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| The Rebrand Photo: True Sweetheart Films |
As a critic, one gets to know the work of particular filmmakers over time, and one of the great delights of the job is watching their skills grow. Not everybody makes it, however, so I try not to get my hopes too high in advance. This means that it’s a delight when something turns out to be as much of a pleasure as The Rebrand, a lively lesbian horror comedy directed by Kaye Adelaide (of Don’t Text Back and Monster Dyke fame), produced by her partner Mariel Sharp, and co-written by Nancy Webb, who also stars in it. Nancy plays influencer Thistle, a troubled young woman who is trying to make a comeback after getting cancelled, along with her partner Blaire (Andi E McQueen) and with the aid of heavily pregnant videographer Nicole (Naomi Silver-Vézina). Over the course of one weekend at Thistle’s remote woodland home, tempers fray and events spiral wildly out of control.
Nancy is the first to arrive when we gather to discuss the film, so she begins by telling me a bit about its origin.
“Kaye texted me – this would have been in 2021, in the pandemic – and she said ‘I want to do a feature and I just want to do it, so will you write this with me?’ And I had no reason to say no. It sounded really fun and the concept was something I could definitely see us having a lot of fun with. So we met up and we just started taking notes and then we would trade links to influencers’ profiles with each other, to get inspiration. It just grew out of that back and forth collaboration.
“Once we had an outline and we knew that we wanted Andi as well, we left some open space for improvisation. Andi also has a comedy background and has a lot of improv training as well, so we thought it would be to our benefit to really use Andi's expertise and improv and my background in comedy. So actually most of the dialogue was left blank and then when we were shooting, we just had a lot of fun and did a lot of takes.”
There's a certain awkwardness to the dialogue that fits the film, I suggest.
“Yeah, definitely. I know it was a huge challenge to edit this film, and Kaye edited it all herself, which is incredible because we did so many takes. We had our plot mapped out but some of the improvised takes wouldn't match up.”
Mariel arrives and shares her own recollections of the project.
“Kaye and I love to go for long walks by the water and we just talk about ideas, so many things that we could do. And I think the very first seed was thinking that there really should be a lesbian Creep.” She laughs, as does Nancy. “We love that movie,” she continues. “And we were like, ‘Wow, wouldn't it be fantastic if there was such a thing?’ And then we talked about it a little bit, and then Kaye approached Nancy and it took off from there.”
It was made for just $5,000? I've made short films that have cost that much, I note, so how did they pull off a feature on that?
“When we talk about $5,000, a lot of that was just on our credit cards,” she says. “We just had to pay for things as we went along. Our goal was to make a movie essentially for free, and then, because we don't have a ton of resources, we were just like, ‘Let's try and scale it and figure out what we can do with our community and with what we have access to.’
“We live in a really beautiful area. We live in Montreal, and we thought if we filmed in the fall, that would look so beautiful, and we’d get all this production value just out of where we are in the season. We live an hour away from these beautiful mountains called the Laurentians. We thought we could just get a cottage there for a couple of nights and do the principal photography. That'd be the bulk of it, and we'd be able to leverage the beautiful surroundings and the atmosphere and especially the spooky vibes. Then the rest of it, we did at our place. I don't know if you noticed when you were watching the film.”
I thought that parts of it looked familiar, I say.
She nods. “We really did make fake rooms in our house. We wallpapered our living room to pretend that it was at the cottage. All the stuff in the basement is in the basement of our apartment here. We were really cutting and pasting. And that's not to mention the biggest contribution, which is our small but amazing crew who brought so much to the project. Our make-up artist, Jessica Cohen, is fantastic. Our DoP, Naomi, who also acts in the film and did all the lighting and sound herself, is just incredible. And our art director, Fanny, was fantastic as well. Just using whatever we had around the house to do all of the production, or things from the thrift store.”
As she’s talking, Kaye arrives.
“Honestly, it was such a small budget that I feel like one of the biggest parts of it was feeding people,” says Kaye. “You know, making sure that we had lots of snacks and nice meals and stuff, making sure everyone was not starving.”
“I made a lot of quinoa bowls,” adds Mariel. “I feel like I was just cutting avocado for a good chunk of the shoot.”
“The food was so good!” Nancy enthuses. “But it was funny because we would be having lunch at like 2am because we had to do a night shoot at the cottage. So eating a quinoa bowl at 2am with full makeup. It was an amazing experience.”
I congratulate Kaye on the buzz surrounding the film, explaining that I’ve rarely had such an excitable reaction to a review – mostly from people who have already seen the film and want to tell others how much they love it.
“I'm really excited that people are connecting with it and are entertained by it and having a good time watching it,” says Kaye. “I think, yeah, we had such a good time making it that it comes through when you watch it. You see the fun on screen – but also the misery and the toxicity and the nightmares of it. One of the main goals was to always keep it entertaining. And I think people feel that. I think a lot of indie stuff tries to make up for small budgets or other limitations by being very edgy and miserable and making people just feel really like, ‘Oh, that's horrible. I feel so bad and awful,’ and not really putting enough thought into ‘Is this entertaining to watch? Are people going to enjoy watching this or is it going to be a miserable slog? Is this a slow burn or is it just boring?’
“We were trying to not have it be a boring, slow burn. We were trying to have it be fast paced and fun and keep people engaged because we never lingered too long on anything. I was hoping that would be successful, and I'm starting to think it was. Based on the reviews we're getting and the feedback we're getting and Letterboxd, it sounds like people are having a good time, which is what we wanted the most, so that's great.”
