To Kill a Wolf
For viewers watching Kelsey Taylor’s terrific debut feature, To Kill a Wolf, it’s easy to miss that its very loose source material is the 17th-century children’s fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood. Yes, there’s a girl lost in the woods, a woodsman, a grandma (arguably), and a wolf, although the latter is hardly an obvious figure. But the relationships between these characters and their backstories are newly invented, mapping onto contemporary anxieties and fears as much an archetypal narrative structures. Consider To Kill a Wolf something of a remix, the kind where the source material haunts rather than dictates, and where its use provides viewers with a productive frame through which to think about issues around trauma, sexual abuse and the evil that can hide within plain sight.
In Taylor’s telling, it is the woodsman (Ivan Martin) who discovers a teenager girl, Dani (Maddison Brown), passed out from hypothermia in the Oregon woods one night. He takes her in until she recovers before attempting to reconnect her with her grandmother, who lives across the state. Dropping her off at her house, he quickly realizes that something is wrong with Dani’s situation. But what? By the time the story has reached its unexpectedly moving and compassionate conclusion, Taylor has totally upended our expectations over the ways survivors’s stories can be told.
I was knocked out by To Kill a Wolf when I saw it at last fall’s FilmFestKnox, where it won Best Film in the festival’s American Regional Cinema Competition. The film had me in its grip from its opening images — Adam Lee provides the excellent cinematography — and as it went on, Taylor’s mastery of tone and performance became apparent. It’s a powerful debut — inventive, thoughtful, and fully realized on an ultra-low-budget — and one that, frankly, should have attracted more attention in its festival run. Which is why the outcome of FilmFestKnox is so meaningful. Festival sponsor Regal Cinemas offers as a prize to the winning film a 10-city Regal Cinemas release, an offer that led Taylor and team to embrace hybrid distribution and oversee the theatrical release themselves. The film opens in New York for a week-long run August 1 at Regal Union Square before heading to, at press time, 13 more markets. I’ll be moderating the opening night, Friday, August 1, and hope to see of our local readers there.
Before the release I caught up with Taylor over Zoom to discuss drawing from Little Red Riding Hood, her screenplay development process, embracing hybrid distribution and more.
Filmmaker: Regarding the origins of To Kill a Wolf, did you start by wanting to explore certain themes, which then led you to the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, or did you start with the idea of taking that specific fairy tale as source material?
Taylor: It’s a great question, and I feel over the process of talking about this film I’ve come to have a different understanding than when I started. Sometimes an idea just comes to you, and it gets stuck, and you don’t really have a choice in the matter — you can’t get rid of it. I love adaptations of all kinds and fairy tales specifically. I grew up in a very woodsy place and [seeing] the Wicked reimaginings of fairy tales, so Little Red Riding Hood was one that would always come to mind when I was hiking in the woods. And naturally, when you start thinking about the dangers that would face a modern Red Riding Hood, grooming came to mind. Those two things — the adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood and grooming — have not changed through the 17 or 18 drafts of the script. In the first version, Little Red Riding Hood killed the woodsman, and it was a very, very different film — much more about female empowerment. There were definitely [other] iterations. What if the woodsman was the bad guy? What if the wolf was the good guy? And ultimately, we’ve ended up where we’ve ended up. I’m glad that I went through that many versions.
Filmmaker: The self-empowerment/revenge movie would have been very culturally on point at the time you were making this. What made you not go in that direction?
Taylor: Sometimes you just can’t help yourself. Right now, everybody wants a horror movie. “If you’re trying to break in as a director, make a horror movie” — that’s what everybody tells you. Every time I set out to do that, I end up with this compromise, which is a drama that has genre elements. That’s exactly what To Kill a Wolf is, and if you’ve seen some of my other work, it’s the same thing. It starts off as a horror movie, and then it turns into more of a human, character-driven story. I have a hard time just following the strict structure of a horror movie.
Filmmaker: You said you took the script through 17 or 18 drafts. How long was that process?
