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| Kelsey Egan, director of The Fix and Glasshouse, with her dog, who also makes an appearance in The Fix Photo: Benjamin Reisner |
As a film critic focused on independent cinema, I see a lot of first features, and I’m always looking out for new talent, but in over 30 years of doing this job I’ve only seen a handful of débuts as fully realised an impeccably crafted as 2021’s Glasshouse. I was delighted at the time to get to talk to its director, South African Kelsey Egan, and equally happy when, this month, I learned that she had a new film, The Fix, screening in the closing slot at the Chattanooga Film Festival.
Kelsey was happy to catch up, and we chatted about the trilogy of science fiction films which she had originally planned on making, and how she had run into delays – a common issue in the industry. The Fix, however, struggled more than most.
“I wrote the first draft of the script in 2013, and as I worked to try to get it financed and packaged over years and years, I would be told different things by industry professionals. Every time a new person was interested in coming on board, they had their round of script notes, and then I made all those revisions, and then they didn't come on board.”
She sighs. As a writer myself, I know how soul-destroying that kind of thing can be – and yet she persisted.
“I undertook and wrote that whole script on spec for no money. With Glasshouse, at least we were getting development funds. And so I was squeezing it in while I tried to make a living. With Glasshouse, I had the privilege of being committed to it full time and fully focused on it because I was being paid for that development process, whereas The Fix has just been a labour of love every step of the way.”
Although it was made on quite a small budget, she creates a really big world through small details, I note.
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| Grace Van Dien as Ella in The Fix |
“I'm really glad that was clear,” she says, thanking me. “I'm really proud of that little detail. More time is always beneficial to any creative project, just to reflect and think about it. But at the same time, The Fix was thrown in so many different directions over the years and had so many different voices weighing in, there were so many different versions of that film over the years. But I think, if I'm completely honest, I'm probably just a very detail oriented person, and regardless of the time I get, I end up being pretty focused on detail. That just might be who I am.”
Something about the story that stood out to me, aside from the fact that, once again, there is something wrong with the air, was that when we talked about Glasshouse, she said that she had been interested in showing the reality behind women who are portrayed as very delicate. The Fix strikes me as doing something similar, particularly because its heroine (Ella, played by Grace Van Dien) is a model, and models tend to be written off as fragile or stupid in most films.
“That was 100% something I was interested in exploring,” she says. “What's weird about the parallels or similarity between Glasshouse and The Fix, with regards to air being a thing, I wrote The Fix years before Glasshouse. When Emma and I were brainstorming concepts to pitch, and were coming up with the Glasshouse idea, I was like, ‘Oh, I don't know – is this too close to The Fix? And then we were like, ‘Oh, it's probably fine. It's different enough. It’s very different world.
“Off the back of Glasshouse I was lucky enough to finally get the buy in for this project that I've been fighting so hard to make for literally ten years, to close the financing and attach the cast. That was signed off on. So I would say that is more of like a coincidence, not necessarily a fixation. But what isn't a coincidence and what you observed very accurately is that, and it’s something that was very much on my mind with The Fix.
“This is probably quite personal. So like, I was a massive nerd as a kid. I have -11 vision. My parents noticed when I was five – I would need binoculars, using binoculars. And so I got glasses really young and they were very thick and I was like a big reader and I was just a huge dork. So I got teased a lot in school. And then the summer after fifth grade, going into 6th grade, I cut my hair and got contact lenses. When I went to school for the first day of 6th grade, we'd had two different elementary schools merge. So there were a lot of kids there that didn't know me from elementary school. And I still remember, like it was yesterday what that felt like, because it was probably one of the most unsettling, disturbing experiences I've ever had.
“Based on nothing – not wearing glasses and having a haircut – it was the first time I'd ever received overtures of friendship from other kids in a way that was warm and open. It was the first time that I was treated in certain ways by boys. It was very weird. And I was the same person, right? But these tiny little appearance tweaks made this huge difference to the way the external world was engaging with me. It made me really think about how much the way we're treated is based on appearances, how it impacts our worldview, impacts how we feel about the world, impacts how we feel about ourselves.
“Much as we'd like to believe we control that in many ways, I wonder if we don't. So that really emotionally affected me and has never left me, and it informed how I feel about a lot of issues surrounding representation and demographics and different forms of practice that I think are horrifically unfair and wrong. And I think a lot of those themes were in my mind when I conceptualised The Fix and the character of Ella.”
The other thing really stands out where women are concerned is that the emotional core of the film is a friendship between two women, rather than a romantic plotline.
