CR 034: Vivian Kerr on Acting, Directing, and the Joys of Being the Boss
The writer, director, producer, and actor discusses her latest films, “Scrap” and “Séance.”
Vivian Kerr cut her teeth working as an actress in television, with appearances in Grey’s Anatomy, Castle, Masters of Sex, and New Girl, among others. But in 2022, she became more widely known as a feature film writer, director, producer, and star when her indie film, Scrap, had its world premiere at the Deauville American Film Festival in Deauville, France. For more than two years, the film screened at dozens of festivals, amassing awards and accolades, and in December 2024 found a home on streaming platforms, including Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime.
Although directing a debut feature film—particularly one starring veteran actors Anthony Rapp (Rent, Dazed and Confused) and Lana Parrilla (Once Upon a Time, Lost)—might sound intimidating, Kerr says she felt right at home in the role. “I’ve been watching directors for 20 years,” she says. “Even when I would guest star on TV shows, I was always on set. I never wanted to go back to my trailer. I would stand in the corner and just watch. I was fascinated by how the directors would communicate with the first AD [assistant director], how they would communicate with the director of photography. I really wanted that experience for a long time. So because I had put in the time and watched and figured out how I want to be on set, how I want to communicate with actors, I felt really ready. I loved it. It was awesome. Being the boss? It’s the best. Being in charge? It’s the best. It’s absolutely the best.”
Kerr’s second feature, the Gothic thriller Séance, is currently screening at festivals and already generating positive reviews. I recently spoke with her over Zoom about the writing of her films, the challenges of bringing them to the big screen, and her advice to aspiring filmmakers.
SANDRA EBEJER: You wrote, produced, directed, and star in Scrap. It’s played at nearly every festival over the past two years and is finally available on streaming platforms. What has this journey—from writing the film to sharing it with audiences—been like for you?
VIVIAN KERR: It’s been intense. I was so naive, in the best possible way, because I’d never done that before. I’d done a lot of shorts and web series and smaller projects, but I’d never taken a feature on that journey, from the inception of the idea to the development process and writing drafts and trying to get the financing and find investors and setting dates and hiring a crew. I’d never been an employer in that way before. So everything was a huge learning curve. And because I was wearing so many hats, I got to experience every single facet of making a feature film. It was incredibly rewarding. I mean, I think I’ve grown more in the last two years than I have in the last 10 just because it was like reaching for the next tree branch every single day. In hindsight, I think I made it harder on myself because I didn’t seek out mentors. But my background had been primarily as an actor. There wasn’t really a Producing Indie Features 101 or Directing Your First Feature 101 course that I could take, you know?
Were there any moments where you faced a challenge that seemed insurmountable?
Yes, constantly. My experience is one of those graphs that overall goes upward, but there’s hills and dales, for sure. Every other month is like a big valley of despair. There was a moment where I had a collaborator leave the project, and that was very difficult, because I had relied on this person. When they were leaving, I thought, “There’s still so much work to do. I don’t know if I can do this on my own.” But you rise to the occasion, and then you bring on board other collaborators. As long as you keep the train moving forward, other people will jump on the train. You’re never going to really be alone. But it is a train. People get off at different stations, and if it’s your brainchild that you wrote and directed and acted in and produced, you’re the one never getting off the train. So, you have to be prepared to go the distance and there’s an inherent loneliness in that. But you’re the train conductor and you stop at all the stations. People get off, people get on. And that ability to keep going can be very challenging for a lot of people. A lot of projects stall out because it is hard to go it alone sometimes.
Where did the idea for Scrap come from?
I got the initial idea in December 2016. At that time, I was in a writer’s group in L.A. People could bring pages of anything, and you would have actors there who would read it, and the crowd would give notes. It was wonderful. And my neighborhood in Hollywood had changed a lot. There were a lot more people sleeping in their cars or on sidewalks, so that had been lurking in the back of my mind. I thought there was some story there I wanted to tell, but I felt like [it had] been covered with movies like The Soloist or Shelter or The Pursuit of Happyness. But then I thought, “I’ve never seen a movie about how that starts.” You don’t just wake up one day living on the streets, so how does that even begin? What are the 47 intermediate steps for you to be sleeping in your car?
And I’d never seen a movie about someone like me, who is a middle-class everywoman who, through circumstances—some in her control, some not—starts doing this to hide from her family. I don’t think we explicitly say it, but when we meet Beth, my character, in the beginning of the movie, she’s only been [living in her car] for two weeks. She’s on this precipice of, this has to get a lot better very quickly or it’s going to get a lot worse very quickly. Once I had that idea, I started writing some scenes that were essentially the beginning of the movie where she wakes up in her car, she’s going on job interviews, she’s showering at the gym, she’s lying to people. I brought that to that writers group, and there was a really positive response to it.
