Every critic who has been at it long enough (and does more than give studios free PR) has had some sort of interaction with a filmmaker whose movie they panned or even disdained. My worst interaction was at an international festival where I saw one of the worst films I’ve ever seen and had a two-minute spiel about how bad the film was before I learned who my conversation partner was: the film’s director (who had hidden their identity to learn how I really felt). She bowed out of the conversation with the classic, “Um, I will go over there now.” I felt like a dick. I was a dick! But her movie was terrible.
Most of the offended filmmakers just reach out via Twitter (X) or Instagram to tell me about how I was wrong or how mean I am or how I was unfair. One screenwriter even asked me to remove a (negative) review from Rotten Tomatoes. I try to be as generous as I can, always rooting for any film to be the best version of itself. Generosity can only take a bad or misguided film so far though.
Kelsey Egan, a Wisconsin-born and South African-based director, was the first filmmaker to reach out to me after reading a negative review of mine of her own film, Glasshouse, not with intentions to scold or ask anything of me but to thank me for my writing and to offer a screener of her next film, The Fix. I suspect she may be the last too.
In our interview, she referred to the gesture as her “olive branch.” She also sympathized or even agreed with most of the major qualms I voiced, including my issue with the all-white casting of a film meant to critique South African apartheid (more to follow). She too was frustrated by the way that turned out; the cast she was offered didn’t fit the part she originally wrote and the producers recommended white talent after seeing all the auditions.
Egan’s first two features are both lower-budget sci-fi films with bigger socio-political axes to grind. They also both involve a toxin that spreads through the air, though the concepts and tones differ dramatically. Glasshouse, the film that began our online correspondence, takes place in one location on the South African Eastern Cape where an airborne disease colloquially referred to as the Shred erodes memories and causes dementia. In The Fix, a film I adored that finished just off my 2024 Best Of list, Earth’s air no longer qualifies as breathable and the poor wear masks while the rich have pills to solve their problem (and make them a lot of money.) As I noted in my review at In Review Online, “It’s renewing to see a film — produced closer to the periphery of global capitalism in South Africa — that functionally challenges rather than reinforces the same paradigm it seeks to critique.” From the action, performances, and even plot similarities, it’s also a deserving offspring of Resident Evil and The Fifth Element. If The Fix is a glimpse into Egan’s future filmography, I will consider myself lucky to be privy so early on.
The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
JOSHUA POLANSKI: [Just so you know,] I don’t do videos. I don’t have a YouTube, so this will be in print [for the Boston Hassle].
KELSEY EGAN: That’s really okay. I do prefer print. I’m sad that everything has gone that route. YouTube and TikTok are the demise of cinema in my mind.
JP: I just watched a film made for TikTok.
KE: Is it vertical?
JP: It is.
KE: It’s a big thing. I’ve been seeing them looking for vertical directors everywhere. It’s normally Chinese production companies. They’re advertising on LinkedIn for directors with vertical experience. I’m like, “You do realize that’s just an aspect ratio, right?”
I have to say, I think we’re not doing it right … embracing this movement … because all the studies are showing how damaging this is to our brains, and how it’s making us stupider, and how it’s killing our attention spans. All the scientific evidence [shows] that this is a bad idea. So [the industry] leans in? We can make money. What? No, no. I will not be leaning in. I might not have a job, but I won’t do it. I refuse.
JP: [Wow, thanks for all of that.] First, I want to rewind to how our conversation got started. You reached out to me after reading a not-very-positive review of your last film, Glasshouse. How do you normally engage with critics and criticism of your own works? Why’d you reach out to me?
KE: Great question. I reached out to you because you were clearly really intelligent and it was a really brilliantly written article.
Frankly, I worked really, really hard to get the opportunity to make my first feature. It took years, and I had this very awkward six-year period where I thought maybe I was just crazy and it was a pipe dream. It was never going to happen. So when it did, and I was inundated with press for Glasshouse, I didn’t know how lucky I was. I didn’t know that this was just a charmed experience because of the pandemic. Everyone was at home and so many people were watching movies.
All of those things were very happy accidents that enabled me to get a shit ton of coverage on a tiny, tiny movie that probably wouldn’t have gotten coverage like that if things had gone differently with a no-name cast out of left field.
As a filmmaker, you always make the best possible movie you can with what you have. But that’s never the ideal version of the film. I don’t know how often anyone gets to make the ideal version. You make the best movie you can with what you end up having.
