We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Haley Wetherington. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Haley below.

Alright, Haley thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Getting to work with Jessica Lea Mayfield was such a dream. I’ve loved her music for years so my heart exploded when she agreed to let me direct a music video for her. She is incredibly kind, collaborative, and receptive to ideas. She was also just super down for a kind of weird, campy, strange, not very traditional music video. Having someone you admire believe in you puts some pep in your step.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a NYC based director and writer living in a cute, tiny, green apartment brimming with various antiques and tchotchkes that are very specifically arranged so my two cats can’t destroy them. I’m a bit of a hoarder, but in an endearing, clean, organized way that makes you want to bring me more things to add to my collection, not request that I seek any sort of professional help. Collecting things inspires me and encourages me to think about the aesthetic aspects of my filmmaking in a different way, whether that be through color, texture, reflections, narrative devices, symbols etc. Anything that I enjoy outside of filmmaking I like to bring into my filmmaking process.

I got into filmmaking in college where I went to school to be a writer. I started writing my own scripts and directing them as I was working various jobs in the film industry. I really take a lot of pride in how I got started. I’ve worked from the bottom and I know what it’s like to work a 22 hour day, not get paid for my work, screamed at by a coked out DP in a hotel elevator, work for people who have no idea what they’re doing, and I think all of my experiences cobble together to make me into a director who knows how to get what she wants without making other people feel bad about themselves. I don’t understand people in this industry who have an attitude. We all just want to have a good day on set making stuff. Don’t make people around you feel terrible. If you have to be a jerk to get what you want, then you might not be that good at your job.

I’m happy to have a strong sense of self in the film industry. I know who I am, what I want to make, who I want to work with, and I’m finally comfortable being myself. I used to get pretty self conscious about the sorts of things that I wanted to make, but I woke up one day and realized that if we all do things the way other people do things we will never get anywhere new. If you’re always following the same recipe, then you get the same result. Even if I do things differently and fail, maybe someone else sees a shimmer of hope in that failure, takes it, and tries something and it grows into something useful for someone else. I get bored seeing the same things over and over again, so it annoys me when someone tells me that I’m not doing things how they’re traditionally done.

I have a delightfully deranged process that is wholly my own and allows me to create works that are beautiful and strange in all of their details and complexities. If you’ve seen my work, you know I have a pretty specific sense of humor that lingers throughout any one of my characters’ morals, overall tone, and general world. I don’t agree with telling an audience what to think or how to feel about something, so I just want to create worlds full of questions that hopefully lead an audience down a road of more questions. My work also emphasizes a physical relationship between the camera and performer. I don’t like a lot of cuts — many of my projects are one long take — so I’m relying on camera, performer, and lighting cues to signal transitory moments in my work rather than relying on cuts. I like my style. It’s not for everyone, but it is for me.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I’m currently developing my first feature film and we’re really trying to work through the financing aspects of the development process. It’s difficult to get people who don’t know you to believe in you, so I’m incredibly endeared whenever someone who doesn’t know me loves my script and is invested in the project in any way.

The more people who come aboard to help, the more possible making a movie feels. We just attached a production designer and I chatted with a costume designer the other day. My director of photography and I regularly work through how we want to shoot certain scenes so when the time comes, we’re ready. We know how we want everything to look and we’re already incredibly prepared. I don’t know what I would do without him. When other people get involved it really starts to create more meaning around the process for me. It’s not just my project anymore, other people are putting their efforts, talents, time and resources into this. Every project is more than me, it’s a giant collaborative effort and everyone who loves me and loves the project gives me the oomph to push through any doubts.

But let me tell you… filmmaking is mostly lows, a lot of lows. The high moments fueled by external validation are fantastic and you feel competent and talented, but those moments are few and far between. You have to maintain your own hearth, you can’t rely on others to fuel that fire. You really have to buckle up and take criticism and doubt at every turn. Critiques aren’t inherently bad and people having a negative reaction to what you do is good — it took me a while to realize that. I’d rather people feel strongly one way or another about what I do rather than feel neutral. I’m not for everyone and I don’t want to be for everyone. I think when you start trying to make something appeal to everyone you will begin to whittle yourself down to nothing. If you’re saying everything you’re actually saying nothing, so I’m not in the business of bending a hundred different ways to please everyone who looks in my direction. I think when I finally came to terms with that, I found a lot of joy in this whole process.

This is all to say, I’m still trying to figure out how to fully fund a feature film, but I have a lot of hope. I’m not wavering. I firmly believe you can hold on tight to something that is honest to who you are and win in the end. It’s worth being stubborn about something that is important to you, stubborn is good.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I always want to be making things — music videos, narratives, little fashion pieces, I wrote a little novel that I’d like to publish (I know, I know. The words “I wrote a novel” are permanently echoing through every lower east side coffee shop).

All of my collaborators are also my dear friends, so whenever we’re on set together there’s so much love and camaraderie. We’re all just so stoked to get to do the thing we love most together. It’s wholesome, sweet, and fills me with an overwhelming sense of peace. I learn so much throughout every step of every project. Each moment on set makes me a better director. It’s a challenge and I love presenting my brain with interesting puzzles to solve. I’m very active and I don’t like to sit still for too long, which, the more I think about it, you’ll see that reflected in my filmmaking style… there’s a lot of movement. I want to keep moving and building and pushing forward to the next thing. There are so many new things to try, new ways to think about things that I haven’t even thought about yet. Our world is vast and there’s a lot of exploring to do.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.haleywetherington.com/directing
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bad_girls_tchotchkes/
• Twitter: @haleys_vomit

Image Credits
Adam Kolodny (Director of Photography), Landon Kovalick (Director of Photography), Emma Penrose (Director of Photography), Katie Quinlisk (Production Designer), Kelly Dempsey (Production Designer), Lindsey Gardner (Producer), Greg Rutkin (Producer), Jessica Lea Mayfield (Musician), Jymmy Kafka (Musician), Joe Taylor Sutkowski (Musician), Emily Erdelyan (Designer)