In the urban jungle of Los Angeles, Sophia (Viva Hassis Gentes) and Alex (Katie Otter) have appeared to have found some shade at the start of “Sunkiss,” feeding raspberries to one another off each other’s fingertips and the sun breaking through the branches of the tree above for just the right amount of light. The two are clearly creatures of the city in crop tops and in the case of Sophia, heavy eyeliner, but any world outside of the cocoon that they’ve formed for themselves seems foreign, so when Sophia gets the hankering to get “some weed from David and his boys,” being pulled back into the world they typically reside can’t help but feel unnatural.
In Dice Rose’s gripping coming-of-age short, there is a feeling of entering uncharted territory before Sophia and Alex find themselves there as the teens take refuge in the area just off the freeway where only the toughest of plantlife can grow and skaters take to the underpass where they’re unlikely to be hassled by the cops. The duo appears as if they’d appreciate a little privacy too, but the need to truly drift off into another realm places them squarely where they’d rather not be when instead of seeing David, they end up meeting the suspicious looking Trent (Nick Grace) and Casey (Preston Beyer), resulting in a car ride neither Sophia or Alex ever come back from, if not in a physical sense, surely a psychological one.
With a soundtrack of Veruca Salt and The Melvins, “Sunkiss” immediately places viewers back in the 1990s when fewer questions might’ve been asked when someone asked into you into their car when the promise of a little danger was part of the appeal and while it can’t be said for the protagonists, it’s well worth accepting the invitation from Rose, who finds tension not only in what transpires between Alex, Sophia and the unknown men, but between the two young women who can’t be entirely comfortable being out in their sexuality when it wasn’t as accepted and are only starting to get intimate with one another. While the director gets at this unspoken frisson quite vividly, she has brought in an impressive crew to get the details of both this particular age and era just right, having no less than “My Own Private Idaho” editor Curtiss Clayton and “Mulholland Drive” supervising sound editor Ron Eng pairing up with an up-and-coming generation of filmmakers to bring the Super 16mm film to life. Recently, the short made its Los Angeles premiere not far from where it was filmed at Shortsfest LA and Rose spoke about making a film that has all the energy of a page being ripped from a punk zine, some happy accidents from the shoot and expressing a time of constant change that feels like running in place.
How did this come about?
I started working on the project in 2019, shortly before the pandemic and it’s largely based on my own childhood and coming into my own as a bisexual woman and also dealing with predatory older men. While I was in the process, I brought in my co-writer Samantha Clay, who had finished the Sundance Episodic Lab and I just loved her writing so much. She’s also a bisexual girl who grew up in the ’90s and dealt with drugs and all the craziness that that goes along with it, so we had just been writing and collaborating and trying to survive a pandemic to get there.
Was it obvious to set it in that time period from the jump?
I know I may not look it, but I am almost 40, and this story largely takes place in 1999 and we didn’t hit it super hard as a period piece, just given the limitations of budget. I couldn’t control all the cars on the street, so I couldn’t fully dress the world. But Gen Z’s really gotten into 90s culture now, and the car is from the late ‘80s and we’re referencing the 90s in not super direct ways, but there are no cell phones in the film, so it was always a part of the idea to always have it be this ’90s story and vibe.
I had wondered if those two fire trucks that sneak into the frame was a budget splurge or not, almost as if it’s a warning to your characters about what’s to come…
Amazing coincidence. We only got two takes on that shot and that happened in the first take. It was just so good and my editor loved it. Then my sound designer Ron Eng [said], “Yeah, let’s put in the sounds and enhance the world. It just fits so well.
We’re around the same age, so the references hit hard, but I thought the intergenerational transference on this film must’ve been fascinating when your lead actors are Gen Z and you’ve got people like Ron Eng and your editor Curtiss Clayton, who were so responsible for crafting the attitude of those Gen X movies. What was it like to be in the middle of?
That aspect of it was such a dream for me because I love all things ’90s and being an elder millennial, I was in this like great position to bridge the early Gen X/late boomer gap of Curtiss and Ron along with my Gen Z cast and we could all meld on our love for ’90s punk rock, grunge culture. It was so amazing, and the cool thing with the timing of all this and Gen Z getting into it is that there were a lot of the aesthetics that we didn’t even need to have a conversation on. They already got it, and then Ron and Curtiss have lived it for decades.
Ron and Curtiss are both post-production specialists, but were you having conversations with them from the beginning?
Yeah, Curtiss has been a mentor of mine for several years now. I was really lucky to TA for him at UCLA and maintain a friendship with him and he was actually a huge proponent of encouraging me to make the film. He had read an early draft of the script and before we went into production, I had a meeting with him about our shot list and talked about what components we need, knowing that we had to be really economical shooting on film, so he was such an integral part of everything and I’m so deeply grateful to him.
