‘Sew Torn’ Director Freddy Macdonald and Star Eve Connolly On Their Surprising Action Thriller
The unbridled thrill of director Freddy Macdonald’s Sew Torn is seeing the way he takes established genre ingredients and spins a wholly unique yarn out of them. The basic set-up seems familiar: there’s a drug deal gone wrong and an outcast who sees an opportunity to take advantage of the situation. It’s all set in one of those quaint, tight-knit towns where everybody knows each other’s business. Yet Macdonald subverts this set-up by crafting a “choose your own adventure” type structure for his story, and we witness our protagonist take three wildly different paths from this inciting action.
In Sew Torn, Eve Connolly plays Barbara, a seamstress wrestling with the recent loss of her mother. She’s inherited her mother’s sewing business but finds herself trapped in a web of depression. On a drive back from a job, she stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong: two men lie prostrate on the ground, guns drawn at each other while fighting over a suitcase of money. In that split moment, Barbara is faced with three options: take the money and run, call the police, or drive away. Regardless of the scenario, Barbara’s choices always put her in the path of a familiar host of characters, most notably Calum (Joshua Armitage), one of the men on the road, and his father, John (Hudson Armitage), a ruthless crime kingpin.
Sew Torn is essentially comprised of three short films in that respect, and each one is marked by a standout sequence where Barbara uses her sewing skills to life-saving and riveting effect.
“The thing that we tried to maintain throughout the entire film, though, which was also a struggle in the edit, was not revealing what Barbara is doing until her scheme pays off in real-time,” Macdonald shared.
Connolly and Macdonald separately spoke with Dread Central over Zoom; this piece combines their interviews into one, fluid conversation. They shared about their experiences filming in Switzerland, collaborating with family, and how the film has made them each think about the crossroads they find themselves at in the film industry.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dread Central: Eve, I know Freddy talked with you a lot about the backstory for Barbara … I’d love to hear about what you two fleshed out together for the character.
Eve Connolly: Once we both understood that what drove Barbara was her relationship with her mother, that crystallized everything else. If she loses the store, she’s losing her last connection to her mother, and if she loses that connection, she’s failing her mother. It explains why she fights back with such force throughout the film’s chapters and explains any impulse she has.
I’m very close to my mother, so I was able to connect with Barbara more easily in those emotional moments. I’m not saying I would kill anyone [laughs,] but I would react very strongly if I felt like I was failing my mother in any way. That was all I needed to understand Barbara and help ensure she didn’t come across as a crazy person.
DC: I’m always fascinated by the wardrobe as a way to access the interiority of the character. Like the other characters in the film, you don’t change outfits during this process. Can you talk more about your character’s look and how it helped you access Barbara?
EC: I discussed Barbara’s costume a lot with Freddy and with Costume Designer Viviane Rapp. One of the conclusions we came to was that Barbara probably spent her entire life being dressed by her mother, and that even as she got older, she was trying to dress like her mother. How she dressed was not an expression of who she was, and since she wasn’t particularly confident or sure of herself, her clothes reflected that to them.
In the lead up to filming, me and Freddy had gone back on a number of emails and Vivian on what we were thinking. I had sent through several images that I felt were right for the kind of looks that Barbara would wear, and we were just completely aligned on what we felt she would look like. By the time I arrived on set and Viviane showed me the outfit, I thought it was perfect. This is of lesser importance but not only did the outfit look good, it was very comfortable. Given how physical I get in certain scenes, it was nice to be able to move with freedom and not feel restricted.
DC: I love that idea because it also explains why Barbara skews more analog, such as her using a flip phone. It makes me wonder whether that was her mother’s phone or if her mother had a flip phone.
EC: I think Freddy didn’t want to date the film too much, so that’s one of the reasons why she had that flip phone. At the same time, I think that’s exactly what you said. Barbara is stuck in her life in so many ways, and everything she has is a symbol of that, from the car to the phone. She’s in the past, and everything she has represents that.
DC: As much as Barbara is an introspective character, she engages in a lot of on-screen combat too. I read that for Into the Badlands you had to go to fight camp and a week later, shoot your first scene. I hope you got a bit more lead time here, but I’m curious if your past action choreography helped you out in any way for these scenes?
EC: Into the Badlands was a great introduction to learning about on-screen fighting. Because that was martial arts, it was intense and was a whole new way I had to learn how to fight. Once I could do that, I understood what my capacities and strengths were. Not to spoil my role in Vikings, but I had a pretty intense death scene and was thrown around with fake blood and dirt. I realized through these past projects that I enjoyed doing these stunts.
The thing I was most nervous about for Sew Torn was having to make my sewing look convincing … I’ve never sewn before. Leading up to the film, I would sit at home and just practice those sewing movements over and over again until I felt comfortable enough to do them without looking.
