Interview With Megan Griffiths, Director Of SADIE: On Violence In The Media & The Importance Of Telling Young Female Stories

Veteran filmmaker Megan Griffiths’ latest feature, Sadie, is a coming-of-age drama that explores the pervasiveness of violence in our culture – and the sense that it is increasingly presented as the only solution to so many problems in our world – through the eyes of a teenage girl. It’s a striking film, ably carried by its young star, Sophia Mitri Schloss, and the rest of the phenomenal cast, which includes Melanie Lynskey as the girl’s mother and John Gallagher Jr. as the mother’s boyfriend, whom Sadie sees as a threat to her idealized family existence.

I was lucky enough to chat with Griffiths recently about the inspirations behind the film, which was almost a decade in the making, and what she’s planning on doing next.

I’ve been looking forward to talking with you about this film because I really enjoyed it. I thought it told a very unique story as well as a very realistic one. One thing that really struck me was that it told a story about a segment of society we don’t often see onscreen treated in the respected, non-judgmental way you treated the characters in your film. I’d like to start by asking you about where the idea for the script was first born and how it evolved along the way.

Megan Griffiths: Thank you for saying that. The script was in the works for many years – I started writing it in 2009, when I was in the middle of trying to get another long-gestating project made, my film The Off Hours. I was being bombarded by violence from media, news and just the way our culture was reverberating at the time and is still. I started thinking about kids who are growing up in this era, and how watching all of us solve problems through violence is impacting these young people who are absorbing it as they’re learning how to solve their own problems. It was a worrying thought, and something I wanted to explore through a script.

I had seen the story told via soldiers, and movies dealing with violent young men, but I hadn’t seen anyone tackle that subject with a young female protagonist. So Sadie grew out of that desire to change the vantage point of the story and explore it through a young woman’s eyes.

Another thing on my mind was the lack of consequences we often see, especially when you look at movies, video games and other stuff: how many characters we see shooting guns or solving their problems with violence without it having any impact on themselves. Characters who are firing a gun and then just moving on with their day without grappling with it or dealing with any of the consequences of it.

That I feel is the most harmful aspect of it, because it feels so far removed from reality to me. Even in war, to fire a gun at someone and see them die and not have any feelings that might impact them for years…it’s dangerous how many people we see going on shooting sprees in media without dealing with any of that psychological stuff.

Yes, that makes sense, and I think your film tackled the idea of thinking about the consequences of your actions very well. You mentioned wanting to tell the story through a young female protagonist because that hadn’t really been done before. Sophia Mitri Schloss, who you cast as that protagonist, is absolutely remarkable. I’d love to hear about how you found her, and what the casting process was like.

Megan Griffiths: She’s a very special young lady. We worked with a casting director named Amey René, who had cast another movie that shot a year or so before Sadie called Lane 1974. Sophia was the lead in that. I had seen a rough cut and how brilliant she was in it, and how she was able to carry that film on her shoulders, and I needed someone who could do the same. Seeing her do that in Lane 1974 was really reassuring.

I had been trying to make this movie for almost a decade so I had seen a lot of people come and go. I had a lot of agencies sending me tapes of whoever the new, hot young talent was. Towards the end of it, we were pretty narrowed down, and I was having everyone do their auditions on tape. I had everybody do the dress scene, which if you’ve seen the film you know it’s the most intense scene in the movie. And when I saw Sophia’s audition of that scene…first of all, she gave me three versions of it that were slightly different from each other in really interesting ways. But there was no question in my mind after that.

That scene is a gut-punch, that’s for sure. Another thing about the film that I really liked was the relationship between Sadie and her friend Francis. Could you tell me a little bit more about the character of Francis and how that relationship came to be in the film?

Megan Griffiths: When I was writing, I knew that Sadie had to have someone around her who could lighten the mood a bit. She’s such an intense, serious character, and sometimes you just have to poke holes in that or it becomes a little overwhelming and hard to watch. So I wanted someone with her who could do that, and also be a bit of a moral compass that she completely ignores (laughs). Someone who sees more of the inner workings of her and how her actions play out but still isn’t quite in a powerful enough position to stop her.