Taylor: I wrote [the first draft] back in 2017 and I didn’t know a whole lot about screenwriting at that point. I was a film production major, and my dream was always that someone will hand you a great script and you’ll go direct it. Then it became abundantly clear that’s not going to happen. The scripts that you’ll be given are not going to be good. So, I set out to do it myself, and I’ve learned so much since then. I’ve gone on to write a number of scripts. This was a quarter finalist in the Nicholl Academy screenwriting fellowships back in 2018 but, honestly, it’s a totally different script now. Structure wise, I’m an outline-obsessive person. My outlines end up being 30 pages or so, and once it goes into script form, it’s just a translation. But I find it a lot easier to move pieces around in the outline stage and to really feel how the whole movie will feel, how things will ebb and flow. Until I translate it into the more poetic form of the screenplay, I like to have an outline that I can just play in my head.
Filmmaker: Are you a notecards-on-the-wall person?
Taylor: It’s all digital, in Google Docs. I like that it’s all on my computer, and anywhere I go I can pull it up. But it’s purely prose with written-out dialogue. I also jump around between different strategies. I’ll use the Save the Cat beat sheet. There’s the eight-segment structure. There’s a Blair Witch version of that I love.
Filmmaker: I’ve never read Save the Cat, but the number of filmmakers I know who seem to be using it in some way has been very surprising to me.
Taylor: Honestly, I’ve never read Save the Cat, but I have the beat sheet from it. There’s a lot of overlap in all of these books, which is why I think it’s helpful to bop around. The Nutshell Technique is also a really interesting one. It’s a simple version of testing your concept — like, does this concept and does this character work? The John Truby book on the anatomy of the story, I love that one as well. But I never stick with anything. It’s always like, “Huh, I’m stuck. Let’s try something else.”
Filmmaker: And then what is the process by which it moves from this high concept, horror or horror-adjacent story to one that’s more character-based?
Taylor: Bopping around you kind of vomit all the ideas that immediately come to mind, and then you start working away from the beginning to end. I know that so often people just overwrite their first act over and over and over. Then you’ve got a really great first act but it may not be the right setup for the rest of the film. So, I try to make sure that every time I’m going all the way through [the script]. You need to know that moment of realization you’re building to and then work backwards from that.
Filmmaker: Was there personal resonance for you in the story – things you were bringing in from the real world, or your experience?
Taylor: One-hundred percent. Every script I write, there are things that are true and real. I’m definitely a sponge for soaking up other people’s stories and experiences. None of it is like exactly what happened, and this is not a true story by any means. But there are pieces of reality, and this is an amalgamation of all of those.
Filmmaker: Tell me about the process of getting the script out to financiers and getting it made.
Taylor: In 2017 I wrote the first draft and immediately started taking it out. I had worked a lot on the below-the0line side of things, in the camera department and as an a.d. We – me and my partner, Adam [Lee], who shot the film, and is a producer — knew we could make it, but we needed money, so that was the next step for us. How do we find money? How do we get a producer attached? For a little while, we went through the proper avenues of “here’s our real producer,” and they took it out to companies. We had a bunch of companies pass on it because on it because it wasn’t quite horror enough. At one point we had half the money for $1 million budget. We were making offers to cast, and we never could get the whole [budget], and it all kind of fell apart. But we kept coming back to it. In 2018 we shot a teaser, and in 2019 I location-scouted on the East and West coasts. And then ultimately it became, “Hey, how do we make this smaller? How do we do this with the resources that we have or can assemble?” And that was 2023, which is when the film actually happened. We decided to scale it way, way down. Ultimately, Adam and I decided we’re not going to grad school, and we’re not buying a house anytime soon. All of our finances went into this film, and then we ended up raising more through a company called Slated, which is great for indie filmmakers. And here we are.
Filmmaker: You actually found investors on Slated?
Taylor: We did! It’s funny, so many people are like, “Wait, you found people on Slated?” I think it really depends on what your project is, who gets eyeballs on it, but most importantly, where are you in the stage? We were like, “Hey, it’s going, this film is shooting in two months. Is there anybody who wants to get on board?” We did not [initially] have all the money to get all the way through. We did just enough to get over the line of shooting the film. We didn’t have enough money for the wolves. We’re going to come back and shoot the wolves at another time, and we ended up raising the money, thankfully. But I do think, personally, you should be in your late stages [to take advantage of Slated].