“I think there's also something to be said about the very dark times that we're in and how important it is to laugh,” says Mariel. “It was a very long process. Kaye edited the film herself in our basement, and at some point she asked me ‘Should I have made something more hard hitting? Should I have made something more gritty?’ Even though we just talked about how we didn't want to do that, reflecting the times that we're in. And I always come back to the 1940s film Sullivan's Travels. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's essentially just about how important it is to connect with people through laughter and through entertainment. That's the very heart of what we're really trying to do with this film, which is to have fun, be in community, and then share that with other people and give everyone a bit of a break from what could be going on out there.”
A lot of the humour in the film is very much part of the LGBTQ+ community, which gives it an immediate authenticity, but it’s great that it seems to be speaking to other people as well.
“Almost everyone who made this film is queer, so that's part of our language with each other,” says Nancy. “Our sense of humour is naturally attuned to that. We just wanted the fun that we were having to be contagious and to kind of let people in on this, I don't know, this fun experience. There were times when I forgot that this was eventually going to actually be viewed by people in a theatre. When I first attended a screening, it was almost bizarre because it felt very ephemeral when we were doing it.
“Andi and I are friends, and we've known each other for years, and we love just being funny and playing off of each other. So it was just very joyful to do. And I think, as Mariel was saying, that's also a key pillar of my filmmaking practice. Everything I do is to bring joy through laughter. I do think that that is a meaningful and invaluable thing to do, and not every film has to be a miserable slog. None of mine, hopefully, will be.”
I note that there’s an increasing number of films out there about influencers, and some of them can be quite snide, and often misogynistic, because people have a certain idea of what an influencer is. This film, by contrast, makes room for them to be people.
Kaye nods. “We didn't want to so much make jokes about ‘Oh, being an influencer is stupid. It's not a real job. It's nonsense. These people are, like, you know, delusional to think that they should be doing this.’ I think it's more that we were trying to take it as a job that exists and find the comedy within that, the same way as if they had been bakers. There is some sense that you can lose yourself to the influencer lifestyle, but I think it's not implying that it's inherently some sort of gendered stupid job to be doing. It’s more that when really toxic people do any job they can and gain any notoriety, they can go mad with power.”
“I’ll just add that something that inspired Kaye and I a lot was the way that the nature of being an influencer can have a psychological effect, and it can kind of exacerbate narcissistic tendencies, or already existing power dynamics can be more profoundly highlighted when someone is always online,” says Nancy. “Also, this idea of what you're hiding and what you're showing was kind of inspiring for us when we were creating the horror elements of it, because a lot of the horror elements are the toxic relationship dynamics. So we paid very close attention to the ways that social media can be like a brain worm and get in there.”
From fairly early on in the story, it becomes apparent that Thistle is a little bit overwhelmed by being an influencer, and she's going to extremes in certain ways. I ask Nancy what that was like to engage with as an actor.
“It was so much fun!” She grins. “We almost describe Thistle as a drag performance because it's so different from my everyday lived experience, thankfully. We just got to really push it to extremes. Kaye was really helpful as a director in directing me and helping me just completely unleash and be so terrible. And we also had an intimacy coordinator that we worked with. So if I had to say really terrible things to Andi in my character of Thistle, we had strategies and exercises afterwards so that we would all be able to feel okay and release the tension. But I think it had to go there for her to be a real villain.”
Kaye and I discuss what was it like for her transitioning to this from shorts, and i ask if she felt that she was having to do things in a different way to keep it all together over a longer period of time, to make everything work.
“Yeah, definitely,” she says. “There was a lot of kind of versatility needed when it came to letting the plot and the structure be fluid because we expected to shoot at least half the movie on our first little getaway to this rental property, and in the end, we shot maybe a sixth of it there because we just didn't have the time. So then Nancy and I went into a process of rewriting to try to figure out, ‘Okay, what's going to be the new ending? What's going to be the new way that we do these locations in our house?’ That was just constantly there on that larger scale, rewriting the overall structure, but also on the scale of day to day.
“With a short film, it's more digestible. There's a limited amount of things that need to be shot. Whereas for this, it was as if there was this infinite amount that needed to be shot, and there could always be something else we could be trying to shoot. And just when were we going to have time to do it? The scale was so much more than I expected, and it sort of built up over time. I thought it would be seven times as hard as making a 10 minute film, but it's more exponential how it grows as it expands.”
Then there are scenes with drag artist Tranna Winter, which bookend it the film. Were those shot separately?
“We actually only brought Tranna in after we had our first cut completed,” says Mariel. “Initially we didn't plan to actually have the Crime Queens part. And all of that was a later addition because we felt after doing a test screening of what we had with just some intertitles that it needed a little bit more. And so we were so excited to reach out to Tranna and invite her to join the project. We filmed that in one day again, just back at our place, and then that's when the edit, I think, really started to come together. That's when we really felt like, okay, we have the final structure, we have what we need to get us into the film. And coming back to her at the end felt really right.”
So what’s happening with the film now?
“Right now we have a handful more festivals we’ve been accepted to and a bunch more we're waiting to hear back from,” says Kaye. “So it's just doing its little festival tour. We are definitely going to be seeking distribution once it feels like it's gained some more festival and press momentum, and hopefully we’ll be able to get it out to a streaming platform where a lot more of a wide audience can see it. We'll be attending a couple of festivals in February, so that will be a lot of fun, to get to connect with the audiences on a more personal level in the same room.”
What's next? Is she going to try to make another feature, or go back to shorts?
“I would love to do another feature and I definitely intend to,” she says. “I have some larger projects that I'm interested in developing and seeking the Canadian grants funding system money for, which is a longer term scale of things. We'll see if I have the patience to actually wait for big money to have a proper budget, or if I end up doing another no budget one. But in the meantime I'm continuing to make shorts between features. I just finished one that was written by Andi, a great little short that I directed and we just completed and are sending to festivals now, and then I've got another short that I'm pushing into pre-production. I just keep making stuff because I have way more things I want to say than I have time and resources.”
