“Good luck…or bad luck, I guess,” Ryland (Augustus Rivers) wishes Andy (Romina d’Ugo) as he’s about to leave her lakeside cabin in “Byeeee,” after he recognizes that she’s trying to kill herself, yet confident she won’t succeed. The rope she’s bought from up the road at the local tackle shop to tie into a noose probably isn’t strong enough to do the job, nor is there anywhere to hang it from in the house that wouldn’t buckle under the pressure, yet he should at least try to be encouraging when she seems so intent on succeeding and only stumbles upon her when it’s been his job to periodically look after the place when it’s uninhabited.
With its literal gallows humor, the tale of a skincare executive who retreats to a quiet cottage to ends things after what she feels is a career-crashing faux pas grew out of what felt like a professional do-or-die moment for its writer/director Chell Stephen, whose euphoric shorts “Fire Girls” and “Crystal” were apt to grab attention with their intoxicating flair yet a shot at a feature never manifested. Taking control of her own destiny, Stephen reteamed with d’Ugo who starred in her delirious 2023 short “You’re My Best Friend,” and crafted a film of otherwise modest means ,but the end result is anything but as it turns a house and its accompanying forest and lake into a playground where Andy and Ryland end up in some particularly dark corners but are gradually pulled into the light, which the director can be counted on to make as effervescent and vivid as possible. The disgraced cosmetics CEO finds an unexpected confidant in the groundskeeper, who seems to have some knowledge around the subject of suicide that had to be gleaned first-hand, and together the two put a happy face on a bad situation when it’d be useless to linger in the past and can only look towards tomorrow.
It’s a future that should promise to be as bright for Stephen as it does for her heroine when “Byeeee” exudes the writer/director frisky comic sensibilities as well as a visual stylist. While Andy looks for the comfort of surroundings she knows well from her youth, the director makes an enemy out of familiarity, zipping around a house with rooms where nostalgia can look like a trap and the sparks that begin to fly between Andy and Ryland start to make things look a little different. The potentially grim plot line has plenty of panache under Stephen’s watch where Andy is treated to a tour of all the different outcomes if she were to succeed with a grizzly demise and it looks like the filmmakers themselves are willing to risk their lives at times to get a shot mirroring the chaos that led Andy to her frazzled state of mind. The cosmic blast of joy is about to touch down this weekend at the San Francisco Indie Fest and ahead of its world premiere, Stephen kindly took the time to talk about how she ended up making her own luck with her first feature, finding the right cast and crew for the ragtag production and ending up with something greater than the sum of its parts.
How did this come about?
Like many people, I have numerable projects in Hollywood Purgatory where you can’t get any money if you don’t have a famous enough person in it and you can’t get famous people to look at it if you don’t have the money, so you [think], “I don’t know what what to do about that. Well, I have to go greenlight myself. I’m a maximalist and I like big visuals, so two people talking in a house would not be my typical vibe, but in the indie spirit, I challenged myself to make something that’s out of a location I had access to, so we shot at my family’s cottage, where we we also shot “Crystal” and I’ve been going up there since I was four. That area has been in my life for a long, long time and the community support was awesome. They were very, very cool to us, so welcoming and supportive. There’s a lot of great reasons to shoot in smaller places and that’s one of them.
Was Romina in mind from the start after you made “You’re My Best Friend” together?
Yes, I wrote it basically for her. She she goes back and forth between Toronto and L.A. and she was one of the first people I told [about “Byeeee”] we were on this walk and I told her, “I’m having this idea, how would you feel about this?” and she was super excited right away. [We did it] basically the way that we did “You’re My Best Friend,” [where] we did the wardrobe together. I found the clothes and she did her own hair and makeup and I knew that this was going to be a similar speed [of a shoot] and she could hang because we’d already done it before. She was also good enough because she’s virtually in every frame and I needed somebody who could really really carry that and and she did brilliantly in my opinion. It’s fun to write with somebody in mind and her in particular so it was good on the writing side too.
How did Augustus Rivers come into the mix?
