We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tyrrell Shaffner a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Tyrrell, thanks for joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
I’m a writer, director and producer who recently directed her first feature film, “Katie’s Mom” (FMA “The Dropout”). People often ask me how I made the leap from directing short films to making a feature, and while my circumstances are specific to me, I can distill my journey down to three simple words: bet on yourself.
I had been making short content for 15 years for various production companies as a producer and a director, and I had grown restless making content for other people.
In 2015, I met Meryl Branch-McTiernan at a production company at the water cooler. She was a writer there who was always dropping funny quips. She wanted to write a script based on a true story about a scandalous ex-boyfriend, who had slept with his girlfriend’s mother during college. She framed it as a modern take on the classic film “The Graduate.” Having had many dubious ex-boyfriends myself, I could relate. It was a simple story that would be easy to produce and something I was excited to direct. I was in!
We started writing the script together on evenings and weekends. Little did we know at the time that this would be an 8-year plus journey that would take us through countless page-one rewrites, a lot of workshopping and a few fights. In other words, the beginnings of a beautiful partnership.
The script development took 5 years while we simultaneously worked other jobs and each went to graduate school on separate coasts. Many friends would question why we kept grinding on something that we weren’t getting paid for. But we believed we had something special, and it felt different putting in the work for ourselves.
In 2019 and 2020, our script placed as a quarterfinalist in the Academy’s Nicholl Screenplay Competition—placing in the top five percent of 15,000 scripts. This achievement gave us confidence that the script was special, but now we needed something very hard to find. Money.
We tried pitching the project during the Sundance Film Festival and to production companies I had met through my membership with the Producer’s Guild of America. While we got some interest, we always heard the same thing. We needed cast or cash to be taken seriously.
This chicken-and-the-egg problem is well known by every indie filmmaker trying to raise funds. How do you get actors without the money? Or conversely, financing without names?
I was in grad school with access to capital for my education. After some serious conversations with myself, I decided to take out a loan for my education and put it towards the film. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done and I wouldn’t recommend it. However, that chunk of money was our first piece of the financial puzzle.
With some seed money in hand, our conversations with producers improved but we didn’t have any real bites. A friend of mine from a directing collective I belong to in Los Angeles, called the Sandbox, told me about an exciting new fundraising platform. Wefunder allowed filmmakers to raise money by giving investors a piece of the profits, unlike say, a donation to Kickstarter. My friend went on to successfully raise over $100k for her feature on the platform.
Inspired by this success, Meryl and I launched our crowd equity campaign on Wefunder in the Spring of 2021. The campaign was a huge success, raising $180,000 from over 100 investors. We also attracted an angel investor who put in the remainder of our production budget. This all happened within a few months! It was incredible to watch the film gain its own momentum after toiling on it for 5 years.
As we began to prep for production, like a snowball rolling down a hill, the film gained some amazing collaborators, including Cinematographer Aakash Raj, Assistant Director Heather Mingo and Editor Daniel Martens. Then we nabbed veteran actress Dina Meyer in the titular role. We shot film in the summer of 2022 in Los Angeles.
“Katie’s Mom” premiered at Dances with Films in Los Angeles in July 2023, where the film won the Audience Award for Best Fusion feature. Walking on stage to applause at the historic TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood with Meryl, Dina and the other amazing co-leads, actors Aaron Dominguez and Juila Tolchin, was a beautiful full circle moment.
Without betting on ourselves as writers and producers, Meryl and I would’ve never arrived at this stage, both literally and figuratively. And it’s hard to know if we would’ve successfully fundraised if I hadn’t taken out that initial loan. But by and large, taking those leaps of faith led to one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
After working as producer in new media for 15 years, I decided to focus on writing and directing. I went back to graduate school to study screenwriting at UCLA, and my feature “Katie’s Mom” represents the fruits of that labor.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Having an audience laugh, gasp and or talk back to the screen during a screening of one of my films. You can catch “Katie’s Mom” next at Dances With Films in New York on December 2nd for our East Coast premiere. Buy tickets at https://danceswithfilms.com/
Contact Info:
- Website: www.katiesmom.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tyrrell323/
- Other: directing website: www.tyrrell323.com
Image Credits
Behind the scenes photos from “Katie’s Mom” courtesy of Mandy Shannon. Stills from “Katie’s Mom” courtesy of Ex Files Productions. Photo from “Katie’s Mom” premiere courtesy of Tim de la Motte.