So that was the narrative reason for putting him there. When we were casting that role, I knew we had to have somebody who had charisma, and lovability. We had auditioned Keith L. Williams, who plays Francis, for a movie that I was producing years before this that didn’t get made. Amey René was casting that as well, so I asked her if she might be able to track him down and get him on tape for Francis.

And then it was just a matter of getting him to do it because he had just been cast in The Last Man on Earth on Fox. But he’s such a delightful young person who I adored having on set. He’s just as charming and sweet in person as he seems in the movie.

Yeah, he had a great presence that I really enjoyed.

Megan Griffiths: The best expressions.

Totally. I don’t know if you could tell that I’m very into your cast, but I’m about to ask you about some of the adults in the film.

Megan Griffiths: Hey, I get it, I’m into them too. I could talk about them all day.

I just love Melanie Lynskey. I think she’s one of the most underrated actresses of her generation. She played the role of Rae, Sadie’s mom, to absolute perfection. What was it like working with her?

Megan Griffiths: Well, I agree with you 100%. I saw her in Heavenly Creatures back in 1994 and have tracked her career ever since. I’ve always been such a fan. I remember watching her on Togetherness, the Duplass Brothers’ show, and being like, wow, she has comedic chops, she has dramatic chops, she’s just incredible. She wears her heart on her sleeve so much and I find her to be very impressive.

She’s a delightful, very sweet, very kind person to have on set, which was true of our whole cast. We got very lucky in that regard on this movie. I just remember how much space she gave me and Sophia when I had a note to give to Sophia. She would just step away and let me have that conversation privately. It’s such a small thing, but it was a sign of respect for that part of the process and that Sophia might need that privacy.

She blew me away constantly on set with how generous she was with the other actors and how she could be in the moment as soon as the cameras started rolling. It’s truly amazing to watch.

That sounds like a wonderful experience on set all around. The final scene between Rae and Sadie, where Rae reluctantly realizes what her daughter has done, is a real example of subtle work that just cuts through you.

Megan Griffiths: Right. She has a scene in the kitchen at the very end where I just used one take. I almost never do that; I usually pick and choose and craft things in the editing room. But there was one take that she did that just blew me away. I knew we couldn’t cut to any other shot, she just nailed it.

One of the other primary adult characters in the film, of course, is Cyrus. For me, he was one of the most complicated people in the film, or at least my feelings about him were the most complicated. One on hand, he seems like a great thing in Rae’s life. He adores her and makes her feel good. But on the other hand, he is an addict who refuses to accept help. He’s basically both good and bad news. How did you shape that character in the script and then on set with the actor?

Megan Griffiths: Cyrus is super complicated. I think part of it is that he’s played by John Gallagher Jr. because on the page, he is basically Sadie’s antagonist. We’re seeing this world through her eyes and she considers him to be the enemy. But, he’s also played by this very likable actor who is able to show the dark sides of the character but has a charm to him and a genuineness to him. You can see why Rae’s attracted to him and why she’s not seeing him as a harmful influence, despite the fact that he’s dealing with an addiction. So that was a very purposeful choice in the casting process, to find something like John who brought that aspect to the table.

When I first started writing this, opioid addiction was not as big of a story. It was definitely still a thing that was happening in our culture but it grew to such a high pitch as we were trying to get the film made, that story and the number of deaths that were happening due to opioid addiction in the U.S. Trying to depict that struggle with some empathy was really important, and John did such a beautiful job creating a human character who was dealing with that.

And that’s exactly how it came across for me watching the film. His struggles seemed very real and very easy to empathize with, even when you got mad at him. I’m thinking of the scene when Rae wants him to come to the hospital where she works, for his back pain. He refuses to go, and they have a fight.

Megan Griffiths: Like a penned animal.

Yes. It’s the first moment of darkness in their relationship.