DC: I caught up with your short film Clara, and your brief stint in Meet Me By the Sea … you speak a lot in all of those films. You do that here too, but you’re silent for most of Sew Torn while everyone else around you is quite loud.
EC: Honestly, that was one of the things that drew me to Sew Torn. What I loved was that even if I didn’t have many lines, in any given scene, Barbara was going on an emotional journey, and the fun challenge was thinking about how to communicate that arc without vocalizing anything.
DC: You come from a modeling background and you’ve described how previously cutthroat that is. I’m curious how your time as a model, where you have to perform under scrutiny, has influenced how you act, especially for a role like Barbara where she has to act under pressure.
EC: I started modeling to try and get into acting. I thought there were actors who started as models, so I thought for some reason it would allow me to do that. It didn’t. And I honestly think the main thing that I learned from it was detaching. And the thing of being like, I can’t control how these people see me.
In modeling, some parts of modeling were great, but you would also have shoots where people would be talking about you right in front of your face, and you would just have to really detach from that and try not to let those things get to you as much. So I think that is probably what I would try to take from modeling. I’m not sure if I’ve mastered it, but I think that the attempt is to just try and not let those things wash out for me.
DC: You’ve made your mark in the horror and genre world through projects like Muse, The Other Lamb, and Ravers. Sew Torn isn’t quite a horror but contains those genre elements of crime, thriller, etc. I’m curious about what draws you to working in the horror/genre space and what opportunities that provide for you as an actor?
EC: As someone who grew up loving films like Scream and TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I have always had so much respect and admiration for the horror/thriller genre. But beyond that, I think the heightened stakes that come with horror/ genre stories mean the characters often have very intense emotional arcs, and, as an actor, that’s very exciting to play.
DC: Freddy, you’ve shared that in that first meeting with Joel Coen, he said, “Always work with family because they’ll be on your side for the right reason.” This is a family affair, with your dad who you write with, your sister who contributed her sewing box … to even actors who carry over like Thomas Douglas who was here in both the short and feature. I’m curious about what working on this project revealed to you all about each other or what you gained and grew from collaborating in this way.
Freddy Macdonald: Luckily, my dad and I had spent so much time working together already because he taught me stop motion animation when I was nine years old and very early on instilled in me to tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending that subverts what you expect. Even though when I was nine, I wanted to just animate a ball bouncing around and all the fun stuff, he challenged me to write something with a joke structure that has a payoff.
We started co-writing, and since my mom is an artist, she would help me paint foam core puppets that I would then go in my garage and shoot for hours on end in the dark. When we were on set for the feature, it just felt like a big home movie because a lot of past collaborators were back. Sebastian Klinger, who is my longtime cinematographer and I’d worked with throughout high school, was a key producer and VFX artist as well as being a cinematographer on the project.
One thing that I did learn on this project is that I also edited my work. I spent about 10 months cutting the film. That was the only moment when my dad and I would get in a disagreement. He would come as the very necessary fresh eyes to watch what I had been cutting all day and offer his feedback. We’d butt heads about that in a friendly way.
DC: That’s great to hear how collaborative it was. It’s funny because looking back on that scene where Hudson and Joshua are arguing. It made me wonder whether or not you were layering in commentary about you and your dad’s relationship.
FM: [Laughs] Some people have picked up on that, and they’ve asked about my relationship with my dad because it seems turbulent. But on-screen, my dad and I are really curious about exploring parental relationships. My dad has always been self-aware in making sure I’m in the industry because I want to be here and not because I feel any pressure to follow in his footsteps in any way. We were curious about what it would be like to tell a story that pushes characters to the extreme negative of what would happen. We wanted to subvert the healthy dynamic that we knew.
DC: Rewatching the short, I was really struck by Dagna Litzenberger Vinet, who was the original Barbara. Was she ever attached to this feature-length version of Sew Torn?
FM: Dagna is incredible in a lot of short films of mine that we shot in Switzerland. This feature took about two years to make and Dagna was originally always in mind. Because she’s such a talented actor, she was committed to this theater program for several years and was out of the picture for the feature film.
Going into the feature, we know that Barbara has become a very different character than what’s portrayed in the short film and the short film. We didn’t have to know what was happening before and after that scene, and we could get away with having a character who was a lot older. And I remember specifically telling Dagna, “I want this to feel mysterious and for the audience not to know what you’re going to do.” She had these great moments where she would just squint at both of the men on the road with zero empathy.
Eve was the opposite, where she had to carry a movie for 90 minutes, and we have to have sympathy for her after she’s essentially tried to kill two men. Eve stepped into this new Barbara, and I don’t know how she did it because I would’ve been nervous in referencing the short film and the performance there versus this new movie, but she brought an entirely new lens to the character, which was incredible.