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| Fleur du Cap nominee Nicole Fortuin as Angela in The Fix |
“Yeah. And for me, that fight between her and Gina [played by Robyn Rossouw] is the penultimate conflict in the film. The most powerful, beautiful. We worked so hard. Those actresses, they brought it on the day, Robyn and Grace. They knew how important that scene was emotionally, because we all know how pivotal those female friendships are. When the whole world turns on you, that's the one thing you have. When the boy doesn't like you or dumps you and you're mistreated by everything, it's those great female friendships that get you through. So when that female friendship also turns on you, it's devastating, right? Because that person knew you best, in theory. So it's really important to me to delve into that.
“I hope that it resonates with other people because I think emotionally, it really resonates with me, and the importance of that friendship to Ella, even if she wasn't very good at externally expressing her gratitude or what something meant to her. I think Grace does a beautiful job of internalising that and showing her outer façade of giving no fucks and not caring, but actually caring so deeply. I think she got that balance really well. But it's all very subtle, nuanced performance stuff, so I hope people pick up on it because I really think she did beautifully. And Robin as well. It's just such terrific talent, so stunning. She's an incredibly powerful, emotional performer.”
I tell her than when watching I was thinking throughout that I knew Grace's face from somewhere, and I realised that she has a cameo in Charlie Says, where she's so good that I never forgot it. But Ella is quite a clumsy character in a lot of ways. She's young. She doesn't know what she's doing. She's a bit overwhelmed even before things start to happen to her body, so it's really important that we can see the way she's behaving and who she thinks she is, separately from seeing who she really is as a person.
“Yeah. Her backstory was something we worked really hard on because especially in a Sci-Fi story where so much world building is required, there's so many moving parts. You could argue that The Fix is really character-heavy and there's so many important characters that managing to track them all, giving everyone the screen time they deserve, is something that we had to work really hard to make sure of. That we clearly set up each character, how and why they are important to one another. and what those relationship dynamics are. It was something that we put a lot of thought into. I hope the impact of all of those relationships read as powerfully on the screen.”
We go on to talk about the mutations that Ella experiences after helping herself to somebody else’s drugs at a party.
“Obviously, budget was a massive concern,” Kelsey says. “A lot of the design was built around how we can save money and how we can be very specific in when we show things and at what stage of the film. So there's different phases to what is happening to her. We're very specific in planning out those phases so that we only delivered the final phase in the last act, so we didn't have to do as much as we would have needed to if the transformation was faster. But we also really leaned into the fact that she'd be trying to hide what was going on, which was very realistic.
“She's wearing long sleeves whenever she can. She's trying to cover and hide her body, which I relate to as a woman. Like, when you feel comfortable showing your body, when you don't. At first we set her up as a character who shows off her body as the only thing that's of value, the only thing she ever gets any positive feedback on. What really resonates with me is the line ‘Who I am doesn't matter. No-one actually likes me.’ It's just this external appearance that people respond well to – everything else, no-one really cares about. And so in her wardrobe choices and her bearing in the beginning of the film, we’re really setting up that she shows off her body. And then, from the moment the transformation starts happening, she's hiding as much as possible. But that really saved us from a budget point of view.”
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| Something in the air |
There’s all that character stuff going on, and the mutations, but the other thing that really stands out about the film is the quantity and sheer quality of the action.
“I worked for eight years as a stunt performer,” she reveals. “Probably one of the greatest gifts I've ever received in my life was the opportunity to learn and grow with stunt professionals who are infinitely more skilled and talented than me. I fell into it. I started training with stunt people because I wanted to get better at action directing. It was a skill set I wanted as a director. I always made a concerted effort to work for multiple departments because I figured that to be the best director I could be, I must understand where all the departments were coming from and what they needed from directors, to maximize what they could contribute to production.
“No-one was more shocked than me when that actually led to stunts castings and getting the opportunity to actually work as a stunt performer on very big sets, within the first year even of doing stunt work. I mean, I was training an insane amount. I got to audition for Mad Max: Fury Road, and again, no one was more shocked than me when I was selected as one of four girls to be on that stunt team and went through this insane workshop process. It was probably one of the coolest things I've ever done, but the whole time, I felt like such an imposter, getting to go to Namibia and work on the initial fight choreography for the five wives and all that.
“I didn't stay for the whole shoot, but just even that experience was so remarkable, and I think I've never lost my passion for that and my love for that community. So anytime I get to have big action in anything I do, I get really excited because it's getting to reconnect with my crew and do the thing we all love so much. I truly appreciated The Fall Guy. That was so important to us because stunt performers have played such a massive role in movies for so many years, as unsung heroes. It's really meaningful to get some acknowledgement. As a director, I always get really excited when I can do action sequences that have a little bit of a twist or something that you're not expecting, as a shout out to this community.