Megan Griffiths: His performance in that scene outside the hospital is one of my favorite parts of what he does in the movie because I think you get a sense of his desperation. Even though he’s acting kind of like an asshole (laughs), you feel where he’s coming from. He hates the fact that he’s so dependent on these painkillers and he doesn’t want her to see him that way. That he knows she can see it is painful to him. What he’s doing there has a lot of layers and complexity to it.

 You mentioned this was a film you had been writing for many years. I know you’ve been active in the independent film world for quite some time, so I was wondering about the process of getting this film made. Was this comparable to your previous experiences? Did you encounter any specific difficulties that were different from your experiences in the past?

Megan Griffiths: It’s never easy to get something all the way up to the summit of the mountain and rolling into production. It’s such a hard thing to do, aligning a lot of stars and getting people to believe in the project. Every time, it’s so daunting.

The experience I had that’s most closely related to this one was on my film The Off Hours, which had a similarly long process of getting to the screen. It was seven years on that one and eight years on this one. They were both things I wrote myself and built from the ground-up, and both independent dramas, which are not the easiest thing to get made regardless.

In the case of Sadie, the refrain we kept hearing was that people weren’t interested in movies about kids but for adults. That’s something that I heard so much and internalized, knowing that it was always going to be a challenge for this movie. The interesting thing that I realized was that I didn’t end up making a movie just for adults. I screened it for teenagers and they have absorbed and responded to the themes in a deeper way than adults have. I’ve taken it on an academic tour, doing a string of dates where I took it to college campuses. We took it to Giffoni Film Festival, which is a youth film festival in Italy, and we ended up winning our category there. So over and over again, it’s proven to work for a younger audience in a way that I didn’t give it credit for.

Because it’s such a dark movie, I thought young people wouldn’t be interested, or wouldn’t be mature enough to handle it, but I’ve been completely proven wrong in the course of taking it out into the world. It was really hard to get over that hump when we were getting Sadie made. We were lucky enough to find a financier who has a 13-year-old daughter of her own and really got what we were trying to do with the movie and was able to greenlight us by herself. That’s our executive producer, Eliza Shelden. That made the difference in this case.

I’ve had other experiences where I’ve come into the picture a bit later, like with my films Eden and Lucky Them. Those films had been in development for years before I got there; I came in at the end and was able to push it over the top of the hill. Those were way less stressful and way fewer years of my life, but I was grateful for those opportunities to have come along when they did because I was so exhausted with the seven-year process of The Off Hours. I was excited just to keep making things. So Sadie was happening in the background of all of the movies I’ve made since The Off Hours, bubbling on the backburner.

That sounds like a very overwhelming type of multitasking: to be working on a big project that means something to you personally for so long and then to balance that commitment, creatively and emotionally, with other projects.

Megan Griffiths: Yeah, it was an emotional thing sometimes, because I would always say in interviews, after all of these films, “My next project is this film called Sadie that I’ve been trying to make for a long time.” And then I’d go off and make something else because another opportunity would materialize quicker. So I’d have to put Sadie down for a while, but I’d always come back to it, and re-read the script, and say “God, I just want to make this movie.”

I thought it had relevance to a cultural conversation that was happening but wasn’t happening at the volume I thought it should happen at. So I was trying to insert Sadie into that dialogue and raise the level of that conversation. I think we have been able to do that when we’ve been going out and presenting it. I don’t know if it’s landed on the collective radar in a big enough way to raise the volume in the broader culture, but at individual screenings, we’ve been having great conversations.

That’s great. I think it’s funny that you said people were hesitant to fund an adult movie about children. So many of the best films I’ve seen recently actually have been those darker films that happen to have children at the center. But I can also see why young people would resonate with this. It felt like an authentic teenage experience to me, which I think is something people are hungry for in film right now.

Megan Griffiths: Yeah, I agree. There are other movies that have come out in the past few years that may not necessarily be aiming for the same thing but have felt in the same category. Eighth Grade, obviously it’s about another 13-year-old girl, but it’s such a beautifully made movie about something that’s similar to what Sadie is and yet thematically completely different. They’re such different movies but they’re both dealing with complicated stories around this age group. Lane 1974, the movie Sophia did before this, was also dealing with some really complicated things around young womanhood. I think the fact that these young female stories are finally getting told is really important.