DC: I love the stunts in the film, and I’d love to hear about the sequencing because it escalates. In universe, Barbara is encountering this scenario, but as the audience, we enter the knowledge of her capabilities into each scene. Were you thinking of that at all, or shift how intense the stunts would be?
FM: That was my biggest stress when we were writing it. We wanted to put the short film at the beginning because we knew it would work. But we knew that with each sequence after that, we’d have to top that and escalate things. The thing that we tried to maintain throughout the entire film, though, which was also a struggle in the edit, was not revealing what Barbara is doing until her scheme pays off in real time.
Typically I love narratives that are very subjective where you’re in the character’s head as it unfolds, but with this, we wanted to kind of do both in a strange way of being with Barbara emotionally, but having no clue what the hell she’s doing until it pays off in a kind of objective way.
DC: You directed music videos for Fantastic Negrito. I love the role that music plays in this film, from the way Barbara turns it off when she’s deciding, to the song when she’s dancing. There’s also a musicality to these scenes in that they feel like their own short films with their various tangents in this singular video form. I’m curious if there’s anything transferable from your time doing music video work to something like this.
FM: We locked in our composer, Jacob Tardien, way before we were even close to production. Jacob had messaged me after seeing the short film, and he was eager to collaborate early on. He had started using thread and sewing machine sounds in his score which I loved. I began to ask if he could begin creating scores based on certain scenes of the script. He was so kind to explore to sonic world of the film and deliver a bunch of different tracks. These were critical because we could send them out to the entire cast and crew way before production and unite the team on the tone of the film.
That was super helpful to me in the edit because I was used to my music video directing days, where I have the music locked and I can just play within the context of this music and cut to the beat of the music. For a film that’s very insert-heavy, it was really helpful to have music already prepared that I could cut scenes to as opposed to putting some temp music in and trying to construct something and then having to replace it.
DC: The bucolic scenery of Switzerland wouldn’t have been my first choice if I were going to film a crime thriller, but the setting works so well for Sew Torn. Can you talk more about the importance of this location?
FM: I was always thinking about shooting it there just because I had so much fun shooting there in high school. I loved that it was just a complete juxtaposition to what you’d expect in terms of this dreamy and beautiful Swiss landscape, and the fact that there’s a drug deal gone wrong.
We were shooting in a town with a population of a hundred elderly people, for the most part, and people would just open up their homes for us. There was this warmth and excitement that greatly aided the production. They let us leave lights up in their place so we could constantly go back and get pickup shots. I think they were excited to bring this young energy to the town.
An example I love bringing up is that for the explosion for the film, all we had to do was ask this very kind, older gentleman if we could explode the store. It was the first explosion of its kind in Switzerland. He was so excited about that. I loved that we could create this heightened world in a landscape that we hadn’t seen before.
DC: One of the themes that struck me a lot was about how we are finite beings who can’t have it all or do everything. We have to make choices and not making choices is also a choice and we can only experience one thing.
It made me think about your vocation as an actor where you can’t say yes to every project or you have to be strategic. How has working on this film impacted your thoughts around that or what it means to say yes or no to something?
EC: I love that it’s made you think about that. I am very similar. That is something I think about so often and I feel that there are so many things I want to do, and it’s sometimes overwhelming. Martin Scorcese shared how he’s nearing the end of his life, but he’s only now discovering more things he wants to do. I feel like that is true for me as an actor. And I’ve started writing, I was studying at the time that we filmed this, and I would love to write and direct someday.
I’m trying to make every decision that will lead me down the path I want to go. But like you say, you never know. What I try to tell myself—and something my family reminds me—is that I just have to make the decision and stick to it and forget about what the other things could be. No matter what, they’ll be good and bad in anything.
FM: It haunts me every day. I think the reason it haunts me is I’ve started to learn how critical a single choice can be in this business. The biggest choice that I never knew was going to be a big choice was sending the Sew Torn short film out into the world rather than just sending it to the film school. Sending it out past what I was planning to do, this feature would have never been made. Joel Coen would have never seen it. I wouldn’t have had just a little bit of confidence it took to adapt this into something longer. After releasing this film, I’m feeling the weight of that again. I’m working on another script that’s set in this small town in Brazil. I’m wrestling with whether that’s the best next step. I was happy to explore some of these angsts in this film.
It’s crazy to think about just how many choices we’re not even making that affect our lives too. That’s why I love the film Run Lola Run. You leave the house ten seconds later, does that mean you get hit by a car? You never know. So that’s fun to explore visually.
Sew Torn is in theaters now.
Categorized: Interviews
