GIRL BAND is story of four best friends, and bandmates, who are ready to leave their hometown for Los Angeles. The only downside is the life they’ve known happens to get in the way as they try to escape.
From the short synopsis it comes off very cliche, but it’s far from that. They’re real girls, reacting to real life situations, and looking like real life women. Not falling asleep on a New York subway after a huge rager, getting their handbag stolen, and wondering shot to shot stark naked as to how it could have happened. (I’ll give you a hint. Don’t fall asleep on a New York ANYTHING. ::rolls eyes::)
During Tribeca Film Festival, we met up with creators Kerry Furrh, Olivia Mitchell, Cailin Lowry as well as cast member, Sideara St. Claire, to discuss women in film, how this idea came about, and life since being accepted to Tribeca. [side note – these ladies are as real as real can be!]
Do you relate to your character?
Sideara: Yeah. I mean, I feel like Ria is kind of immature, but I can be also. It’s just the way she carries herself that was really like a version of myself, you know? She’s kind of an attention whore.
Kerry: She’s so sympathetic and you pull that off so well.
Olivia: You did. You’re really good at listening. Like that one look on your face in the car scene…
Cailin: That’s one of my favorite moments, when she shoots this look over her shoulder, because it has laughter but it also has like, “Shut the fuck up.” It’s amazing and such a cool thing to pull off. I love that moment.
Is this your first segue way into acting?
Sideara: I’ve been doing a lot of acting stuff but I haven’t had anything in the Tribeca. It’s not my first but I’ve worked with some other people that I know they know or have worked with. It’s been really nice.
Cailin: We got her early in her career which is cool.
Olivia: We snagged her before she becomes Jennifer Lawrence.
I was going to say that but then I was like, will she be offended? (everyone laughs)
Kerry: Sideara is so good. Adrienne [Visnic] was good, too. You and Adrienne were some of the best actresses I’ve ever worked with. The whole Girl Band cast was incredible!
Sideara: Thank you. That means a lot.
Cailin: It’s also fun that, I’m sorry, we’re taking over, but it’s fun to see the different styles because Sideara’s very natural. You can give her a script and she got it. She understood the subtext that was there. She understood the character immediately and that’s really cool to see because we went to film school and we worked with a lot of people who are studying a little bit more traditional, breaking down the script and finding the beats. It was really special to see someone who can just take a script and get it.
Olivia: Second nature. It was interesting editing, too. Kerry edited the whole thing and we all sat there and watched. Every take of Sideara’s was good which was astounding – sometimes actors have awesome takes but the takes aren’t as consistent.
Cailin: Adrienne went to USC. We all went to USC and we had heard of her because she was so well known in the program and she is an amazing, pretty traditional, by the book kind of actor. It was cool to see how she would prepare and deal with it versus how Sideara would.
Sideara: The writing made it really easy, too.
I sometimes feel as if people take these sorts of stories and they use language that people really wouldn’t use. Throughout I thought, “I would say that,” or “I can relate to that.” My sister and I would never share drinks because she would always spit in it, and I’d be like, “This bitch!” (everyone laughs) But people really do that. So how did this story come about?
Kerry: It started a long time ago. I was friends with Olivia and some other musicians,and I was listening to the songs they’d send me that I understood the stories behind and how the lyrics related to their lives. I was fascinated by how they put their emotions into the songs. Songs on the radio are broadcast to everyone.
Olivia: The songs are like journal entries, it’s so weird. No other craft is that intimate. Just for some background, I was a music major and they were film majors. Around the time Kerry came up with the idea, I was trying to do music as a singer and she was filming my videos for me.
Kerry: I was super interested in that and kind of started writing some stuff, then brought Olivia into it and then Cailin came on board about a year later and it started out as a web series first that we decided to ditch.
Cailin: …that Olivia and I were in.
Sideara: Really?
Cailin: (everyone laughs) Yeah, and it’s at the bottom of a drawer on some hard drive.
Kerry: After the web series we really wanted it to be a TV concept and we created a bible for it and we created all these ideas and we were going to write the pilot and just develop the world and the story and pitch it to people. No one was quite getting the vision of what exactly we wanted to do so we went out and shot this so people could see this is the world and these are the characters.
Cailin: I say there were a lot of hashtag meetings because it would be like oh, #feminism, #youngwomen. It really felt like that. You’d see the money in their eyes but then they weren’t getting that we didn’t want these girls to necessarily look like supermodels and we wanted them to feel like real girls that you want to hang out with. I don’t really see that many characters on TV that I actually want to spend real life time with.
