Samuel Goodwin has to be every aspiring filmmaker’s ‘cool older brother’ right about now.

With an impressive anthology of short films already released and available to watch on his YouTube channel, his debut feature ‘Cut Your Teeth’ follows an engagement party gone wrong when lies and betrayal fragment a group of friends. Filming in Florida, it stars 9-1-1‘s Oliver Stark, A Complete Unknown‘s Arthur Langlie, Riley Dandy (Things Will Improve) and Madeline Weinstein (Mary Page Marlowe), with Daredevil: Born Again producer Aaron Moorhead also on board.

Amongst all the madness, Sam found time to sit down with me to chat about the film, his journey as a filmmaker, and a few geeky questions he so kindly humoured.

Check it out on Deadline, and come back here for the low-down.

Let’s start with a bit about yourself. Who are you, what kind of stories do you tell, and what is ‘Cut Your Teeth’?

Hey I’m Sam! I sometimes go by Samuel on ‘official’ things, but I struggle with any kind of consistency on that. I grew up and currently live in Denver, Colorado, but I’ve bounced around the country quite a bit before that. I’m a writer/director and producer, though most of the producing so far has just been boring commercial stuff.

I’m trying to think of a throughline for my films… the weird thing is that “Cut Your Teeth” is a little bit of an outlier.

Most of the films I’ve made and scripts I’ve written are about folks in some form of intense isolation. Whether it’s intentional and somewhat positive or deeply alienating, those tend to be stories I gravitate towards. Stories with next to no dialogue that are extremely action oriented… and by action I think I mean activity. It’s not all gunfights, a lot of it is just watching people in their routines. 

And there’s a lot of that in “Cut Your Teeth.” For every two-hander conversation in this movie there’s an extended sequence of learning about somebody by watching them doing tasks by themselves. And the entire film kinda focuses on an event that causes an entire friend group to alienate themselves.. So that’s a through line, I suppose!

On a less granular level, I’m very into dark dramas and thrillers. But every idea I have comes from the characters first... I don’t really chase a scene or a genre, I think my brain just gravitates towards seeing my characters in uncomfortable and awful situations. 

Cut Your Teeth is a little more personal and a lot more grounded than some of my other films. It’s a straight-up drama, while the other scripts I have that won some attention are thrillers or horror Films at heart. 

I firmly believe it’s my best script. It brought back a lot of stuff I messed around with when I was much younger and writing plays. It has romantic elements, it has sexual elements, it has a fuck-ton of dialogue that I’m honestly pretty proud of. 

“Cut Your Teeth” kinda fits the stereotype of “artist gets frustrated writing what he’s supposed to and finally just writes what they want” and that ends up being the thing that gets attention/blows up/goes. 

This is very much that film for me. 

 You have some great short films available to watch on YouTube, and like many filmmakers, you started with shorts. Was there anything you had to ‘unlearn’ making the jump to feature length?

Hmmm good question! But honestly not really. I was frankly pretty surprised by how production really felt like a very long short film. 

Raising money is extremely different, it’s much more difficult because you need so much more, and weirder because (unlike shorts) you actually do have to find a way to maximize an investors chance of a return. That is extremely different from shorts where everybody who puts money into that knows they are lighting it on fire. 

But working with bigger actors, working with more experienced crew and producers… all of it honestly felt like a short shoot that lasted 15 days to me. 

I think this is chiefly because of HOW we made this film, using FSU Film’s Torchlight package and filming so much of it in Tallahassee, Florida. 

But it’s a great way to make a movie. I wouldn’t change it for the world. 

If anyone is scared of making the jump, don’t be! I think the the biggest difference between the two is in the writing. Production isn’t really that dissimilar. Just know your script, revise your script, get others to know your script, and prep and plan the hell out of everything. 

Maybe that’s a key thing. Shorts, you can experiment a little more. Your first feature you HAVE to plan to a T. Not only because you wont’ have enough money or time and need to really be ready to triage, but even more because your cast and crew will be more experienced than you, and for them to have any confidence in you as a first time director, you have to show them you have this fucking planned. 