I love him so much. I’m so excited for people to see both those performances, and Djouliet [Amara, who plays the clerk at the tackle shop] as well. I didn’t audition them and you don’t know until you get to set, but “You’re My Best Friend” played at the Bushwick Film Festival in the block with a film that Augustus was in and had produced, so when I got there, my producer was like, “Oh, there’s other Canadians here!” We met them and I saw [Augustus’] performance and was incredibly blown away by it. So it was this dream scenario you hope for when somebody sees you in a short and then calls and offers you a role in the feature and I just offered it to him. We had everybody staying there at the cottage too, so the vibe was almost as important as the skill too. So [I was also asking in addition to the part] are you down to hang at this level of indie filmmaking? And he gets that very deeply as well.
Once you get it in the hands of the actors and see the dynamic, does anything change in your mind about what this is?
It was such a read in a way that I don’t know that I’ve experienced before to actually hear them make those words real. There’s something about when you’re doing it yourself [where] it just feels like words. But then I hear them and I’m like, “Oh my God. They made them into what feel like real conversations.” That really is such a treat. It was a blessing to see and I was so heartened. I don’t think you get that experience all the time as a writer and those performers really offered that to me, which was amazing.
Was it difficult to get the right tone, where it’s life-affirming without being cheesy or saccharine?
There’s two sides to that question. I debated on the ending for a while because there were a bunch of ways it could go and I didn’t want it to be up in the air because I feel that’s insulting to an audience, but I realize that’s basically my relationship with all this mental health stuff where it’s like you’re never like cured or [think], Oh God, I’m fixed,” whatever your mental illness is. All you could do is really decide one moment after another to stay, to manage it and to sit through it. When that came to me, that was definitely a clarifying moment for the whole project. I was really grateful to come up with an idea that actually resonated with the way that I feel.
As far as the rest of it, I just think everything is so absurd and I have fun finding the humor in dark stuff. I do think many people think about, [in terms of] suicidal ideation in particular, the dark things more than we’re allowed to talk about and I wanted to open that space up. To me it’s better to talk about it than not and humor is an accessible way to do that. That is also the basis of the friendship between the two leads where it’s like, you don’t expect you can talk to everybody about things like that, so when they realize that they can, it’s an interesting dynamic, and what they offer to each other, which in the end I think helps save them.
What was it like how to create the mood around this main setting of the house when it changes so much?
Brennan Full is our [director of photography] and she absolutely killed it. She had a one-in-one team — one gaffer, one key grip, both women notably and the gaffer Sasha came in and [said] “This whole house needs to be rewired. The electric is all bad.” So we did our best. She had tape on every outlet. But I wanted to make something that felt visually like me and yet can by its nature be contained. There was this movie “Sanctuary” that’s so contained as well and that was a reference for me [as far as] having two characters in one room and how did they keep evolving the visuals and the lighting and the style. Then I saw the suicide montage bit really early on that I was talking about with the DP, and the way that “Beetlejuice” handles death was something that’s a good reference. Incidentally, it was also a good lighting reference, so that as one of the guiding points in that way.
That montage also requires Romina acting opposite herself in the scenes. What was that like to pull off?
That was what we called Bizarro Andy. Honestly, it was an incredible night just to showcase Romina’s skills and to see her do those two performances back to back. It was like, “Damn, not everybody can do that. It’s a real pivot. She’s going to some pretty emotional dark places when she’s being real Andy, so we had a couple of wigs and a couple stand-ins, I like to do that stuff old school, so it was a plate shot and we did all of regular Andy’s coverage and then the play shot locked off one side of her and then transitioned her. I read the other lines because I knew how I wanted them said, so I’m hidden giving her the Bizarro Andies while my producer Sarah sits in her suit and wig in front of her, just to give her something to perform to and then and then we swapped it. My sister was available to help with some of it, but a lot of it was [Romina] doing her own hair and makeup and the transitions like that need to be fast into these different looks. Not every performer is up for that and thank God Romina was. That was our second-to-last night shooting and overnight as well.
What also looked crazy was anything that was shot in the forest. Did you break any cameras getting that footage running?