I love films with messy, complicated female protagonists. What was it like as an actor to bring Beth to life?
It was a pleasure. Women are, just as men are, complicated. We have bad days. We’re not always likable. We self-sabotage, even when our intentions are pure. It’s such a cliché where it’s like, “You have to have a likable character.” It’s a weird holdover that we hold female characters to. A lot of people enjoyed the film, but there were a few reviews or audience members who would say how much they inherently disliked her. That surprised me. Occasionally she would really spark someone’s vitriol. And what does that say about us? Because, yes, she’s a liar and she is a self-sabotager, but this is also a woman who’s fleeing domestic violence. This is a woman who experienced a great deal of trauma as a child, losing her parents. I mean, [there’s] a scene in the movie where her ex hits her in the face. What standards are we holding our female characters to?
Likable or not, I think she’s a character that sticks with people when they’re done watching the film.
I hope so. Some of the things that she does, like wasting time buying stuff she doesn’t need on Amazon, I’ve done that. We’ve done that, where you’re like, “I don’t feel good about my life. I want to buy that.” That’s a very teenager kind of thing to do. Your mom gives you 20 bucks and drops you off at the mall and you get to buy something. I think some of [Beth’s habits are] based on behavior that I either have done or recognized in other people, and then just amplifying for comedic effect.
You’ve been a working actor for many years, but Scrap was your first feature film as a director. Was it intimidating to direct Anthony Rapp and Lana Parrilla?
Intimidating is maybe not the right word. I think I got lucky that it was all happening at the right time in my life. I don’t know if I could have done Scrap when I was in my 20s; I needed to be in my 30s. At that point, I had done what a lot of actors have done, which is pop up on different TV sets for a day or a week, and you have to be very comfortable working [with celebrities]. I remember when I did one episode of Castle. I had been such a fan of Nathan Fillion from Firefly and what he had done with Joss Whedon. He was quite famous to me. And I remember walking on that set and seeing his face and being like, “Oh! There he is.” And it is a weird thing that you learn to get over quickly as an actor, where you’re going to show up on a set, you’re going to know everyone, they’re not going to know you at all, and you have to throw that out the window and just relate to them person-to-person. I think being in the practice of that served me well.
It’s only the night before [shooting] where you’re like, “Tomorrow is the first day with Lana Parrilla. I hope she’s cool!” My entire cast was beyond cool. They were consummate professionals. They were incredibly kind to me. They were there for the right reasons. They were excited to make my film. They were very open hearted and generous and wanting to play and be creative as artists. I felt like the clouds parted, the gods smiled on me, and I got very fortunate with the casting of Scrap. Even Anthony [Rapp]—I used to listen to the Rent soundtrack in high school. If I could go back and tell 16-year-old Vivian, “You’re going to be starring opposite Mark from Rent in a film [in] 20 years,” I would have never believed that. That would have been crazy to me, because at that time he seemed so famous. But then you get older, and you realize everyone’s just working. But yeah, it was a huge deal. It still is a huge deal to me.
Having gone through every step with Scrap, were there any lessons that you learned that you’ve taken into subsequent productions?
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a director is how important your crew is going to be to you. Because as the director, I don’t have a background in lighting, so if I don’t have a great relationship with my gaffer, who really understands artistically what we’re doing, I can’t do their job. On day two, if something’s not right or we have to change something on the fly, it’s not like I can step in and do it myself. I have to communicate with someone who’s an expert in their field, without having all the technical knowledge that they have, to try to achieve something in my brain artistically. It can be a challenge, and you really need to rely on these people. I worked with an amazing DP [director of photography] named Johanna Coelho on Séance, my second feature, and I had never worked with a DP who was so collaborative. She taught me a lot about how important trust is between a director and DP. Similarly, I can’t operate the camera. I don’t know what all the buttons do. So, you’ve got to trust your crew, and you’ve got to be really careful about who you hire, because you’re bringing them into your world, and you’re only going to get to shoot this film once. Let’s say I looked back at Scrap and there was a scene I didn’t like; I can’t go back and redo it. You only have that day. So I think building rapport with your crew, having trust in them, and figuring out how you can continue to improve your communication was the biggest learning stuff for me.
Séance is very different from Scrap. How did this project come about?
It was such a long, long process trying to get Scrap made. One of the challenges with Scrap was there was no way to do it cheaply. You hear about these indie filmmakers who made a feature film in their backyard, but Scrap had over two dozen locations all over Los Angeles, so this is not a movie that you can make for 50 bucks. So I was thinking, “Could I write something that was maybe one location? Could I write something that was really contained, maybe only three or four characters?” But I couldn’t come up with any brilliant ideas. Similar to Scrap and the homelessness aspect, I didn’t have any take on it that is different and new and fresh and interests me enough to go on a multiyear journey with the story.