Even if you’re more improvisational and the planning is just kinda theater, It’s valuable theater and important to have. 

Short films often demand precision—you have very little time to say exactly what you want to say. How has working on shorts affected the way you approached pacing and tension in a feature-length thriller?

It taught me how much I deeply despise writing shorts. 

You just emphatically do not have the time to tell a compelling, deep standalone story. Folks that manage to make me so angry because it feels like witnessing alchemy that shouldn’t be allowed. 

I HATE writing shorts. I absolutely hate it. I want to laze, I want to meander, I want to explore the lives of my characters while also having important and pivotal events happen to them and with shorts I always feel like I run out of fucking time. 

I’m really glad I made the ones I did, I’m honestly pretty proud of them, but every self-conscious thing I have about my shorts is in the writing, and it was a breath of fresh air to get to shoot a feature where I feel like my script has the time and page count to say what it needs to say. 

And Cut Your Teeth is only a 95 page script! but God, compare that to 15 pages… 

However yeah I do think the production and editing lessons are the same. What works in the scene and moment of a short will work in the scene and moment of a feature. Perhaps i’ll realize i’m completely wrong about this in the edit, but I feel like the difference in pacing and tension comes in writing as opposed to production/editing. 

Shorts should give you pretty good confidence you know what you’re doing in a scene/sequence, then writing is just knowing how to stack those together. It’s using the same blocks to make a slightly larger castle, I think, but this is a good question for me at this point in time, because this sort of potential blind spot is what has me tossing and turning as I wait to see the first rough cut. 

But this is a good question for me at this point in time, because this sort of potential blind spot is what has me tossing and turning as I wait to see the first rough cut. 

Was there a moment during production where you stopped feeling like ‘a director making his first feature’ and simply felt like ‘the director’? Has it fully sunk in yet?!

Honestly pretty early on. Melina (Valdez, DP) and I have been prepping this movie for years, and a ton of the cast and crew on this film have been on it just as long and are close personal friends. I knew we were gonna have to prep the hell out of it and fortunately this is my model anyways. 

We actually photo board the entire movie on location; I was a little concerned we wouldn’t have time or ability to do it on this feature (like we have on all my shorts), but once we did in the final weeks before shooting I was beginning to feel pretty okay.

We planned out far enough, and got lucky enough, that we were able to prep this exactly the way I wanted and cast the best people I could possibly think of.

Honestly it was during prep I began to feel like “the director” because the process was truly feeling so much like it had on shorts. 

Our very first two setups of the first day had me a little worried, it was the one location we weren’t able to board in and our slightly wider supplementary coverage was feeling a little too stilted, and we didn’t have time to light it to make the shots feel more dynamic than the blocking allowed. I was a little worried. 

The second we moved into closer coverage (what I imagined using throughout the scene anyways), it all clicked into place. The performances popped and the shots looked really gorgeous. I began to actually see our movie. 

I’m happy to say after those last two setups, I honestly think I liked 99/100 shots we got. Wides are tricky in a low-budget feature. You don’t have time to make them look ideal, so you have to pick perfect locations. Only one or two wides were less than what I wanted but hey, yunno, that’s why you have closer coverage. 

but that is a good lesson for others. If you’re planning big beautiful sweeping dynamic wides, you better plan on that being your only shot for the scene, because you probably just won’t have the time to accomodate that and closer coverage. that was a good lesson for me! 

If one of your short films could sit alongside Cut Your Teeth as a double bill, which would you choose, and why?

12pmEST for sure.

It had the exact same creative crew and it was all of us trying out two very different ways of creating tension that we brought over 1:1 in this feature. Again with the perils of shorts, it’s really hard to justify a short being shot two different ways and structurally, being two stories I duct taped together. 

It unfortunately DOES feel too long, and like it loses steam and has to pick up again. I knew this in the writing stage but I really wanted to try it. 

Which always bums me out because i’m really proud of each half of that film, and I kinda wish I’d found a way to wrap it up neatly and just have one half. 

I’m glad I shot both because I learned a lot and got pretty vindicated.