And I think what I really appreciated about your review is all of the critiques and all of your commentary were stuff that I was like, “Yep, fair, completely fair. Yep, 100%.” But to have it be that insightful and that well observed and that well written is a rarity.
JP: Wow, thank you so much.
KE: That was also a learning experience I had from Glasshouse, because I read the gamut of reviews. I read all the reviews. I don’t hide from them. I’m interested because I think that feedback is informative. Some of it is very, very subjective. But if enough people are saying the same thing, it’s a learning experience. With Glasshouse, what I found so interesting was that it was a very polarizing film. People either loved it and loved that vibe or they really didn’t. There was very little in between.
Your review specifically… stuck out for the quality of the writing and the quality of the mind behind the writing. And yours popped in that way where I was like, “Oh, I really like this writer. I really wish he liked the movie more.”
But because I [like] your writing and how perceptive you are, the one thing that hurt me personally was the casting [Note: the film was meant, in part, as a colonial critique but ended up using an all-white cast, including for the “Stranger.”] I didn’t want someone this intelligent to think that we were really that oblivious, because we were not. The irony is [the casting] had been a point of contention for us in pre-production. We worked so hard for it to be a mixed-race family. [But] our commissioning executives, who are brilliant and wonderful, [including] Kaye Ann Williams, a Cape Coloured woman, [told us,] “No, we truly believe the best possible casting is this white iteration of the cast based on the strength of the auditions. This is the best possible version of the movie with what we’ve been offered.” And I [knew] this [was] going to look real bad, real bad. We’re not even going to get into some festivals because of this. This is just not acceptable.
JP: Did that happen? Did you not get into some of the festivals because of the casting flop?
KE: I suspect. The optics are terrible. You do sort of a colonial-esque feeling all-white film out of South Africa? I mean, it’s not great.
JP: I know I’m not the only person to compare your film to The Beguiled by Sofia Coppola, which is also a mostly white cast that takes place in …
KE: [Finishing the sentence] …the Antebellum South.
JP: We don’t have to talk about Glasshouse too much, but was that intentional? Even the soft lighting felt [inspired by Coppola’s film.]
KE: No. I hadn’t seen the film. Everyone was [telling me to see it.]
This is a little inflammatory, and I’m not particularly proud of this, I [also] think it can be very good, [but] I don’t watch very many movies.
It’s not because I don’t want to. It’s because of the way I was raised. I wasn’t allowed to watch television if my mom was home, which I think was healthy. We weren’t a TV-oriented family, and she worked. I would get excited whenever she went to work. I’d sprint upstairs [to] watch movies with my dad. [That became a bonding thing with my dad.] So movies, for me, are a shared experience. It’s not something you do alone. I don’t just watch anything. It feels sad or lonely to watch things alone [because of] how I was raised. So unless it’s like an assignment for research for a job, or I have to, or someone tells me I have to, I don’t watch stuff.
So is that bad? Yeah. I can be a little out of touch with what’s going on. But I’m always blissfully convinced that I’m hugely original. And it’s saved me sometimes because I’ve been accused in certain spaces of like, “Oh, you copycatted this.” [Note: I arguably did this in my review!] And I’ve had the great glee of being like, I haven’t, it was just a happy accident. It was just parallel minds…
JP: Thanks for admitting that. It’s not something most filmmakers are jumping at the bit to admit. You’re breaking a lot of my images of the typical director that I interview by admitting that you don’t watch that many movies and also emailing me a screener after you read my negative review. That’s typically not the way this job works. Typically, if I write a negative review, filmmakers wouldn’t even want to sit for an interview, let alone send me their future work.
KE: You’re a really, really good writer and you’re really, really smart. We need more people like that reviewing movies.
JP: Wow, thank you. I don’t know what to say. Thank you, Kelsey. And, transitioning to The Fix, I think you’re a talented filmmaker who made a good film. That talent was evident with Glasshouse too, even with the shortcomings.
KE: I will be honest, I’m not a saint. Sometimes I’ve read some of the reviews on The Fix and how they’re panning and why, and I’m like, “Fuck you, are you oblivious?” I don’t always respect [criticisms].
JP: Most criticism is bullshit though. That’s fine.
