The Projection Booth

Teenage desire doesn’t announce itself — it hides behind dial-up logins, borrowed MSN identities, and the older girls you’d kill to become. That’s the world of Sid Bookman in Big Girls Don’t Cry (2026), writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s queer coming-of-age debut, set over one restless New Zealand summer in 2006. Mike talks with Schneideman and her two leads, Ani Palmer and Rain Spencer, about building that world: the MSN plotline that arrived a year into writing (the ending never changed), how Spencer landed Freya almost instantly off Good Girl Jane (2022) while Palmer’s audition tape stopped Schneideman cold ten seconds in, the grocery-store exercises that forged Sid and Freya’s onscreen bond, shooting a summer film through an actual tropical cyclone, and working with Noah Taylor, who kept improvising in character well off the clock as Sid’s hapless father.

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Director Shaun Paul Piccinino — a former stuntman and martial artist who cut his teeth on Jackie Chan documentaries — tells Mike White how Double Trouble came together as "Home Alone meets Ocean's Eleven": a Vegas heist comedy built around real-life sisters Madeleine and Violet McGraw, anchored by an Andrew Koji-led, Jackie-Chan-inspired kitchen brawl where even the lettuce gets used as a weapon.

Piccinino details the chaos of filming inside a live, working casino — sound so loud from slot machines and chatter that nobody expected to salvage any production audio, until the sound team proved them wrong — and the night 4,000 football fans unexpectedly descended on the casino floor mid-shoot for the climactic lobby fight, which his longtime cinematographer Brad Rushing called the hardest shoot day of his career. Add the limited hours mandated for the film's underage leads, and Double Trouble becomes a case study in improvising around a city that never actually sleeps.

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Johnny Flynn talks with Mike White about playing Jacob Hansen (opposite John C. Reilly's Doc) in A Prayer for the Dying, Dara Van Dusen's directorial debut adapted from Stewart O'Nan's novella. Flynn breaks down the challenge of embodying an unreliable narrator — a Civil War veteran whose PTSD warps everything the audience sees through his eyes — and the novella's hidden debt to the Book of Job, which is why he showed up to set in Slovakia with a real, unscripted beard he and Van Dusen eventually agreed on.

Flynn also gets into what drew him to working with a first-time feature director, tracing it back to his experience on Michael Pearce's Beast and explaining why a director who's spent a decade fighting to get a passion project made brings an urgency he finds irresistible. He talks about Van Dusen's path through Poland's famed Łódź Film School (where she met cinematographer Kate McCullough), her decade-long effort to secure the rights to O'Nan's book, and the film's long road from its 2024 shoot to premiering at the Berlin Film Festival.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña built their new film inside a Santiago museum, in front of a live audience, using rear-projected scale models and painted backdrops instead of CGI. The Chilean directing duo talk with Mike about Donkey Princess, their shape-shifting reimagining of the Donkeyskin fairy tale starring Antonia Giesen as Princess Diana.

León and Cociña describe the chaotic, caffeine-fueled process of splitting one overstuffed script into two films, Donkey Princess and its companion piece The Hyperboreans, written during Chile's 2019 social uprising and the pandemic that followed. They talk about the year and a half they spent animating a sequence for Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid, their resistance to letting the film's politics dictate its story even as an editor read it as being about patriarchy and dictatorship, and how Francisco Melo's own experience as a father reshaped the king's arc.

The directors also get into fairy tales as a shared cultural language, the six-stars-that-used-to-be-seven storytelling parable that keeps them hooked, and what's next — including a stop-motion adaptation of Hansel and Gretel. Donkey Princess, also starring Andrew Bargsted as Lalo, is awaiting North American distribution from KimStim, which previously released the duo's The Wolf House.

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Bil Richardson's Ephemera was built backwards: instead of writing a script and shooting it, the longtime below-the-line filmmaker and West Virginia University professor emeritus assembled the entire 87-minute film from licensed stock footage on Artlist and Envato, recording all dialogue as ADR, and discovering — only while writing the final log line — that he'd accidentally told his own story. Richardson tells Mike White how the project began as a distraction during a year-long hospitalization for a twelve-inch, six-inch-deep leg wound that wouldn't heal (doctors twice recommended

amputation), and how the film's pyromancer heroine — burned in a firefight, fitted with an artificial "nanoskin" graft, and left afraid of the very fire that once made her exceptional — turned out to mirror his own ordeal without his realizing it until the film was done. He also breaks down directing a movie from the picture outward: writing dialogue to match lip movements already on screen, voice actors in Scotland, LA, and the Philippines who never met in person, and the four years it took to get from the first assembled scene to release.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth