We Need to Talk About Oscar

Creator Jesse McKeown built 'Below' around a premise easy to sum up in a sentence, a sea creature terrorizing a small town, and explains how he kept that pitch from overshadowing the family drama and economic unraveling he actually wanted to tell. Having spent years visiting Newfoundland and growing attached to it long before cameras rolled, he talks through the strange task of shooting the place he loves in a way meant to feel threatening and dread soaked on screen.
Jesse walks us through how he and his crew worked to avoid the flattened, gray-blue look often applied to coastal or remote settings, aiming instead for something textured and alive. He set the story during a Come Home Year, a real Newfoundland tradition that pulls former residents back into town, giving him a built-in way to stage friction between people who stuck around through hard times and those returning from elsewhere.
Jesse also reflects on premiering the opening episodes at TIFF on a massive cinema screen, even though the show was conceived for television, and how designing for home viewing shaped his choices around both open water sequences and tighter interior scenes. At its core, he frames the show's real threat as change itself, a community watching its industry and way of life slip away, and considers how his own years navigating a constantly shifting television business fed into how he wrote these characters reacting to losing theirs.
(Photo: Courtesy of Netflix)

Writer-director Thomas Leisten Schneider makes his feature debut with 'Love - Love,' moving from the quick turnaround of commercials and shorts like 'Point and Shoot' into a much longer, more demanding shoot. He reflects on the unexpected challenges of holding onto a singular vision over that extended timeline, and on growing up between France and the US, a background that shaped his outsider's fascination with the road trip as a distinctly American form, and with the bleak, otherworldly quiet of the Salton Sea as a setting.
Much of the conversation centers on directing Haley Joel Osment as Andy, a character living with schizophrenia, and how Thomas balanced guiding that performance with trusting what Osment discovered on his own, including a moment on set that reshaped his sense of the character entirely. He also discusses casting Beck Bennett as Jeff, a brother pulled suddenly into caregiving while still searching for his own footing, and how he used the absurdity of the entertainment industry to offset the story's heavier emotional terrain.
Thomas connects his theater background to the rehearsal process he built for both actors, aiming for something true beneath the film's shifts between humor and pain. He also unpacks the title's tennis roots and how they tie into Bruce's past as a disgraced professional, before reflecting on how far he's come since his first day on set and what that journey revealed about his voice as a filmmaker.

Writer-director Paula González-Nasser spent years location scouting before making 'The Scout,' her feature debut following Sofia, played by Mimi Davila, through a single frantic workday. Paula reflects on whether scouting for a film about scouting changed her process at all, and whether her professional instincts made her hyper aware of every space she chose for Sofia to enter, or whether she had to consciously set those instincts aside.
The city around Sofia moves fast, but time slows the moment she steps inside a stranger's home, and Paula walks through the pacing and blocking choices behind that shift, protecting a sense of quiet within scenes that otherwise sit inside a hectic day. She also unpacks the irony of making such a measured film under the same high pressure conditions indie sets usually produce, and what it took to keep her crew from falling into the very chaos the film observes.
Paula gets into the toll of constantly watching and drawing from strangers without fully showing up as herself, and whether that same transactional dynamic extends into independent filmmaking more broadly, including any observational habits she's had to unlearn to stay present as a director. Turning to how younger creatives have responded to a film this honest about the industry's exhaustion, she weighs whether that honesty makes the path ahead feel more daunting or more navigable for them.

Writer-director Liz Sargent built 'Take Me Home' out of the life she and her sister Anna have lived, expanding her Sundance short into a feature. Liz opens up about what it means for her work to sit so squarely inside her own family, and whether any line can realistically exist between directing a project and living it, between being someone's director and being their sister once the camera rolls.
The short still stands on its own, and Liz looks back on it now with the feature finished, considering how her feelings toward that earlier piece have changed and whether the longer process gave her new appreciation for choices she made the first time around. She also gets into how a feature schedule, so much longer and heavier than a short, reshaped her working rhythm with Anna, and what pulled her toward telling this as fiction rather than documentary.
Anna acts opposite a seasoned ensemble here, and Liz describes how she built a set where her sister felt secure and genuinely creatively empowered among them, along with the accessibility practices her crew adopted to make that possible for everyone. She closes on the film's ending and the hopeful world it imagines, and whether offering audiences that vision makes the current state of care systems land even harder for her.

Writer-director-star Greg Vrotsos shot 'Situations' entirely within Silver Lake, and considers how uncommon it's become for a film to present Los Angeles as itself rather than a stand-in for somewhere else. He also unpacks the space between what he anticipated directing would feel like and what actually filled his days on set, plus whether the experience reshaped opinions he'd carried for years as an actor working under other directors.
Several scenes place Greg's character, Nick, in conversation with himself, and he identifies who or what served as his counterpart in those beats. He addresses his instinct to withhold emotional explanation and let the audience fill in what a character feels, and describes how his eye as a photographer informed the visual distance he and cinematographer Trevor Wineman maintained between the lens and the people on screen.
Greg also reflects on what playing a man trying to climb out of a creative and romantic slump revealed about his own habits as a performer, including instincts he found he could finally drop. We wrap by considering whether completing a film rooted in frustration over the scarcity of stories about adults in their thirties and forties actually eased that frustration, or simply underlined how rare those human scale stories remain.
(Photo: Courtesy of Liam Brown)