“In The Fix there's one specific fight sequence, which I won't talk about, but two of my dear friends who are two of the most talented performers, they do this sequence with Ella, and we had so much fun choreographing that together and working that out. And these are guys who, you know, one of them was flown to Australia to be on Furiosa, so I feel like it's a privilege to work with these performers who are my friends. I hope that comes through in this, how much fun we had with, you know. And also, I have to be really grateful to this community because they really showed up for me. We didn't have the budget of these big projects. They really pulled out all the stops to bring an exceptional level of work despite the fact that this was a small film. That means so much.
“I think the other thing is that Glasshouse was such a micro budget film. I tried to throw in some action elements in Glasshouse, some little fights and stuff, but that's quite minimal. And with The Fix, I really wanted the opportunity to show off that skill set, because I feel like more women should get to do action films, right? I’d like to get to direct bigger action films. And I love working with the stunt department. I'm really intimately familiar with their process and what they need from a director. I've seen big films where stunt people are tragically under-utilised simply because the director didn't have the experience to know how to maximize and trust what they could deliver. And I have the privilege to get to play with those things.”
We talk about the work that went into getting the setting right.
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| Clancy Brown, Daniel Sharman and Nicole Fortuin in The Fix |
“Our pre production period was six weeks. Not enough time, but I had a very good sense of what locations I needed to use anyway because I had this film in my head for so many years and I wanted to shoot it for so many years. So, like, every project, every set that I was on over years and years in Cape Town, I was like, ‘This would be great for this...’ So I already had a pretty strong sense of where we would need to go to create this building and each different location we needed to use to cobble it together. It was a huge collaboration between action and VFX and everyone, really.
“We did have a huge amount of locations for such a small film. We needed to make sure we took care of our crew. How do we schedule so that we're not doing location moves every single day? How do we block it so that, like, one week is location but then the next week there's a couple of days just in studio, as a little bit of a break? We were very cognisant of that. But then you're also working around the locations’ availability and when they say you can get in there.”
I also ask her about her experience of working with Clancy Brown, because for anyone who loves genre film, that’s an amazing coup.
“That was all down to my exceptional producing partner, Allison Friedman. She was lucky enough to work with Clancy on another indie project of hers called The Mortuary Collection, and she had a relationship with him from that. When The Fix came up and we got financed and were closed, Allison was like, ‘Let’s give him a try.’ And she reached out to him and his team, and he was like, ‘Sure.’ And I was just like, ‘Oh my God! How could I be so lucky?’ And then there was this really fun parallel. Because Grace is Caspar Van Dien’s daughter he and came to South Africa to shoot Starship Troopers 3, so it felt like this whole funny, full circle thing where Grace was now getting to go shoot a movie in South Africa, following her dad's footsteps, and with the Starship Troopers connection with Clancy, it was all in the family.
“For a young director to work with an actor with as much experience as Clancy and that much incredible ability and talent, I have to say he is such a gem. He's a consummate professional, so lovely to work with, but he makes the effort to put everyone at ease around him and make it fun. And I'm always, as a director, trying to make it fun, but when you have an actor working with you to make sure the experience is lovely for everyone...He's incredibly grounded, he's incredibly warm and just a true actor. He delivers, he cares. He gets so much variation, he's so responsive with notes and so fun and brings to so many different things. Getting to work with him was definitely a highlight of the experience because he embodies everything you would hope for.”
So how does she feel about the film screening at Chattanooga?
“I love that festival,” she says. “It’s basically a father/son operation. Chris [Dortch] Jr., it was, I think, his brainchild, and he watches something like 700 films every year in doing the selection, and then his father helps. Chris Sr. is just the most wonderful, warm, caring, exceptionally intelligent personality. He's a sports journalist. I think he's in the basketball hall of Fame as a writer for a basketball book. He's the most eclectic, interesting man, and they really care about creating this experience for filmmakers and the community.
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| Facing the future |
“They really support films they're passionate about, that they love, that they feel have value or make commentary on the world or bring something of substance. And it's not coming from a political place in any way. It's not coming from a ‘Oh, who can you programme that will get the most crowds’ place. You know what I mean? It's truly about love of cinema that they feel is special, and I was really touched by that. They were so warm and effusive about the film and wanting it for the closing night selection, and, you know, it just felt like the right fit.
“I think if there's anything that I'd love to make sure that audiences know it’s that the script was written in 2013, because we have this running joke with this project that if I'd made the film when I wanted to, anytime between 2015 and 2019, I would be seen as omniscient. So I’m making sure that everyone is very aware that this was not a response to the pandemic. And when Luc Besson's Lucy came out I was terrified because I'd written the script before that, and I was so worried that it was too similar. All this stuff where you just watch people doing things that you had written, but you couldn't get them to be made because no-one believed you could do it or they thought the project was too ambitious for the budget, you know, all this stuff. So it did turn into a bit of a vendetta project of, like, ‘Yes, we can do it for this amount.’ So I'm super proud that we were able to make it and prove what I'd been advocating for.”
