Ed Harris and Chloe Sarbib on-set (photo by Saffron Burrows) This month Filmmaker is publishing diaries from writers and directors who attended the 2025 Sundance Institute Directors Lab. Next up is Chloe Sarbib, who traveled to the Lab with Trou Normand. Here’s the description: “As her family prepares to leave their Normandy home, an aging actress becomes convinced that a lost Vichy-era heirloom is the magical solution to all her problems — but the search may dig up more than she bargained for.” A complete list of Sundance Labs participants can be found here. — Editor
In the afternoon, I hit a low. I chose this scene, my second scene, because Michelle Satter and Ilyse McKimmie told us to explore what makes us nervous, and this scene does. It’s a major turning point. My main character is listening to music and grows so desperate that she rips a hole in a wall with a hammer. The scene should feel tense, eerie, funny and sad, all within the same story. It’s really two scenes—her private moment and then a confrontation with her sister—and there’s a record-skipping gag. Oh, and I’m directing in French, which I’ve never done before—uh-oh.
Coming back from lunch is always hard—it takes a while to get going again. But this feels different. I’m rehearsing in The Library, one of the grandest (and probably most haunted—it’s the Stanley Hotel, after all) rooms I’ve ever seen: wood-paneled walls, leather furniture, large windows overlooking the mountains. I’ve given one of my actors, Saffron Burrows, time off so I can work with the other, Stephanie Szostak, on the first half of the scene, when her character is alone.
Stephanie’s doing excellent work, yet I feel like I’m drowning. I wonder if she can tell. I worry the scene is fundamentally flawed, that the choice my character has to make in order for my whole movie to take place is too unhinged for an audience to follow her there. I understand her. I love her—she has so much of me in her. If I can’t make her make sense to other people, maybe I’ll never make sense to anyone, either.
Then, like a cowboy in a Western, Ed Harris arrives. Actually, it’s not like that at all—he doesn’t swagger in as if through swinging saloon doors. He comes in quietly, sits against the wall. I don’t notice him for several minutes.
At some point Jomo Fray, who shot one of my favorite movies of last year, has also arrived. We had lunch today, and I expected we’d talk through the shot list my DP, Melanie Akoka, and I started in the hot tub yesterday. Instead, Jomo asked me what emotional adjectives describe my film, and I struggled to answer. He pushed me to be specific and honest about when in my scene the subjectivity shifts, to work from my gut and not my head.
I can tell they sense my uncertainty and are giving me space. When I look up from my spiral, I see them conferencing. They ask to talk to me.
I call a break.
Ed walks the beats of the scene. He did this for my first scene at our first lunch, bent over the script, drawing out things I knew but hadn’t yet articulated. “You know what you want,” he told me before that shoot. “You’ve let your actors wander for a while. It’s time to direct them now.”
This time he’s up and moving. I watch him inhabit this character I made up, in the late-afternoon light in a room filled with horse’s heads and antique globes, and wonder what the fuck my life is—in the best way, even mid-crisis. With his help, I understand the scene enough to give Stephanie a scaffold. But I end the day uncertain. Does the scene work? Where will I put the camera? How will I get it all done in six hours?
That night, at our production meeting, I wonder if my crew can tell that I have no idea what I’m doing. I go to the bar with Melanie. We finish our loose shooting plan over a glass of whiskey while people relax and celebrate their shoot days around us. I don’t want to let her down, but my exhaustion is curdling into doubt. She pitches shooting the second half of the scene handheld. I’m not sure. My gut isn’t talking to me and really, as a director, that’s all you have. And we’re shooting in a white-walled condo when my film is really set in an old house in Normandy. And we can’t actually make a hole in the wall of the Stanley Hotel, which is the event of the scene.
I’m so tired.
I walk back to my room. The Colorado stars are stupidly bright. I think about how it will feel to fail—at least I’ll learn. I think about how, when we fellows directed each other as actors in the lab’s early days, I asked Kasey Elise Walker if she “had a song she liked to cry to” and she immediately pulled one out. Maybe I’ll cry to it tonight. I think about the people I’ve met, wonder how I got so lucky as to be among them—I believe so fiercely in their talent and would ride so hard for each of them. I think about what the effervescent Joan Darling told me, that my movie accumulates like life and you’ll only really understand it at the end. I think about the hummingbird who flew over me in the hot tub.
The next day, I walk to set carrying a Françoise Hardy record and a pile of clothes and scarves to make the bedroom look as chaotic as my character’s mind. When I arrive, my AD Art “Brain” Brainard and crew have rearranged the furniture as I’d hoped and put in an antique vanity table with a mirror, and already the sterile blank room feels different. We pull a rack of clothing into the bathroom to sell it as a closet. Team props—Mike Lau and Toshi Satake—have printed posters I’d sent weeks before to hang on the walls. We plug in the record player to test it. I put on the record (not the song we use in the scene in the end, but a great record). As soon as it starts to play, I look around at the group, building the world of my film, and know it’s going to be a good day.
And it is. My gut is back. The set moves in that magic way that happens sometimes, as one organism, everyone bringing something I couldn’t have conjured on my own. Stephanie gives a performance beyond my dreams of what the scene could be. I dance when she’s dancing, hold my breath when she freezes. Melanie is perfectly in sync with her and with me. We only met 10 days ago but it feels like I’ve known her forever. Gaffer Camilo Godoy, sound mixer Kenny Lee and AC Kelly Poor all seem to see and hear inside my brain. Advisor Christine Lahti chimes in with surgical precision, offering key insights to help me push my actors further. The artistic director of the lab, Gyula Gazdag, crowds with me into the tiny room, sitting on an apple box. Last scene he had some notes for me; this time he says, just once, “Good note” after I give direction. He smiles at me the way Kasi Lemmons, who guided me through my first scene, smiled at me then: it’s working. Now I can’t stop smiling. The song in the scene hypnotizes us all, puts us into my character’s trance. Brain kicks the dresser over and over to simulate the record skipping with each hammer hit. In the afternoon, we go handheld and it’s the right decision. Saffron arrives and her exquisite performance grounds us in the sisters’ connection—the scene shifts from spooky-funny to moving, as I hoped. Scripty Diane Hounsell likes to pick a “French word of the day,” but we’re all so locked in that we only find one at wrap: “coupez,” French for “cut.” For a few hours, I see my movie become real in front of me. I walk off set thinking this may have been the best day of my life.
I arrive to the edit with a “REDRUM” cupcake for my editor Troy Lewis—it was his birthday while we were shooting, and there are balloons all over the edit suite. We watch the footage. Assistant editor Jen Tam says my character in this scene reminds them of Britney Spears, a totally on-point comment I’m still thinking about. I start to worry again when I see things that aren’t perfect, understand that some moments won’t work. But Troy’s excited. We share so many filmic references, I think he’s seen every movie ever made and his sensitivity and his humor are a match for mine. I trust him.
When I step outside to let him do a first pass of what we talked about, there are seven elk arrayed—eating, flirting, lounging under the trees—between me and the mountains.