Olivia: A lot of it to me is the crudeness. We are very loud-mouthed and crude and open with each other. On TV women are typically a little bit more demure than we are, so we’re looking to change that.
Cailin: It’s very real. Right before you came in we were both talking about how we need to go poop. And I’ve been going out drinking every night and having those big after drink farts in the morning. I’m happy to talk about it.
It’s like when I do Skype interviews, when it’s a guy, I have to put makeup on. For a woman, I would never do that.
Olivia: You don’t worry as much, exactly, exactly. We call our attitude, “Locker room humor,” for girls. As far as your question about where the idea actually came from, we had all this music inspiration. There was a moment one day when we were looking at Netflix trying to find a new coming of age, female-driven comedy show. We were like searching for two hours in our dorm room that sounds crazy. We had no lives in college. (everyone laughs)
We were searching for really long and couldn’t find anything that looked like what we wanted to watch and so we were like, “Let’s make it.”Let’s try to do something that channels what she was saying with the music influence, things that we listen to and how we talk. That was the initial spark that got the idea going, I guess.
How did the characters develop?
Cailin: It’s funny because we had, and she was talking about this earlier, but we had written for the TV concept this whole bible that’s like a 60-page exploration of all the characters of what we wanted the story to be. I totally forgot your question.
Olivia: When you said that about how the characters developed I’m like I don’t even remember because we’ve been doing this for 4 years.
Kerry: I remember when we discovered that Ria and Moxley should be sisters and that’s when everything started to click. They’re like totally yin and yang. They both strive so much for attention but they’re so different. Then we kind of created two yin and yang characters. Elle and Stef are kind of opposites.
Cailin: What my thought was that I just remembered was we had these bible characters that we had developed and they started out based on how you take different personality traits from different people you know and build characters. Then when we cast, the actors really influenced how we view the characters. Now we’re writing a new pilot with some of the actors’ tendencies in mind.
When I’m writing it now I’m like okay, “How would Sideara say this line?” Now to me she is Ria, and it’s the same with all of them. You kind of have their actual speaking voices in your head now, which is so helpful when writing. It’s kind of this weird cycle thing because it’s like obviously we had the characters before, but the cast has so embodied them and made them their own that it’s influenced what we do now.
Olivia: It’s a long evolution. It’s like you spend so long coming up with the perfect chemistry and then yeah, you still every day –
Kerry: We’re constantly adding layers to the characters –
Olivia: Yeah, adding dimension and trying to make them as complex as possible and getting them…
Kerry: We write a lot, too.
Olivia: We’ve written 30 versions of our pilot script. We’re really intent on trying to make this into a TV series ideally.
So you want to make it into a series, not a feature?
Kerry: A series of some sort. We have so many stories to tell of them. To follow their journey you just can’t do it right in a feature. You need to see them on a daily basis
Cailin: It’s funny because at a film festival obviously people are like oh, are you making a feature film, we’ve gotten that question a lot. It’s kind of fun to be like no, this was made as a proof of concept…
Olivia: Tribeca is validating our whole pitch process so much. We had been desperately just trying to get in rooms with people and all of a sudden Tribeca happened and it’s like wow now we can’t respond to all the emails. (everyone laughs) Last week while Kerry and Cailin were busy working on other Girl Band stuff I was like I’m going to just email literally every person in the Tribeca directory.
Cailin: There was this link within a link and I was just clicking on it. I was like they have the list of everyone who’s coming. She takes it and is like I’m going to email every single one.
Sideara: Wait, you’re emailing who?
Kerry: All industry people who are here.
Olivia: We got an agent a couple days ago who’s really cool. That came as a result of one of those emails and he responded to the email. He was like I love your email attitude. You guys are really balls-y for emailing a New York agent when you’re in LA. What are you doing, but I like you so much.
Cailin: I think also, though, we spend a lot of time even in composing the email that she sent out. We take the time to figure out how do we make this funny and how do we make this something that people are going to actually read and click on the links for something.
Olivia: We’re very anal retentive about every little detail. It helps to have 3 of us because it goes through three layers of body control.
Kerry: We can each take a part of it.
Cailin: We say we’re like the U.S. government; we have the checks and balances.
The 3 branches.