KE: I’m remembering [one review] in particular. It was so funny. They were like, “Why didn’t they lean in more to the VFX? Why didn’t she mutate more? Why didn’t they have more CG?” Have you ever heard of a budget? Do you understand the concept of money?
JP: [Speaking of budgets,] I think you can tell a lot about a filmmaker, or a filmmaker’s vision for a film, from the first person they hire. Who was the first person you brought onto The Fix? What drove that hire?
KE: Well, honestly, my producing partners, because I would never have made this movie without them. Finding the right producing partners did take time, and [we] went through a couple of different producers before we had the recipe for success.
After that, from a creative position, [or] from a crew perspective, without a doubt the cinematographer, gaffer, and editor. Lighting for me is a really big deal. Then very closely followed by the first assistant director because if you don’t get the first AD, cinematographer, and director relationship [right], the movie [won’t] work. That triangle of cooperation is key.
JP: I didn’t expect gaffer to be one of the first positions brought up. That’s a weird one. It makes sense too. One of the things I did like about Glasshouse and that really stuck with me, even though I’ve only seen it once and it was like three years ago, was the lighting. I think you feel that in this film too. I usually hate when a movie is lit the same way from start to finish. That stupid HDR-Netflix look.
KE: I hate it so much.
That’s the map. Nowadays, especially with everyone shooting digital, you’re really reliant on your lighting to get any sense of filmic anything. And I can have a total bitch session about how shocking I feel like things look these days and how shitty most lighting and grade are. I’ll watch stuff on [huge budgets] and I’m appalled, absolutely appalled, by the way it looks.
My favorite cinematographers usually start as gaffers, and [my] cinematographers historically choose the gaffer. With my cinematographer choices, I’m usually looking at three main things. I’m looking at their lighting, I’m looking at how versatile they are as operators, as well as standing back. I’ve never had a big enough budget not to have my cine [DP] operating. And I want someone who’s very agile and very comfortable in that space. And then [also] personality, how well we work with each other and how well we click, how good our shorthand is because it’s key.
JP: You’ve done a lot of stunt work. How did that work shape you as a director and the way you approach directing?
KE: Everything’s a dance to me. And maybe it was a dance to me before stunts. Movement has always been important to me. And I did when I was directing more theater, when I started as a director, I always had dance and a lot of movement in my work. Choreography to me, even if it’s just a walking scene, is a dance between the camera and the movement of the cast. And when I’m designing how a scene is covered, any sense of dynamic motion is something that I’m always looking at how to incorporate. Or when I choose stillness, and the camera’s just sitting in a space, that’s also a choice. It’s a very powerful choice if you have a little bit of movement. And I’m always very aware of that.
Stunts definitely heightened my understanding of using the camera and camera tricks to support the emotion of a scene or to support the intensity or impact of a scene. [As a point of] personal transformation, stunts are probably the most profound thing I’ve ever done in my own life that changed me or forced growth on me as a human being.
JP: How so?
KE: Oh, God. I had to learn to accept limitations, which I hate.
I had to learn to accept myself when I was never as good as I wanted to be and sit in those frustrations. I had to learn how to be injured and how to still be a decent human being if I was frustrated or angry with myself and let that be okay. I had to learn how to listen to my body. And that every day you are not going to get the same version of you and what you’re capable of. It’s the idea of moving water. You go around the rock, you don’t try to force through it. A lot of directing is like that on a set.
Stunts are akin to that. You have a lot of stuff thrown at you, a lot of high stakes, a lot of pressure, a lot of potential for things to go horribly wrong. And you have to keep your head on your shoulders and not let the bustle and the franticness and the rush of the day distract you from safety, distract you from what the core elements of [what you] need despite the pressures. [You need a] war perspective.
The determination was also an incredible lesson in what is possible from people. If you show them you believe in them and you show up for them, [amazing things can happen.] We’re going to do this. Mistakes will happen. We will have days where we fuck up. But it’s how we solve it counts. There are a lot of applicable life lessons in stunts, and that’s one of them.
JP: Is your direction safer too?
KE: Huge. Huge. Stunt work has made me psychotically risk-averse.
