We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Vivian Kerr a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Vivian, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

One of the most meaningful projects I’ve ever worked on is my first feature film SCRAP. It’s currently doing film festivals and I started working on it in 2016, so it took me six years to get it made! There were so many roadblocks, moments where it seemed impossible to continue on, so to be here now doing film festivals with it, is hugely meaningful to me.

I’ll never forget one day during shooting we found out that there was a cast member who had tested positive for COVID. We shot it in 2021 so it was still in the peak of COVID and everyone was masked on set. That day it felt like the shoot was going to be derailed completely, because we had significant scenes left with this person to shoot, and I remember going home and sitting on my couch in despair, and then looking at the schedule and shotlist and really thinking through it all. What could be cut? What could be rearranged in the limited days we had left? It was like a puzzle and when I figured out how we were going to shoot around that character and make our days, it felt like a huge win.

I’m so proud of the hard work the cast and crew put into it. It’s exactly the film I’d hoped to make for so long, so to see it resonate with audiences now. I was just at the Mystic Film Festival in Connecticut and our Q&A, which are normally only 10-15 min, went for almost an hour with several audience members telling me some really personal stories about dealing with homelessness in their own lives, or dealing with single parenthood. It’s incredibly moving to see your work has affected people in a way that feels authentic.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a Los Angeles based actor, writer, producer, and director. I’ve been a professional actor for over 15 years and then started expanding into writing and directing slowly over the past decade. I’m most proud of making the leap into feature film directing. I’d directed plays in college and always loved working with actors, and then in my 20s I was directing small things — short films, scenes for friends, a web series, etc. Just really small stuff, mostly to fill my time in between acting work. But I’d always been hungry to direct a feature. It just seemed impossible to me — how I would raise the money, how I would find people I could trust to collaborate with, how I’d piece it all together. The first day of SCRAP I remember being a little nervous if I could pull off acting, producing, and directing all at the same time, and then by the end of the first week of shooting I felt like a lightbulb had clicked on, “oh, this is what I’m supposed to be doing! I am going to do this forever and I’m actually really good at this!” The fear went away immediately and I loved every minute of it.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wasn’t great at networking. I always felt like the weirdo in the corner at parties, but once I realized how exciting it is to meet other talented filmmakers, I got over myself. Now it’s one of my favorite things — going to a film festival and seeing all the interesting work being done and then getting to discuss it with the directors and cinematographers who created it. So I almost wish I had gone to more film festivals even when I didn’t have a film in the festival.

And I also wish I had just been a little bolder about reaching out to DPs and Editors whose work I admired. Now I have no problem finding someone’s email and saying, “Hey, I saw your work and I really liked it, can we have coffee?” But definitely I never did that ten years ago, and I should have!

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Writing and directing a film is so personal, so it’s hard to see things from the crew’s perspective sometimes. To some crew, your film is just a gig, and that doesn’t mean they don’t work incredibly hard for long, long hours to realize your vision, but it does mean that they won’t necessarily have the emotional attachment to the piece that you’ll have and that can be hard to accept when the film is your baby that you’ve already spent 2, 3, or even 4 years on before you get to Day 1 on set.

I had a trusted colleague bail on a recent project right before we began shooting, and it was really, really difficult for me emotionally. At that point the film was my entire life, so it was a big betrayal and I felt very abandoned. And there were other things happening during pre-production that made it feel like the film was really falling apart left and right, and I just knew that it was going to be entirely up to me whether the project continued to move forward or not. If I fell apart, I knew the film would fall apart. No one else really had my back. So I really do have to say I am super proud of myself. It really took super-human resilience to keep the train moving forward. I mean, seriously, reserves I didn’t even know I had! And I am so glad I did keep going, because that film ended up coming together in a really special way and I learned so much about how to be a better director, a better producer, and even a better human being from the experience. When you go through something incredibly hard like that and come out the other side, you truly realize you’re meant to do this for a living.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.viviankerr.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/viviankerr