Filmmaker: What were the physical production adjustments you had to do to make it work for the budget you had?
Taylor: We had about 10 people on our crew. It was very, very small. One of the biggest things, I think, from a technical standpoint, is that we did not have a way of moving the camera in any traditional fashion — no dolly, no slider, nothing. I’m proud of how much the camera does not feel still in the film, and so much of that was because of blocking, making sure the actors are moving so the camera could pan with them, and being clever about where we put foreground elements and stuff. Watch the film and you’ll notice there’s not a single traditional camera move. There are some zooms. And then the other thing is, we hardly struck any lights. We really only struck lights for the evening scenes that needed it. And even then, it was mostly practicals. Adam is really incredible at using very, very little. I’ve worked with him when we’ve stripped the sheets off of hotel beds to bounce light. [Here], he used a lot of little reflectors, just putting them in places to make things feel just a little bit imperfect. And this is not something you would do on a tiny movie with a 10-person crew, but we shot one of our dusk sequences over five days because we were at the house already — Grandma’s location — and we just wanted to shoot in that 20-minute blue-hour window. We would just come back and shoot a little bit more and a little bit more.
Filmmaker: How many days did you shoot?
Taylor: Twenty-five. Most of the films we work on are 14 days, 20 if you’re lucky, but for this one, we knew with that few people we needed time. Time was the thing we wanted the most, so that’s part of why we kept it so small.
Filmmaker: I know that Neil Jordan made The Company of Wolves a long time ago, which was based on Angela Carter’s reworking of classic fairy tales, particularly Little Red Riding Hood. Did you look at their work or that of other filmmakers and artists who reinterpreted classic fairy tales when developing To Kill a Wolf?
Taylor: It’s funny, Angela Carter comes up almost every time I talk about this film. No, she never came in in the making of the film. If anything, I really wanted this to be an homage to the fairy tale without hitting you in the head. I wanted it to be grounded in this reality.
Filmmaker: I think many people could watch To Kill a Wolf and not make the connection if they didn’t read about it beforehand. But it’s certainly a marketing hook.
Taylor: I have mixed feelings about what we’ve done by leaning into the Little Red Riding Hood [story]. It was something that at one point got pulled out of the script, and then it was like a fun backstory of how this [story] came to life. But we’ve really leaned into it now because it is such a hook. We’re in an IP world right now, and it’s a little weird to be exploiting that, but at the same time, the more people say, “You don’t really need the Little Red Riding Hood [connection],” the more I dig in my heels and be like, no, I think it’s really important because fairy tales are something that we pass on to our children. These are the stories we tell our children to warn them – to tell them the importance of watching out for people within your family, people who might not do good things but on the surface present in such a way. I think it is important to see this as a modern fairy tale. These are the things that our children are facing. And yeah, I think the subverting of expectations throws people sometimes. They’re like, “Well, grandma’s dead in yours. It’s not Little Red Riding Hood.” But if that’s what you’re expecting, [the film] puts you in the shoes of a little girl who’s lost and doesn’t have anybody, and you would expect she could just go home to grandma, but there is no grandma. There’s no mother telling you stay on the path. So in in that sense, I’m very much like, this is Red Riding Hood, if you really want to dig into it,
Filmmaker: Tell me about your casting. Obviously your lead — Maddison Brown, who plays Dani — is older than a little girl.
Taylor: We had met Ivan Martin, who plays the woodsman, on another film, an action comedy called High Heat. We just thought he was hilarious, which is not really the thing that you would expect we’re looking for in our hero. But I just I loved how unexpected he was. He was just clearly a talented actor and had just something funky about him. And so after talking to him about this project, I went back and did a rewrite of the script with that kind of funkier look at the woodsman. It used to be much more like the serious traditional gruff guy. I was like, I think there needs to be a little bit more humor here. What if the woodsman smokes weed? We met Madison through Ivan’s representation. Her manager was like, “You need to watch this girl.” We met and had just a brief read, and I fell in love with her. She does so much with so little. So many times actors are trying to show you their emotions, and I’m always like, “Just bury it. Just think it.” Madison can really do that. Kaitlin [Doubleday], our aunt, was also in High Heat and hilarious. But really, we were just looking for great actors. If you find great actors, there’s never a fear they’ll be able to delivery on whatever your put them in.