When we were shooting the scene with Ella right on the edge of the roof– which was cheated, by the way, she was never right on the edge. We just made it look like that. But my camera guys were going quite close to the edge of the roof planning the shot because they were walking, tracking back with the camera. They were essentially the tracks. We couldn’t afford [a steady cam]. So they had to stabilize a MoVi rig to get the look we wanted, and they were getting quite close to the edge before they had their harnesses on. I was screaming at them. [Well, not screaming, but] I was telling them to get back. It’s like it’s my production company. If there’s one gust of wind, if there’s one slip, I’m liable. Even if we’re walking from location A to location B, it’s a little location move, and we’re walking through the city, I’m mother-henning my crew and shouting at everyone to stay together.
And that fucks my day. You’re thinking about these things all the time, and even with that, you still make mistakes. There’s still a moment where something goes past you and that’s where your 1st-AD comes in. That’s where every department head needs to be on top of their game. It’s that voice that’s saying “Oh, can we just check that, actually?” that saves lives or saves the day. Asking those questions is scary, but you want those people around you on a shoot.
JP: I’m glad I asked. That was great. Speaking of dangers, your first two films both involve some sort of toxin that’s spread through the air.
KE: I know. Not a good look.
JP: How did Covid and the pandemic play into these, if at all?
KE: It’s awkward for lots of reasons.
The Fix is a younger version of me. I wrote that script in 2013 and then did various revision passes because, for every new person that you think is going to come on board with some financing, you need a revision. They have their comments. Up until about 2018 and 2019, we were pretty locked in. But from 2013 to 2016, so many revisions, 2017, so many revisions. I’ll be honest, I feel like if I managed to make the film when I wanted to make the film, at any point between 2015 and 2019, I would be seen as omniscient, and now I’m only going to be seen as derivative. And that does make me a little sad. It’s kind of frustrating.
The toxin thing [though…]. At that point, when we were developing the concept for Glasshouse and in February of 2020, I still didn’t know if I was ever going to manage to make The Fix. And [my Glasshouse co-writer Emma Lungiswa De Wet and I] even talked about whether or not they were too close because she had read The Fix.
JP: There are two big motivating socio-cultural anxieties of The Fix: big business, specifically big-pharma, and climate change. Those are two things that you see a lot in sci-fi, but you don’t usually see them related to each other. It’s one or the other. How important was the relation of the two to your vision for The Fix?
KE: Honestly, I think you can’t really have one without the other because climate change is so influenced by big business, and it’s how corporations choose to engage with this problem that impacts the continuation of the problem or whether or not we manage to pull ourselves back and change course. I don’t think we can be in a capitalistic society and not have the two be intertwined. I think that’s very well observed [though], and again, a credit to you to see that. It probably just didn’t even occur to me that it wouldn’t all be interlinked. That was just obvious to me. And, of course, then they’re going to fuck it up and drive [us] to extinction.
JP: When we were talking previously, we briefly discussed Paul WS Anderson and Milla Jovovich. How have those two influenced the way you think about movies?
KE: I have so much respect for what Paul built with the Resident Evil franchise because that could have been so schlocky, it really could have been, and it’s a credit to him as a filmmaker that he made cinema. Milla is his muse. Exceptionally talented. She is just a revelation. I’m sure you noticed all my little nods to The Fifth Element in The Fix, down to what the models were wearing and all of that. When we were casting Ella, I wanted to find a young Jovovich. This is what we were looking for here with this role. That’s the thing where you have sci-fi that on the surface is glossy or just a good time, but then it’s elevated by a performance like that to become so human and have so much heart. That’s really what Fifth Element did, and something that I would aspire to do as a filmmaker.
Paul has similarly achieved that in films you wouldn’t think someone would. He’ll bring that heart to elevate the work, even in the context of action, obviously. I hugely admire them as a team. And to be able to work so closely with your partner and have that work is a gift. Very few people are lucky enough to have that.
JP: I saw another interview where you talked about yourself as an old Star Wars director instead of a new one in regards to how you shoot action and use digital technologies. But we also just talked about Paul WS Anderson, who’s sort of like the custodian of digital cinema. I am wondering now, what did you mean by “new Star Wars?” Are you referencing the last five years or whatever? Because the prequels are also on the cutting edge of that digitalism.
KE: I’m showing my age here. For me, the new Star Wars [is anything after the original trilogy.] I was horrified by their creative approach to those movies. I was pretty traumatized by that. The new stuff, it is chronic, you’ll have moments of “ahh” and shocking moments of “ohhh.” I don’t really want to speak to that. I grew up on the original three. I named my dog Skywalker. I was absolutely obsessed. I watched them a million times, and they [are] so deeply lodged in my heart.
