Youth and Experience: Leads Talks Filmmaking Truths at Tribeca

Scene: “Heather Kafka enters from the back of Chateau Marmont, glistening post-workout but obviously confident in her Spanky’s Liquor cap.”

Cut to: Reality. Kafka is on a Zoom call from her living room in Austin, wearing a zip-up jacket, with that Spanky’s baseball cap at an jaunty angle. She laughs as she delivers what she calls her Vanity Fair-style profile introduction and laughs even harder when I used the word “resilient” to describe her. “Oh, am I!”

That artistic resiliency, and what it takes to maintain it, is at the core of Leads, her latest film as both star and cowriter with her longtime friend and collaborator, writer/director Bryan Poyser. The pair famously worked together on 2010 Sundance success Lovers of Hate, and Leads, which receives its premiere at the Tribeca Festival this weekend, is arguably a sequel to that – just not in any way you might expect.

It’s been said that the greatest movie about life in the indie filmmaking trenches in Living in Oblivion, Tom DiCillo’s thinly-veiled jab at his own miserable experiences making Johnny Suede. Yet the characters in that bittersweet comedy are living the Hollywood high life compared to Leads’ Mags Molloy (Kafka), a onetime darling of the festival circuit who never got her big break and now teaches screen acting at college. It’s a solid job, but it was never Plan A, and her conflicted emotions about her life are only complicated when her wastrel brother (Justin Arnold) reappears. Worse, he cannonballs back into her life just as she’s supposed to be hosting Taylor Betts (Macon Blair), the now-successful director of the film that made her almost famous.

Leads is a tender and clear-eyed study of what it’s like to be one of those filmmakers who got festival famous and never reached those peaks again. And, just as DiCillo channeled his own experiences into Living in Oblivion, Kafka and Poyser are open that Leads comes from close to home. Like Mags, Poyser parlayed his filmmaking career into a teaching position, lecturing at Texas State University in San Marcos. As for Kafka, she’s blunt: If it hadn’t been for Leads, she was probably done with acting.

A decade of shorts, supporting roles, and one-offs in TV shows was an amazing experience but it wasn’t paying the bills, she says, and she was working minimum wage jobs to pay the bills. “I was having a real falling out and a losing of my religion when it came to acting. The world was changing so quickly and the audience was becoming something I didn’t want to play for.” At last, she seemed to be getting her big break. “I finally booked a pilot that was going to shoot here, I was going to be a series regular, and I would get a steady paycheck." Then the producers called her. “‘Hey, the pilot got picked up, and we’re going to come back to Dallas and shoot.’ I went, ‘Oh, great!’ and they went, ‘But we’re going to replace you with a name.’”

She paused. “That rejection broke me in half.”

Meanwhile, Poyser had also been doing exactly what he was supposed to do: writing scripts, each of them bigger than his last feature, Love & Air Sex, with bigger names attached. “I wrote three, four scripts, and used my manager and agent to get them out and talk to producers, and they’d go, ‘Yes, maybe, we kind of like this if you changed that’ [and] then I’d rewrite the script and I’d be like, ‘Well, I don’t know if I like it anymore.’”

So, instead of doing what he was supposed to do, he went back to doing what he knew: making small films, starting with a cast and an outline, and building the story out from the resources he had. He said, “I’ve made four features, three of them were made for way less than a hundred grand, but I’d figured it out. I was able to make movies I had control over, that they were going to turn out the way I wanted.”

This was, clearly, insanity. If you listen to the supposed experts, Poyser said, “Independent cinema has been ‘dead’ for about 35 years.” To push past any doubts he was deeply inspired by his own students at Texas State: After all, if he could insist they make dozens of films every semester, what was his excuse? In fact, not only were they eager to make their own films but both students and alumni signed up to be part of Leads, giving many of them their first professional credit. Poyser said, “That energy that they had, and that enthusiasm they have, was a major source of momentum and fuel for me.”

It didn’t stop at using them as crew. Poyser saw Leads as “a movie that melds that generation with my generation and Heather’s, the jaded Gen Xers who’ve been through the shit. [It’s] a film about that collision of the two generations and the good that can come from it.”

It was arguably the only project that could get Kafka back in front of the camera, mainly because it was her close friend asking her. But even having signed up, she was still brutalized from losing that TV part and wasn’t sure whether she had anything left to give as an actor.

“I was driving to set on the first day of shooting, and I realized that, for the first time in my life, I was number one on the call sheet. Something about my life experience just kicked in, and the thing that I knew is that that person is the vibe. That person sets the tone. I can’t go there and dump myself on this. I can’t go and die on stage. This isn’t my Hamlet. These kids need me and they’re all going to be looking up to me. I’m the seasoned actress on this thing, I’m number one on the call sheet. You better buck the fuck up, Gen X.”

“The minute I got there,” she said, “the energy of the set and the excitement of these kids, it was just unstoppable. It fed me every day.”

If Leads has a big existential question at its heart, it’s simple: Why is it so hard – especially in America – for experienced artists to make a living, even in the supposedly world of cinema? Viewers bemoan the lack of mature voices but the reality is that there’s no infrastructure to support, frankly, grownups in the industry. The current zero-budget, zero-support, put-it-on-your-credit-cards model is fine when you’re in your twenties and can live on ramen and instant coffee. However, Kafka observed, “As we get older, it gets much harder to stay alive, and you want to have a family, and you need to own a home, and you need to have all these things just to feed yourself.”

“For people like Bryan and I who want to work in this independent space, it’s not a calling card, stepping stone to blockbusters,” Kafka said. “This is the subject matter we want to talk about, these are the types of films we want to make.”

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Leads

Narrative Competition, World Premiere

Friday, June 6, 5pm, Village East by Angelika
Saturday, June 7, 12:15pm, Village East by Angelika
Sunday, June 8, 11:45am, Village East by Angelika
Monday, June 9, 3pm, Village East by Angelika