How did you get these two great lead actors?
I wish I had some magical story to tell, but I found them on Actors Access, but everybody we cast, it was that spark right away, especially with Viva [Hassis Gentes]. The moment we started chatting, she just got this girl and knew who this charming, wild and free and…a little bit fucked up girl that she is. Then with Katie [Otter], there’s just this incredible vulnerability that Katie has that’s just so real and it’s oozing from her. Talking with her was so easy, so I knew it’d be a great collaboration.
We cast fairly late in the pre-production process and we had one day to do rehearsals, so I think everyone’s insane chemistry and easiness was such an amazing bonus. You hope for that, but it was such a perfect thing to have happen and there were so many other cool little things that just came together like that. My Steadicam and A-cam operator [Kevin Jacobsen] flew all the away from New York and donated his time [after] he had seen me posting about my fundraising campaign. I had originally intended to operate the whole thing, but I’m so glad he came and allowed me to be able to like direct and DP in a much more effective way.
And then you tortured him with that amazing single take of the girls running through the freeway overpass?
Yeah, Kevin Jacobsen is incredible. The man’s a beast and he’s so kind. That shot was actually something that I had been working on since I launched my fundraising campaign and when you’re in pre-pro on a film, you have your vision and then there’s a lot of things you have to let go because you don’t have the money, but that was one shot that I was like, “Absolutely not. We have to make it happen at this time of day.” Kevin was just down and we ran it three or four times and it turned out so perfect. We caught that lens flare, and it was great.
I love the idea of movement in it — there’s a stillness at the beginning and then Veruca Salt’s “Seether” kicks in and then you’re in the car where it’s static and at the same time it’s moving.
It’s very much intended in that our first scene is shot entirely on sticks and meant to be very tranquil and then by the end, we’re totally handheld. Then there are those in-between moments with “Seether” and everything — that’s all shot on Steadicam, so the whole idea is that we’re rowing in this transition of unsteadiness.
It’s an incredible soundtrack, especially for a short. Were the songs in mind from the start?
Those specific songs were not in mind, but we knew we always wanted to use ’90s music, and I grew up very much listening to punk rock and PJ Harvey. My composer, Zach Lemmon had temped a few songs from Veruca Salt while we were working on it, and we had some Smashing Pumpkins in there at one point, but Veruca Salt was my number one, and when I reached out to their label, I was so thrilled that they said yes.
Something else besides a sense of time you capture is a sense of place. One of my favorite things about being in L.A. is the mix of concrete and nature, which you really get from those early scenes in the movie. What was it like to look for locations?
I’m really glad that translates. We shot in Sylmar and that specific location wasn’t in mind from the beginning, but I knew I wanted to find something that reminded me of Golden, the small town I grew up in in Colorado which sits at the base of the Rockies, about 30 minutes or so away from Denver. It is also this place of [where] nature and urban environment comes together and so much of our childhood, our parents would just be like, “Be home by dark” and we would just run around all these forgotten little crevices of these urban spaces.
When we were scouting in Sylmar, we were just finding all this amazing urban stuff situated right against the mountains, and [I thought] “This is so perfect.” The first scene where the girls are underneath that tree, that’s a long highway and it felt very much like the life that we led [in Colorado] because we didn’t have money to be able to go to cafes or shops and we didn’t really have homes we felt like we could exist in, so we would just find these little safe havens in forgotten urban environments that we could go and take over.
The animation gives the film a real era-appropriate zine quality as well. How did that come into the mix?
That was actually not planned. Curtiss and I, and then Marcus Chan, who came on later to finish the film, had been trying to figure out how do we build this nightmare sequence and I was just struggling for it to have the impact I was really wanting. I was on TikTok one day and I saw Wioletta [Kulig]’s art. She’s this amazing Italian animator and everything she does is by hand. The moment I saw it, it reminded me of what we would watch in the ’90s on random shows or commercials [where] there was always that very handmade cutout paper aesthetic. I reached out to her and asked if she would be down to collaborate and we collaborated overseas and just exchanged ideas. She did every single frame all by hand. The only thing digital are just the scans of it.
It adds to the overall handmade quality of the film that’s really endearing. What’s this like now that it’s starting to be taken out of your hands?
It’s so profoundly grateful. Making any film is such an endeavor, and this is me on cinema. And to have found all these people who were down to come and donate their time and really believed in it and believed in me has just been so amazing, so every day is a practice in gratitude. It was a mountain that we climbed and all of this is also in service to a feature script that I’ve been working on called “Favorite Color Yellow.” “Sun Kiss” is a like taste of the first act of that story, so I hope that this is able to bring us the momentum we need to make the next big piece.
“Sunkiss” is currently on the festival circuit.