Filmmaker: Tell me a bit more about your background leading up to this film. You were in a directing program at Fox and did an Alien short?
Taylor: Yes, but that was through another platform called Tongal. You pitch on projects that they post, and they posted this project with 20th Century Fox for Alien. Fox funded five films, but there weren’t a lot of resources. We thought there’d be a little more support when we pitched a greenhouse in space, but there wasn’t. But, yeah, that was a big, big turning point as far as my directing career because people actually watched that because of the world of Alien. So many short films don’t get attention.
Filmmaker: This was in 2019, and then the pandemic happened.
Taylor: The Disney merger happened right after those shorts dropped as well.
Filmmaker: Oh! I was going to ask if that Alien short put you on more of a genre IP path and if you were doing agent meetings for various reboots.
Taylor: I did the water bottle tour, but nothing came of it. Maybe things would be different if the pandemic hadn’t happened. Maybe not.
Filmmaker: You shot this film in 2023, then, so just after the pandemic.
Taylor: As soon as the COVID protocols went away.
Filmmaker: And tell me about its festival life, because in your case it really is part of the film’s release story and you embracing hybrid distribution.
Taylor: That’s a great and terrible question. We didn’t really know anything coming into the festival circuit. Our understanding was from film school: you just submit to the big festivals, and then you get in, hopefully, and then someone buys your film. None of that happened for us. We cold submitted to all the big festivals. We didn’t get in to any of them, and then we ultimately ended up at Edinburgh after we had already accepted a couple other festivals. So, we made a bit of a mess for ourselves, because we just we didn’t understand the [premiere] strategy of it. I still don’t feel good about how that all unfolded. You’re looking for what’s best for your film, but it really is a timing thing of when you enter the festival [circuit]. How do you know when to wait and hold out for certain festivals that you really want but you may not get into? But we premiered in Edinburgh and then went on to play a number of great festivals, and, we thought, surely someone will buy this film. There were a few offers along the way, even one that came with money and really tempted us. And we won this prize from Regal [Cinemas] at FilmFestKnox. Then we started taking a distribution class with Jon Reiss, and after learning more about the process of distribution, we were like, wait, we have a lot of the elements that we are looking for in a partner. And unless we find a partner who’s really additive and brings something to the table, what’s the point? So we decided to take it on ourselves, and it’s a full-time job. That’s the hard thing. Filmmakers, they don’t want to do it, including myself. I hate this. I’m not good at putting myself out there, but you have to. When we’ve spent seven years making this film, what’s another year? And if our goal truly is to get the next film made, it’s better if we make the most of this one.
Filmmaker: For readers who haven’t gone through the process of self-distribution, what makes it a full-time job?
Taylor: What am I doing all day? Creating graphics, managing social media, and reaching out to people, trying to get people to go to screenings. But, oh my gosh! There are four screenings a day for seven days in ten cities. Regal has been incredibly supportive, and they are playing our trailer, but there are all kinds of things that you don’t know, like how [deliverables] need to be conformed. I’m also working on booking us into more theaters, because the film is very much an art house film. We want to play in independent cinemas, so I’m calling and acting as a theatrical booker.
Filmmaker: And you have an impact campaign going as well?
Taylor: Yes, and we have help. We’re not just doing this alone. Together Films are doing our social marketing and our impact campaign. We’re having a virtual event this week, and we’ve partnered with ENOUGH ABUSE, Youth Line and Covenant House — all these organizations either work in the sexual abuse space or in mental health support for youth. We want the film to be an educational tool for young people. How do we prevent these kinds of things from happening, and how to we help people heal? It’s tragic, the number of conversations that have come out of people seeing this film – they come up after the screening and say, “This brings up a lot of memories for me.” I’m hopeful that we can get the film to the right people, the people who would benefit from seeing it.
Filmmaker: You said you’re acting as the theatrical booker. What’s that like?
Taylor: I’m just going to [theater] websites and then just calling them, saying, “Hey, I’m looking for your program manager.” We’ve booked a couple of one-night screenings in places. I mean, it’s just talking to people. It feels like we’re in pre-production again. You’re just calling and asking people to be kind to you.
