’s also making one for the artist she’s always been.
Emily Bader as Rose in FRESH KILLS. Photo courtesy of Fresh Kills Production/Quiver Distribution.
Fresh Kills is a tight thriller and a great first film. It makes the most out of its small budget, employing a cool blue color palette to great effect as you feel the life drained from Bader’s pale skin when standing next to more conforming women. As with life goes the light. Props belong also to cinematographer Ben Hardwicke (You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah; Summer ‘03) for employing the strengths of digital photography so well. Maybe most impressive is Esposito’s daring choice to place so much of the running time on young actors and getting them to deliver. Anastasia Veronica Lee (As They Made Us; Lisey’s Story) and Taylor Madeline Hand (Summer Camp; No Rest for the Weekend) deliver two of the best child performance of the year as the younger versions of the leads for much longer than you would assume when we first flash back to them. They are essentially co-leads of the film with Bader and A’zion. As an actor-turned-director, it’s natural to think that Esposito would be at an advantage in drawing water from this well, but when you consider how, as producer and the main stakeholder of the film, Esposito managed to make the scheduling of two important time-limited performers fit within the budget, you see that it’s a very daring feat of directing and production management. There are many directors whose first film is their best, but as good as this one is, I’m not worried about Esposito peaking with Fresh Kills, you can bet on that. She certainly is.
Tune in next week where Blockbuster Bets will be discussing Horizon: An American Saga — Part 1 and what it means when a late-stage auteur has to bet the home in order to push the business forward by going back to the past.
Fresh Kills is now streaming on VOD, get on it.
In theaters June 14th, 2024.
Available on VOD and digital July 23rd, 2024.
For more information, head either to the official Fresh Kills website or Quiver Distribution webpage.
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Categories: Films To Watch, Recommendation
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