Cailin: You just took that to the next level. I hadn’t really thought of it that in-depth. I just thought of the general concept of checks and balances but now look.
Kerry: We’ve got to analyze that a little more so we can hash it out.
Olivia: We have a creative marriage now.
Cailin: We talk about how we’re three moms who aren’t married and birthed this baby and we went into a post-birth depression for a little bit. Then we got into Tribeca. It’s the whole thing.
Tell us about the other characters?
Olivia: Moxley’s her sister; she’s the rainbow hat eating pizza in the car. She’s like Kerry said, the yin to her yang. She’s like the biting, cynical character but also very lovable.
Cailin: Penelope also really changed that character after we cast her. She described herself, I’m actually going to pull my phone out. She said something that it is, that totally changes the way, and I wrote it down because originally the character had been really dark, like very dark. Penelope brings something to it that is really special because she’s dark but she’s really funny and she would never want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
Kerry: It was something like dark without bringing other people down.
Cailin: I love that. I love that because the character went from kind of being someone who does cut people down and undercut people. Penelope has this really special spirit about her where she’s a super positive supportive person, but she’s also got this insanely dark sense of humor.
Olivia: She disses you in a loving way.
Kerry: The first time we met Penelope, too, she never acted before and she shows up at our house for rehearsal and was so invested. She was putting everything into it and wanted to do everything. She came over to our house later to finish up rehearsal with us and she committed to it so much. She was so positive and encouraging.
Olivia: We were all very intimidated by her because she’s a few years older than us and she has a massive following online for her. She’s a designer and illustrator and animator and she has a pretty big fan base. We’re like this girl’s not going to want anything to do with us when we messaged her. We actually found her after going through thousands of people through traditional casting. We stumbled upon her after searching on Instagram accounts because we’re like that’s how you can get a sense of people’s personality.
We found her Instagram account one night at one in the morning and we’re like this is the girl So we messaged her. She was surprisingly like “I was just lying on my bed the other day thinking it would be cool to be an actor one day and then you emailed me so yeah, I’ll do it.”
She flew out from New York on her own accord and came out and shot the whole thing. Her Instagram is super biting and cynical and dark. They’re saying in person it’s funny; she brings a warmth to such a seemingly dark character.
Cailin: I think we got very lucky with both Sideara and Penelope because they are artists beyond just acting. She’s a designer and kind of a creative entrepreneur. They take craft seriously in a way that I haven’t really seen because I feel Penelope hadn’t acted before she was like this is a new art for me and I’m going to figure out how to do it and take it really seriously and totally commit.
Olivia: She understands what mastering a new art form means and dove into it big time. Adrienne was a mutual friend from USC. We all went to USC and we had heard about her through our friends. Adrienne is one of the best people in the USC acting school.
She came into our auditions and she was the last person who came in after a very long day of auditions and we were feeling very sad because we weren’t finding anybody and she came in and just nailed it.
Kerry: We had everyone audition, dance to a song of their choice and Adrienne comes in and dances to Style by Taylor Swift and she just like goes all out, she’s like totally shameless.
Cailin: It’s on her Instagram but I describe those auditions, as first of all, obviously we’re young, we don’t have money to have a casting director. We saw every girl who ever sang at a middle school talent show who is trying to be an actress, and that’s what it felt like. It was brutal. It’s awesome that they’re out doing their thing but a lot of people don’t really have an accurate understanding of oh, if this is a music-driven project, they want me to actually be able to sing.
Olivia: It’s not the same as theater singing either. It’s hard but we were so happy to find her, and Elle is the character that’s the moral compass of the group. She’s the more straight edge, a little bit more Type A. Not like in an annoying, stereotypical way but she’s the one who keeps the more eccentric Moxley and Ria contained. Selena plays Stef who’s the last of the 4 girls.
Kerry: She tripped into her audition. She literally walked in and fell.
Cailin: Which was perfect for Stef.
Olivia: Stef’s kind of the scatterbrain, fun in the moment, ADD character. She’s the youngest in the band. She’s like a little sister in the group and she runs and stumbles and we’re like oh, okay, cool.
Cailin: She’s still in high school actually so there was that dynamic too on set.
Do you all already know where the story will go from here?
Kerry: We have a general sense. There’s so many different areas that we want to explore but we know that they’re going to be on the radio. In their world they’re going to make it to radio and they’re always going to stay together.
Olivia: We don’t want to give away too much. The main thing though is that they stay friends. They love each other deeply even if they go through the ups and downs of working on a team; they stay together through the fame.