I was a theater major in college, and I still have all of my college plays. I thought, “Why don’t I go back and just look at small-cast plays? Maybe there’s some inspiration I can find. If there’s a story that is engaging enough for three or four characters for two hours on stage, maybe there’s themes in there I can borrow or something will spark.” So, I was looking back at different plays and I randomly stumbled across this August Strindberg play that I’d never read before called Creditors. It’s a weird one-act about three characters. This husband and wife are vacationing at a hotel by the seaside and her first husband shows up and you don’t really know what’s going on. Is she going to go back to the first husband? Is she having an affair with him? Does the second husband know about the first husband? It was just fun. I thought there could be something in that, maybe transposed into that kind of 1960s horror aesthetic, like The Haunting or The Innocents. And I added to that this idea of exploring a storyline of grief. I added in a fourth character, the character I end up playing, Lillian. I thought this set in that Victorian Gothic thriller world could be really interesting. So it was a little bit stealing from Strindberg and then also being a fan of those 1960s horror films where everything is practical and [there’s] no CGI. I really wanted to see if I could do that. Also, as a director I wanted to stretch and grow. I wanted to do something really different. I naively thought, though, that that budget would be smaller than Scrap. [Laughs] I was like, “It’s only four characters. It only takes place in one house. This is gonna be easy!” Little did I know, if you ever try and do anything period, it rapidly gets very expensive.
You mentioned that you studied acting in college. Did you grow up knowing you wanted to be an actress?
Not really. I have one older sister, Marion, and she always wanted to be an actress. I was very interested in writing. I mean, I loved the arts. I liked anything creative. But our dad was an attorney, our mom was in sales, so neither of them were pushing us in any way to do this. But because my sister was so involved in acting, I was always taken to a lot of theater, and I started loving it, too. I did plays in middle school and high school, I did drama classes and started doing community theater and fell in love with it. I wasn’t sure if I knew I wanted to study theater and acting in college; I thought I might double major. I got really lucky at USC that not only did they have a great theater program, but they also had an amazing film department, so I was able to PA [work as a production assistant] on a million short films by the time I graduated. It would have been very different if I had gone to a school that was more of an acting conservatory, that didn’t have any kind of film program at all. I tried to do as many jobs as I could on these student films when I wasn’t rehearsing plays. Getting that experience was super formative.
When you were making Scrap or Séance, were there any artists, films, or books, that you turned to for inspiration?
Yeah. For Scrap, Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me—that’s always been one of my favorite films. And The Savages—not just that movie, which I love, but that kind of acting that Philip Seymour Hoffman did, that kind of acting that Laura Linney did and does. When did those movies come out? That was the golden period of what we call movies for adults, where a movie like Scrap would get a $15 million budget. Now, forget about it. Your movie is either made for nothing or it’s Marvel. The in-between is gone. But those movies that were being made at that time that were really great, thorny dramas about the human condition, that featured incredible actors doing their best work—all of that had a huge impact on me. I wanted Scrap to be a throwback to that kind of a movie.
And Séance [was inspired by] the original The Haunting from the ’60s. That was a huge influence. We forget in that film that you never actually see the entity. Whereas today, it’d be like Crimson Peak where there’s CGI ghosts coming out of the floor. Not that I don’t love Guillermo del Toro or that movie, but CGI ghosts? Not my thing. So yeah, those kind of movies, as well as The Innocents. The cinematography of that movie had a huge impact on me. Someone recommended it to me for research and I watched it, and I immediately watched it again. It’s so beautiful to look at. The whole movie feels unreal. It feels like a dream. And I was always a fan of Gothic literature—The Turn of the Screw, Wuthering Heights. All of that was a huge influence.
I read that you wrote Scrap because you weren’t getting feature film directing opportunities, so you created an opportunity for yourself. What is your advice to aspiring actors or filmmakers who are struggling to get their foot in the door?
I probably could have made Scrap five years earlier, but I wasted a lot of time because I think I was waiting for validation. I was waiting for someone to come along and anoint me as a director. I thought you had to earn it. So many of the directors I admire, like Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg or Ron Howard, are old men. I thought, “I guess it’s something I’ll do in my 60s. I guess that’s the rule. You have to be old to do it.” I was carrying those beliefs. So my advice would be do it now because you don’t know how much time you’re going to have. You don’t know if you’re even going to live to be 60! Do it now and do it with whatever resources you have at your disposal. It doesn’t have to be super high budget. If you have $80,000 and a backyard and an imagination, you too can be a feature film director. You don’t have to have a name cast. You don’t have to have a bajillion locations. If you’re creative enough, you can create something incredible with any constraint.
To learn more about Vivian Kerr, find her on Instagram.
To learn more about Scrap and Séance, click here.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
You might also enjoy…
