Interview: Allison Torem Presents ‘Road Head’ at Midwest Film Festival, August 28, 2023

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CHICAGO – One of the Midwest Film Festival’s greatest strengths is its sense of community. The way they branch out and reach out to all in the Chicago filmmaker/actor/crew collective is without precedent in this evolving cinema city. Monday, August 28th, will feature Women & Gender Non-Conforming Filmmaker Night, and one of the films making its Chicago debut is “Road Head” by Allison Torem. Click MFF for tickets and more information.

“Road Head” is a hilarious story of coupling, carnality and COVID, not necessarily in that order. Written/directed by and in a lead role is Allison Torem, the broad farce takes on as many modern problems as possible in a short film format. The filmmaker herself describes it as a “Reform Jewish absurd comedy about grief, changing plans, and the lengths we’ll go to avoid direct communication with the people we love.”

’Women & Gender Non-Conforming Filmmaker Night’ at the Midwest Film Festival
Photo credit: MidwestFilm.com

Allison Torem is one of the breakout actors in Chicagoland on stage and screen, generating received rave notices for the at-SXSW 2021 film ”Our Father”. As a writer-director-producer, short film credits include the comedy “Beefsteak," as well as the dramedy “Essentials,” featuring Austin Pendleton.

The Midwest Film Festival has been a staple in Chicago’s film community for 19 years, with a monthly format. At the beginning of 2020, it reinvented the brand with a new look, facilitated by Executive Director Erica Duffy. It has maintained its status as one of the most influential, popular and provocative film festivals in the city of Chicago.

In a brilliantly comprehensive interview with Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com, Allison Torem explains the art of the artist.

HollywoodChicago.com: You are expressing many inherent life idiosyncrasies in this short, not to mention throwing it into the pandemic period. What was the idea spark for the story, and did it evolve from the spark or turn into what it became through the process of creating it?

Allison Torem: My friend Alex Pont and I were joking around about road head, and I was like ‘Be right back, I’m gonna write a script real quick!’ I sent that draft to him and then to a few more folks, some in film and some not, and people tended to come back with something along the lines of, ‘I don’t know what the f*** I just read, but it captures something about my experience I’ve been struggling to put into words. Also LOL.’

That was exactly how I felt, and this early feedback was what gave me permission to go into script revisions and pre-production, even and especially during the pandemic. It became increasingly exciting to me and my closest collaborators on the project to strive to create something which might offer comfort not in spite of but through absurdity, something which could contain a wild tonal bandwidth without falling apart. Working to discover, protect, and refine the film’s tone, including in post with co-editor Max G. Mooney, has been one of the most rewarding aspects of the whole creative process.

View From the Monitor: Allison Torem Acts in & Directs ‘Road Head’ with Elan Maier
Photo credit: Eva Fabray

HollywoodChicago.com What is the greatest advantage of acting in a narrative that you have also created and directed? Does it create a shorthand for you as an actor or is it a different kind of challenge?

Torem: Deciding to act in your own movie can make things both harder and easier. It’s painful to be away from monitor and your baseball cap and your caffeine supply, but it’s a beautiful thing arriving at a level of creative understanding and trust with your core production team that allows you to be present as an actor whenever necessary. And while of course it’s a lot of work to memorize lines and get the blocking in your body and do the psychological and emotional character work, you’ve been invested in and exploring the intricate backstories and interpersonal histories of the characters as the writer and director all along, so all of the words already sort of make sense in your mouth and all of the actions and shifts and arcs already make sense in your head.

Plus, when you’re directing yourself, you get a free pass to give yourself all those results-oriented notes you’d never otherwise give to an actor, and that’s sort of fun … I came across my copy of the script recently and saw that I had written into the margins, “Laugh→Cry.” That’s about as unsophisticated a note as you can give, but I was giving it to myself, so it was A OK. At the end of the day, acting in your own movie does tend to complicate things at least as much as it simplifies them, so I do feel that it should only be done if it’s really worth it for the particular project at hand.

HollywoodChicago.com So how did that specifically apply with the current film?

Torem: In the case of ‘Road Head,’ I think it was, partly because I got to bring all of the trust and respect I already share with Elan Maier [Isaac] and with Danny Rhodes [Man 1] into the scenes, which not only expedited our process of building the character dynamics I wanted on set but also provided us with a comfort level as an ensemble that allowed us to really ‘go there’ as performers, and that was the best case scenario and such a blast.

But it bears emphasis that without the hard work and care of our cast and crew, very much including Lisa Cisneros [Producer], Eva Fabray [AD/Producer], Danny Rhodes [Producer/Actor], Phil Ortiz [DP/EP], Adam Rebora [Producer/Actor], Ajoa Darko [Wardrobe & Production Design Consultant & Assistant], and Chloe Baldwin [Intimacy & Violence Consultant] … the process wouldn’t have been been possible, let alone nearly as much fun.

Allison Torem and Elan Maier on the Set of ‘Road Head’
Photo credit: Araceli Gaucin

HollywoodChicago.com What is different in the experience of this film than your past five short films, and what knowledge from your previous experience helped you most in creating ‘Road Head’?

Torem: ‘Road Head’ is the strangest film I’ve ever made that’s meant this much to me on a narrative level. The project never fit cleanly into one genre category, and I was striving to achieve a tone that I had no pre-existing reference in mind for, and I couldn’t tell prospective team members, ‘It’s like THIS!’ or even ‘It’s like THIS meets THIS!’ And for a project that’s this inappropriate– I mean you can’t even so much as put the title on your resume without wondering, ‘What the hell am I doing with my life? WHO AM I?’ – and which required intimacy, nudity, violence, overnight shoots, and a larger crew than I’d ever managed before, it was not going to be possible without the assistance of an incredibly hard working cast and crew, each of whom, for whatever reasons of their own that they are under no obligation to share with me, saw something of themselves in the project and decided to take a leap of faith.

Even my dear friend of over a decade, Elan Maier, who came on board to play Isaac, said to me after our first read through, ‘Al, I’m not entirely sure I understand this script yet, but it was a helluva lot of fun, and I trust you.’ So, I can only imagine the inner dialogues of various crew members who had absolutely no other context for me at the time besides the script. Something I think I brought with me from past projects that helped me throughout the process was a certain enthusiasm for finding the absurdity in everyday life and running with it and a certain comfort level with finding and working with actors and editors and other team members who are excited to exist in that tension with me.

Allison Torem Photo credit: Cory Popp

HollywoodChicago.com Finally, what is the greatest lesson or advice you’ve received about 1) being a writer, 2) being a director and 3) being an actor?

Torem: As writer, don’t hold back on the first draft. Do your best not to censor or judge yourself. Let everything fly. Training yourself to take breaks and come back to your work with your editing cap on is a skill that takes time to develop, but you can’t practice that skill until you have something to edit.

As writer and director, In a perfect world, we’d all receive exactly the feedback we need exactly when we need it from exactly the people we want to receive it from, but in reality, we have to learn how to filter notes according to what is useful in making our work more what it wants to be, and sometimes that requires us to attempt to determine the difference between a note given on the basis of quality versus a note given on the basis of preference/taste.

And finally as actor, If you’re not having fun, neither is the audience. This doesn’t mean that just because you’re having fun, the audience is too. But, I do think that enjoying the visceral experience of listening and responding to another person under fictional circumstances is a precondition for your audience enjoying seeing you do it.

By PATRICK McDONALD Editor and Film Critic/Writer HollywoodChicago.com pat@hollywoodchicago.com