The peril of writing shorts is that you can’t really have them stop halfway through then pick up again with a different energy. 

You can in features though! I love when features do that. 

12pm is almost best described as a proof of concept for “Cut Your Teeth” as opposed to its own short, I think.

I’m proud of in a lot of ways, but I also know I kinda didn’t find the best package to showcase Gabriela’s amazing performance and character she created. We probably should have found a clean way to end the short before all the gas station stuff happens. 

C’est la vie, and a lesson to everyone. Some shorts are still really valuable even if they’re just your chance to learn and try stuff. but you and everyone involved will be disappointed when it doesn’t have the festival run of something a little more cohesive and streamlined. 

it’s dumb and it is what it is, but it’s true! 

Has there ever been a piece of advice about directing or filmmaking that you completely disagreed with at first, but now realise is 100% right?

That you really have to just say you’re making something for whatever money you happen to have. 

I had a lot of people give me that advice… but maybe framed in a slightly different way.

The advice is always “write and make something with the resources you HAVE, not the resources you hope to have.” and I chaffed on that because I just never had an idea I cared about enough that fit into that box.

I couldn’t think of a locked room thriller, or a found footage horror, or a  walk-and-talk romantic drama. I just kept feeling like I was trying to squeeze characters and concepts I liked into constraints that couldn’t fit them. My mindset became “Well, if you’re lucky enough to have a good idea for something like Blair Witch, or Resolution, or Once then more power to you, you lucky asshole.”

But on THIS movie the advice (from our super producer Aaron Moorhead) shifted.

After he came on board, he had me sit down and make a budget to shoot Cut Your Teeth for like 50k. For the minimum I absolutely knew I could cobble together from family. We’d had traction and casting luck that made us feel like we could certainly get more (and we did), but Aaron’s philosophy was “Okay, have this version ready. It’ll suck. It’ll kill you. If you make it this way, your crew will hate you and you won’t get everything you need. But you have to be prepared for this possibility or the movie will not get made.”

And God bless him, he was right.

There were many points in the process, even in the month before production, where we only had like 100k firmly raised and if I didn’t have the “PULL RIPCHORD AND MAKE THIS FOR NOTHING” plan and mindset, I might’ve gotten scared and bailed, and said we had to delay production another year so we could actually get the money this idea deserved. 

If I did that, I wouldn’t have raised another dime, I would’ve probably scared several people off of the project, and the movie would never get made. Bar none. 

You have to have the backstop plan so that you can take your leap of faith, and trust and hope and fucking PRAY that the financing will come together in the weeks before production. It did! but we honestly would’ve still made the movie if it hadn’t. It wouldn’t have been as good and we would’ve had so much less cushion against problems, but it would’ve happened. 

The added bonus is that the money we did raise felt like a godsend (and we honestly raised a little chunk ABOVE our overall intended budget, miraculously). This still was a very low budget movie, but raising what our final budget was felt like we were KINGS for having it after we spent months ripping our hair out thinking of how to make this film for 50-100k. If we started from a place expecting MORE we would’ve felt skimped and our plan would’ve fallen apart and morale would have plummeted. 

This won’t work for every idea. Some movies have a definite FLOOR of how much they can cost, but if you have the right idea.

Figure out what the minimum you can raise is, pick dates to shoot, have a backup plan for how to make it for that minimum, and humiliate yourself begging for more money than that. 

I don’t really know how else to get an indie feature made. 

Along that same vein, what would be your best advice to new filmmakers starting their journey to their first feature today?

See above answer. Also be ready to fucking humiliate yourself.

If you’re going into this to feel cool and sexy and in charge, you have a lot of humbling coming or you’re never going to make your film. 

You have to beg, you have to rebeg, you have to copiously cry and thank people for saying NO. Those people will be the ones you’re most grateful for, as you want to call in a drone strike on every person who seemed very interested then ghosted you entirely. 

It sucks. It’ll stop and start. you’ll have hopes dashed on sharp and horrible fucking rocks. 

It sucks.

It REALLY sucks raising money. 