That’s so funny. I just started e-mailing people [for the shot of the phone being thrown out of the car into the forest] and there was this [drone operator] who lives nearby out there, and he thought it was cool. He doesn’t do a lot of narrative stuff, but he was just like, “Oh, I’ll come out and do this for you. The price is right.” And respectfully drone people are kind of nuts, but he’s the exception. He brought six [drones] and [I said] “We don’t need all of them,” but thank God he did because what I wanted from the shot is [for the camera to] tilt down and then fall to earth because that’s what she’s experiencing, so in order to get that part of movement, he had to turn off sport mode [on the camera]. The unfortunate side effect of that is that he can’t really monitor [the shot] as easily and he legitimately did hit a piece of tree [with the drone] and it fell, so all of that is real. I say that it was my fault he turned it into that mode because that’s how I’d asked him to operate it, but luckily he brought a bunch of them as drone guys are wont to do and [when it broke, he’s like] “Oh this shit happens. He has insurance too, so he wasn’t that hurt about it.
Once we had that, I had the version of the shot where it didn’t break and I felt we have to just use the one where it falls on every branch because that’s also the feeling [Andy has], like hitting every branch on the way down. The first take we did of [scene where Andy is running through the forest], I didn’t give Romina the direction to do movie running, so [once I said] “Action,” she took off sprinting and Brennan is just hustling after her. Once we stopped, she was like, “Okay, next time a little slower. I don’t know if any of that is usable.” And honestly, a lot of it is in the in the cut. That’s it is exactly what I wanted. It could have been dangerous. We’re very lucky. There’s another shot where we have the camera in the water, on Brennan’s shoulder for shooting the skinny dipping and I don’t think that’s advised either.
They genuinely felt out of control, but they were impressive because obviously you had some command over it. Was there anything that you didn’t expect that made it into the shoot and you ended up liking it?
We were such a small team and for me, it’s always like be the water, not the rock. When you have limited time and space and and resources, if something falls apart, it’s like, you can’t really be heartbroken about things that might not go the way you pictured them and that’s fine. Ultimately I’ve learned that on a lot of my shorts. It’s going to end up the way it’s meant to be. For the end scene, I couldn’t really get all of the fireworks the way it was written. I wanted it to be like a Rube Goldberg machine and obviously we can’t really do that for safety, but it ended up really working out. We had a million conversations about that. Everybody’s like, “How are we going to pull this off safely?” I really love creative problem-solving and projects of this size offer a lot of opportunities to pivot where you thought something should be one way and it’s like, well, we have this other way. We’ll do that.”
What’s it like having this under your belt? Making a first feature must seem intimidating until you actually do it.
It was crazy, man. We shot for twelve days, which is not a lot for a feature and because our crew was so small, everybody was wearing a lot of hats. There were mornings I was up putting on the coffee and then working all day and breaking down the craft tent at night. I remember thinking in these moments, “Not everybody should do it this way. Not everybody wants to do it this way and that’s fine.” That is correct for them. It’s a certain type of masochist who is down to operate on that level and I guess that’s what I like to do. But I’ve always wanted to climb Feature Mountain. I know that’s something I needed to do and as we were making it, I couldn’t really think, “Oh my god, it’s the first feature, are you excited?” I was just thinking about it as a day-to-day shoot. We have so much to accomplish and I’m really lucky that I was very inside the project, so I could really be in the moment on the day because sometimes with projects like this, you might normally expect prep time with my collaborators, but they didn’t always have that, so I had to know everything and I can be very hard on myself as just a person and as an artist, but I am proud of how I was able to show up for this because I had to. I designed it that way. Whenever anything would go weird, I’d [think] you chose to do it this way. You made every choice. I can blame no one but me for the how difficult this might be. And ultimately that is the way I want it. As much as it might be hard, that inspired me.
And it’s an exciting time period about to have it. It’s like this little baby bird that some of us only know about, almost like a secret and now it’s going to belong to more people, for better or worse. I know that means we’re opening ourselves up to like commentary that might not feel good too, but I’m hoping that people find something to relate to in it and they might just feel good for a minute. That’s all we want for people.
“Byeeee” will screen at SF Indie Fest at the Roxie Theater on February 8th at 4:30 pm. It will also be available to stream from February 5th through February 15th.