Definitely. The kinds of movies about young women that are getting made right now are the kinds of movies I wish were around when I was that age. So it’s really nice to know that the generation coming up has stories like this.

Megan Griffiths: They’re able to deal with it through characters, and not just see young girls trying to lose their virginity.

Exactly, there are so many other stories!

You mentioned your casting director and your executive producer. What were some of the other key collaborators for you on this film that helped you bring your vision to life after so many years of thinking about it?

Megan Griffiths: That’s a wonderful thing to ask. Definitely, I have to shout out Lacey Leavitt, because she’s a producer on the film and has been since the first draft was written. She has been working with me to try to get it made for a really long time; she took the film to the Sundance Producers Lab in 2011, took it to the IFP Market, took it to the Rotterdam Coproduction Market. She’s been pounding the pavement with it for a long time now.

And then, in the final months leading up to production, the other producer, Jennessa West, came on board and really had that burst of energy to push it over the edge and get us rolling. Whenever I see a movie with just one producer I’m always amazed that they could possibly do it by themselves, because it’s such a big job with so many different aspects. Lacey was on the film for so long, but it still couldn’t have been made without Jennessa stepping in at the end.

My costume designer Rebecca Luke, it was our fifth feature together. Ben Blankenship, who did the production design, had done The Off-Hours and Eden before this. And TJ Williams, who shot it, was someone who I hadn’t worked with as a DP but who I had probably worked on five or six features with when I was an AD and he was an AC. We knew each other really well and how we operated on set. Asking him to do it was a really conscious choice. And my editor, Celia Beasley, I’d worked with before on my film The Night Stalker.

I worked with Mike McCready, from Pearl Jam, to do the score. That was a first-time collaboration and a really cool one for me as someone who’s been such a fan of Pearl Jam over the years. He brought in two women from a band called Thunderpussy, a Seattle band that has been touring recently, and the three of them I thought created such beautiful tracks for the movie.

So do you make conscious choices to work with a lot of the same people?

Megan Griffiths: There’s definitely a thought process of “who’s the right fit for this movie?” And sometimes it’s the people I’ve been working with all along. Like the costume designer and production designer, I knew they would understand the aesthetic world of this film, and be able to build it out in great ways. They were no-brainers.

And then it was trying to find people who could bring the right skill level as well as the right energy. I wanted it to feel like a real warm, safe environment for these actors, especially the young actors. Sophia had to do such intense things in this movie. I wanted her to feel like she was walking into a safe environment every day. So I was definitely careful about who I was inviting.

That makes sense. Before I let you go, I’d like to ask: any projects that you’re working on right now or have lined up for the future?

Megan Griffiths: The next couple things I have are TV. I’ve been doing more episodic direction over the past couple of years. Right before I shot Sadie, Mark Duplass asked me to do two episodes of the first season of Room 104 for HBO. That was a turning point in terms of being able to get other television work.

It’s actually a really challenging transition to make, from independent film to TV. There’s a weird myth about film versus TV that filmmakers don’t work quickly, and having come from working in independent film for almost two decades, I’m like, I don’t know what sets you’ve been on! (laughs) You have to move at lightning speed. So it’s been an easier transition in that way, but it did take Mark asking me to do those episodes to convince the powers that be in the larger television world to hire me.

So alongside my Sadie journey, I’ve been racking up more TV credits, building up my resume in that area. There’s a lot of overlap between independent film and television but there’s also a lot of new things to learn, always, on any set. I’ve been doing a lot of that and that’s the stuff I have on the horizon.

It’s been nice. I did an episode of a new show that will be on Netflix called The Society, but I also did my 50th Q&A for Sadie on Monday night and I’ve been able to fly around with the movie, and have in-person conversations. It’s been nice to do work that’s paying me and fulfilling me while also giving me the time to take Sadie into the world.

Sadie is currently available on VOD in the U.S. You can find more international release dates here.