Kerry: They don’t change too much with fame, either.
Olivia: You see so many stories about how fame corrupts.
Kerry: The story is not about how fame changes you.
Cailin: It’s about how people around you change when you succeed. Because even at this very first step forward, obviously it’s not a small success getting into Tribeca, it’s something we’re really proud of, but it’s funny to even see how people I went to film school with are reaching out and responding to me differently after I have this modicum of success. I’m like okay, thinking about this on such a bigger level.
Olivia: If your song’s on the radio, imagine what happens.
Cailin: Who comes out of the woodwork and who suddenly is your best friend.
Olivia: I think you stay grounded. I mean I found working with Kerry and Cailin; you stay grounded when you’re on a team of people. If I were coming to Tribeca alone I would have such a different experience and we always talk about that. These girls, they have each other which is cool, and they’re all such different personalities, they kind of even each other out and if they get famous and things get crazy, there’s always at least one of them who keeps their cool, even when the other one might be losing it a little bit. That’s how it is with us, too.
Kerry: We wanted to kind of mirror our experiences, too.
You always feel whenever they have a grouping of women they always have the one who leaves because she gets married, then they start fighting…
Olivia: We’re not going to do that.
Kerry: That’s not what we’re looking to do.
Olivia: We want buddies who stay buddies.
Kerry: I mean they’ll grow up but they’re going to stay together. The band, obviously the band can’t go on forever but it’s not going to end because someone leaves.
Olivia: Obviously they’re going to get into their issues and have their fights because that’s human, that happens to everybody, but it’s about the maturity of getting through it and sticking together.
My last question, do you find it hard being a women getting this far, getting help from anyone? Do you think it would be different if you were a guy?
Olivia: Definitely. Definitely. I’m not sure if it’s for better or for worse sometimes. I feel like it depends on the person we’re meeting with. Sometimes people definitely look down at you. Oh you’re a young girl coming into my office, what are you doing? I feel like sometimes it helps, too, though.
Cailin: I’ve started to view it as a game, actually. This industry is a game as it is but I’m fully aware that my experience is very different as a woman. It’s in every aspect but I think having that awareness you have to figure out how to use that to your advantage. Like, in any situation when you’re not the one with all the privilege, and in the film industry women are not the people with the privilege.
Sideara: Even roles. There are not a lot of three main female characters and that’s it, you know what I mean?
Kerry asks Sideara: How was it for you with finding this role, was it something that was different from what you normally do?
Sideara: Yeah, it’s just very much about the girls but it’s not in a way that says this is about the girls, you know what I mean? It’s just like these are people, and this is their thing.
Olivia: Exactly, and that’s what we say, too, we’re like it’s obvious people like to call it a female driven project and we realize we have to say that too because that’s the generation we live in, but at the end of the day it’s just about people who have dreams and friends.
Cailin: That’s the biggest thing for all of us I think is I say we have just been trying to do our best work. That’s what got us here and I think that’s also the attitude you have to have. I’ve had a lot of conversations with women who are in film. I had a conversation on set a couple weeks ago where this girl was just really down on the experience and she was like, “I know I’m never going to get hired and I know I’m never going to be able to direct because I’m a woman.”
Part of the thing is changing that attitude and changing your approach and being okay, I’m going to figure out how to do this. That’s the thing about the three of us as a team. We have this persistence that I sometimes call a delusional persistence. We are going to make this happen and that’s what you have to have. Men have to have that too, it’s just a different experience.
Olivia: I think it helps walking into a room with three of us versus one.
Kerry: Something like women being treated differently in film, it’s something that’s so hard to prove. The feelings that you feel from it but for me I think the one thing that I’ve noticed is women have to prove themselves. People look at it like this is actually good, whereas they thought going into it, it wasn’t going to be good.
Olivia: They go in skeptical rather than going in expecting.
Cailin: Someone said to me after I got into Tribeca, I was on a film, a different film set when I found out and somebody came up to me and said, “Oh, is it about women? Is it a women film?” I was like, “Yeah, actually it is. You can go fuck yourself, man.”
Olivia: Hopefully guys would watch it too if they can realize it’s just people.
Cailin: Would I ever go up to a guy and be like, “Oh, your film that had success, it is about men?” (everyone laughs) Yeah, I’m sure it is. “Is it about your life experience?” (everyone laughs)