I don’t know if you saw Light & Magic [the mini-series about ILM]. It’s beautiful. I think that type of problem-solving and coming together and doing things or figuring out things in a practical way to create these incredible effects that no one had ever done before, but with figurines and models and clever plays of light through glass and all this stuff, [is amazing]. I love that. It’s very DIY arts-and-crafts.
It’s also artisanal. It’s protecting a type of art that is dying. Matte painting, puppetry, and all that… I want to protect that. I still want people to exist in the world that can paint like that, and I don’t want them to die out because AI takes over and steals their job. I will always prefer that route. And this is what’s so painful. I am a hypocrite because my vision for The Fix was to be 60-70% prosthetics and then elevated and supplemented with VFX. But because of practical and logistical reasons, it ended up being forced into the opposite. We used prosthetics and they were very, very useful and key, but we ended up doing way more VFX than we ever planned for a number of reasons. We lost the original actress for Ella, and we’d already put $30,000 into prosthetics. We didn’t have the money to redo it. We’d had specific eye measurements and optometrist appointments made for the original actress for her contact lenses, so by the time we cast Grace, we’d lost the time we needed to get the contact lenses made the way we needed them to be made. So we used VFX for that too. That’s the thing. You have your dream of how you want to make movies, and then you have the reality of what you have.
JP: I’m wondering if you’re not giving yourself enough credit there. There are over 600 VFX shots. I think of the bathroom fight scene with the interesting camera movement. Is that a digital camera movement?
KE: Oh, which shot are you talking about?
JP: There’s a few, but in the first scene right after she takes the drug and she’s in the bathroom, and then she’s eventually hiding on the ceiling.
KE: That was all practical.
Well, in post-production and in the edit, sometimes we’ll add some camera movement or camera shake if we need to, but I don’t think we did that for the bathroom scene. I could be wrong. We had both Grace and her stunt double-rigged on the ceiling. That was all practical, and we pretty carefully choreographed the fight sequence in the bathroom, making sure that we were getting the angles that we wanted. Honestly, I could redo that bathroom scene a million times, and I’ll probably never be happy with it to this day.
That scene was honestly my nemesis because the proof of concept that I shot eight years ago was that same scene.
I’d already shot listed and worked it out in my head so carefully once. We were [also] so pressed for time, and in a weird way, shooting in that bathroom, it was like a dungeon. All of our crew felt it. There was a weird thing about that bathroom.
JP: Action in close quarters has to be difficult too, I imagine.
KE: It’s fun. I love the moment when Christian slams Tafara Nyatsanza [as Tully] up against the wall, and then Tully grabs the gun. I love that moment. It was a lot of fun doing the rigging with her up on the ceiling. I love that moment when he sees her and she’s looking down at him. But yeah, all of that was practical. I’m very proud of that.
JP: I know you’re from Wisconsin, but now South Africa is home. Could you recommend a few South African films for an audience that’s very unfamiliar with that cinema industry?
KE: Oliver Hermanus’s first film, Shirley Adams, is a phenomenal movie. It’s a really, really powerful film. I actually discovered Keenan Arrison, who plays Solomon in The Fix because of the film. I was just astounded. And Denise Newman was someone who I wanted to cast badly because I was so blown away by her performance.
That one for sure. Everyone knows this movie because it won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, but Tsotsi is a revelation.
JP: What’s next?
KE: I wish I knew. The industry imploded, I don’t know if you’ve noticed. It’s a really bad time. I don’t know how things are going to go. It’s never been this bad. It’s so bad. So you’d think that after two directing credits, you’ve proved yourself, but…
JP: Hopefully, The Fix changes that.
KE: My dream is to work with really amazing talented producers and [creatives] doing better work, sustaining a quality that I grew up watching and revering and want to achieve and honor in my own work.
JP: Thank you, Kelsey. Thank you for reaching out to me, thank you for your vulnerability. And thank you for doing this interview. I’m very glad we got to talk today.
KE: I’m so grateful to you also for being so receptive to that first unexpected olive branch. I’m also really grateful for your amazing writing, frankly. It’s a privilege to make movies and know that people like you will say something intelligent about them, whether that’s good or bad. Just to know that there’s some brain power out there.
The Fix
2024
dir. Kelsey Egan
98 min.
The Fix is currently available digitally and on demand
