Celine (Sarah Steele) doesn’t wait for work in “Crisis Actor,” her headshot sitting in her apartment, but too busy engineering any opportunities to perform to send it out for actual auditions. She finds all the world’s a stage when she can turn a customer service call over a lost item into a bit of theater to entertain herself or slip into a student hospital where she feels free to play to the rafters in her reaction to an endometriosis diagnosis, which is unlikely to help improve the novice doctors’ bedside manner, but feed her need to be someone else for a bit. Her own life is suggested to be in a bit of a funk when her boyfriend’s stuff remains at her place, though she refuses a mutual friend from coming to pick it up, and her prospects at satisfying all her needs are looking up when she meets Josh (Phillip Ettinger) at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting she’s drawn to when the opportunity to share personal testimony in front of an engaged crowd and a chance at a juicy dramatic monologue, all made up in Celine’s case of course.
However, in Lily Platt’s sly and sophisticated comic short, Celine has reality awaiting her in all respects when going back to Josh’s apartment puts her in contact with his sister Emily (Emily Allan) who’s just had a relapse and staying there to recover. Not only is Emily unhappy about making space for anyone else, but when Celine is put such close proximity to someone who can’t shake their addiction leads Celine to wonder whether she has one that could be just as ultimately out of control and potentially toxic. While Celine ultimately feels cornered, Platt creates an airy yet hardly weightless character study of an actor who has truly lost the plot and armed with a performance that shows the extreme range of Steele and a mirthful and mischievous score from Luca Scopetta-Stern that mirrors its main character’s view that she lives in a constant carnival, the film delivers joy as its lead remains in a desperate search for it. With the film making its premiere at Sundance this week, Platt graciously took the time to talk about the genesis of “Crisis Actor,” finding the right angles for group scenes and taking an entirely different one towards the idea of addiction.
How did this film come about?
I made this film in November of 2024, but I had made a film earlier in that year about a woman who lies to her ex-boyfriend about a pregnancy and planned an abortion to manipulate him into caring for her. I really liked the character and the challenge narratively of how to reveal the lie, so I just wanted to continue working in that same vein. And the film was born out of an attachment to that person.
Was the student hospital scene actually something that was inspired by your earlier short?
Totally. I think medical spaces are so ripe for drama and tension, and for someone who is a performer or in the case of the other short, someone who’s seeking a level of care or attention, when you have put yourself in that context, you immediately demand a certain kind of focus from other people, so that is very appealing to someone like Selene.
It sounds like you had a pretty good idea of this character in mind, but what it was getting Sarah Steele on board and perhaps develop it a little further with her?
Yeah, I got so lucky with Sarah. I am just so incredibly grateful to her. I followed her career and had seen her in many things, most recently in a play at the Classic Stage Company in the months leading up to the film and immediately knew I wanted to work with her. I think Sarah just brings so much intelligence, but also a really profound sweetness. She has this balance of incredible determination and this quick intensity, but also like a softness that is a wonderful combination in the character and I was very lucky that she was available and said yes.
The idea of addiction is fascinating when you draw this parallel between the need to act and chemical dependency. Was this just based on observation or did you actually do any research into addictive behavior?
I am a big fan of Al-Anon, the 12-step program that’s designed to give support to friends and family members of addicts. That’s has been my primary exposure to the space of support groups, but I also was always struck by how there’s such trusting spaces and they’re kind of right for tricksters because you can go into those spaces and say anything and you’re taken at face value. It’s such a supportive community. So I liked the idea of someone who sees the opportunity in that, also as a performer who sees this captive audience — a group of people literally sitting in chairs who are laser focused on you when you speak. It’s really the perfect scenario for someone who is driven by the need for an audience.
But I also think that she finds herself in this support group for people who have addicts in their lives, but she also has a lot of compulsive behaviors herself, which is part of the pattern of addiction, so there were a lot of parallels between her own addiction and then this group that she finds herself in and she’s like the perfect candidate for a program like that, even though she’s navigating it, not as someone who’s seeking support, but as someone who is seeking an audience.
Visually, it’s so interesting how you are able to frame this where she’s the center of attention and gradually is pushed out of that position by the more serious kind of addiction she encounters. What was it like to figure out how to film these support groups?
Yeah, the support group scene was a big challenge for me because I’d never directed that many people and I’d never been on a set as a director with that many people before. It was also a bigger crew than I’d ever worked with, so that was really fun. I am so grateful to my incredible director of photography Leo Zheng. We just diagrammed the whole space and we knew exactly how we wanted to shoot it. I ended up deviating from the shot list that day and I actually really regret it. But Leo, who’s a real professional, really had a solid plan. I think that overhead diagrams are your best friend in those scenarios.
The score also really nicely accentuates what’s going on in the film tonally. Was that a fun process?
I got the chance to work with this amazing composer, Luca Scoppetta-Stern. I always knew that I wanted a minimal classical score. Luca is a trained classical pianist and he wrote an incredibly beautiful score. And then my dear friend Anna Schwab, who has a music project called Sadie, very generously gave us permission to use an unreleased song from an upcoming album for the credit song, which I think works really beautifully.
From what I understand, you actually planned to pursue a career in architecture prior to filmmaking. How did you end up gravitating behind the camera?
I always had filmmaking in mind and I did some film studies undergrad. Because I always worked in the curatorial side of architecture design, [rather than having] a studio practice, I was always in the space of visual storytelling in terms of putting on exhibitions. There’s a lot of transferable skills beyond the narrative element in terms of thinking spatially and about how certain spaces condition certain kinds of behaviors, seeing the lines. I think there’s definitely a conversation between those two things. But I started working in nonfiction filmmaking after I stopped working in architecture design as a producer and then eventually decided to pursue narrative filmmaking in the form of graduate school.
What’s it like to get to the place of having a film at Sundance?
It’s really exciting. Short filmmaking is such an incredible labor of love because there’s so few ways for short films to have audiences, so I’m just really grateful that it’s going to have a festival audience and that it will have a life beyond my hard drive. I’m just so excited.
“Crisis Actor” will screen at the Sundance Film Festival as part of Short Film Program 4 on January 26th at 5:30 pm at the Megaplex Redstone, January 31st at 9 pm at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in Salt Lake City and February 1st at 3:15 pm at the Holiday Village Cinemas.