And you probably have to do the brunt of it yourself.

Nobody’s passion will sell more than yours, so don’t count on finding a producer to fundraise for you. 

The cast brings together actors from such different corners of the industry. Was there a chemistry or quality you were searching for above all else, or were you looking to collaborate with certain actors?

I try to be extremely collaborative.

I think in all things but especially with cast. I don’t hold my dialogue as gospel, I don’t hold my blocking as (complete) gospel. It’s very important to me, especially in this film, that dialogue feels naturalistic and like it belongs in the mouth of the actor rather than the pen of the writer. 

There wasn’t any different or special casting process here, I started auditioning friends a few years ago. Partially to see if there was some perfect fit, but also just to hear and try out my dialogue in a lot of different voices. 

We got more into “names” in January of this year, and most of the cast came together in the month or so before we shot. Nearly everybody taped, which I’m grateful for and always helps, but there were a number of people I kinda knew early on based on vibes. 

A casting addage I kinda solidified in this one is: “if someone comes in and looks completely wrong, but they’re so good that you’re beginning to question the look you were thinking of, they are probably your person”.

We had a few folks like that on this, they just felt like the wrong look until I saw them act, then the character suddenly morphed around them. That’s your person! 

As for chemistry reads, I had a few ideas up my sleeves for this. The only actual chemistry read we did was Joe and Kaleigh, and that was so heartbreakingly good it made me cry. Everyone else, I tried to get some friends I cast to cast THEIR friends so some relationships were pre-existing. Sola (who plays Michael) knew and reccommended John Henry (Connor) and Maddie (Olivia) so they had some pre-existing rapport. 

But the real move was to save all the scenes where the group was most bonded and cohesive and fun for the END of the shoot (meaning we shot the beginning scenes last). The cast and crew loved each other so much by then that the happy scenes really felt joyous and goofy and happy. We shot all the alienated scenes first! 

Every director has a different relationship with preparation. By the time you called ‘action’ on day one, how much of the film already existed in your head, and how much were you hoping to discover on set?

I think see the above answer about our prep process with boarding. The short answer is “pretty much all of it existed in photos and the script by the time we shot.”

What detail/decision in Cut Your Teeth might go unnoticed by audiences on their first watch, but you’re incredibly proud of?

Honestly how little money we made this movie for.

I don’t think people will believe us when they see the final edit.

We fucking LUCKED out, and we were prepped to recieve that luck by doing an assload of planning. Our cast is so fucking good, we were incredibly fortunate and blessed with extras and locations, and PD and cine absolutely NAILED this movie. And poor PD was so overworked. 

I do think a BTS detail that helped us achieve this was that we’re doing a full equity split with the crew. Nobody on this film is taking a smaller equity share than me! And the actors are taking just about the same amount of even our BTL crew.

And I swear to God this isn’t even because of the “Obsession” discourse, this has already long been my intention and practice when it comes to filmmaking. 

It’s certainly an ethical thing, I just think it’s the correct way to go about making things and splitting rewards with folks, but it also gives people a lot more buy in and passion about your film. I think it really helped our cast and crew go above and beyond for this. 

Having a good and meaningful script helps a lot, but having one of those AND offering everyone a piece of the pie they’re creating goes a long way. I’m extremely proud of that. 

What’s your Letterboxd top four, and which three films do you think CYT would sit alongside for audiences?

Cache by Michael Haneke, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair by Jane Schoenbrun, Shame by Steve McQueen, and Aliens by James Cameron. 

Okay, good companion films…

Hm… 

Wildlife by Paul Dano, that was allllllllll over this lookbook and our planning for that films use of perspective and tone. 

Worst Person in the World, that late-20s coming of age thing, and a movie I just DEEPLY identify with. 

Passages by Ira Sachs, I really love how this movie deals with time… never explaining or really showing how long time is taking between events. It’s also kinda a group of people falling apart around one man’s sorta breakdown and that’s got a lot of DNA shared with this film. 

To keep up with the post-production and release of Cut Your Teeth, follow Sam(uel!) on Instagram, @samgoodwinfilm.