For Durham native Andie Morgenlander, bringing her debut feature film, Whistle Down Wind, to the Carolina Theatre is a homecoming. Before she ventured into the world of film production, Morgenlander was a self-described “silly theater kid” growing up in the Triangle.
Her love for storytelling was cultivated at local arts hubs like the Durham Arts Council, the Scrap Exchange, and the classrooms of Jordan High School, where creative writing and theater teachers encouraged her voice and unlocked her imagination. Morgenlander honed those skills at Louisiana State University, where she majored in theatre performance, and Prescott College where she received her Master’s in Fine Arts.
Her debut feature, Whistle Down Wind, is a deeply North Carolina-centered project. The project began in 2018 as a $500 short film shot in the Blue Ridge Mountains. After years of grassroots fundraising, Morgenlander and her film team raised $45,000 to develop the project into an 86-minute feature-length film. The movie costars her older sister, Shawn Morgenlander, and cowriter, Julia Christgau, as childhood best friends Janie and Alex and examines their bond as it shifts and deepens from youth to adulthood.
Morgenlander’s ambitions in the film industry go beyond just producing movies. She’s the cofounder of the Justice Film Collective, a creative studio “dedicated to conscientiousness at every stage of the filmmaking process,” and says that she’s committed to humanizing film sets by implementing practical structures and creating independent films that avoid the burnout and exploitation so endemic to the industry.
Ahead of the film’s premiere at the OUTSOUTH Queer Film Festival on Saturday, August 15, the INDY spoke with Morgenlander about her roots in Durham’s creative ecosystem, working with a sibling, and the importance of centering diverse stories in the South.
INDY: After studying theater performance at LSU, you worked as an actor before stepping behind the camera. What was the turning point that made you switch to directing and building your own agency?
MORGENLANDER: I was feeling disenchanted at the time about what was being offered to me and people around me. A lot of the roles available were stereotypes that people were getting asked to play, and I burned out on that pretty quickly. And also, I don’t really want to do a career where I’m always at the mercy of other people in terms of getting cast, so what led me to filmmaking was the opportunity to decide what I want to talk about and why and through what lens.
What I first attuned to, whenever I was in acting and in theater performance in college, were these hush-hush dialogues that would happen where upperclassmen would tell lowerclassmen, “Hey, watch out for this teacher, you’re gonna get cast as the hot girl.” Or an older Black actor [might tell a younger one], “Oh, this teacher is gonna cast you as the maid or in a stereotypically ‘Black’ role.” It was a culture of warning and preparing rather than speaking up and being like, “I actually don’t deserve to be cast in this role because this is not where my worth is,” at least for me and for the people that I was around at that time. That’s something actors and artists deal with over time, especially when you’re younger and trying to figure out what your worth is.
A major piece of Whistle Down Wind is the “ethical filmmaking framework” you authored to support safety, accessibility, and mutual care on set. Where did this framework come from? What does that look like day to day?
It was that blend of experiences that moved me to think about how I want to be able to make movies in a different way. I want people to feel mutually supported, even though it’s a difficult industry. And I believe there are ways to build trust and support and care when you’re working intimately between a director and actors, and when actors are working with each other. There’s all these ways you can create containers so that people can actually be bold and take risks. And in my opinion, if people are nervous about abusive or problematic things happening on set, then they’re not gonna feel safe to take emotional risks. I’m trying to support actors to get to that place themselves. That was the amalgamation of what brought me to found Justice Film Collective.
It’s not like a full-blown production studio. There’s no brick and mortar yet. What that looked like, initially, was and has been producing films that, in some way, link to a social justice or social practice mindset. We did a documentary about corporal punishment that featured adults who had different experiences with corporal punishment when they were younger and how they’re healing and moving forward from that now. We produced a film that was based on one of my friends’ experiences, about Black motherhood and Black mothers birthing. The actor we cast in that was actually a woman who had been through the loss of a child who really connected to the piece and wanted to do the movie.
We’ve done a magical realism short recently about another person who is a producer within Justice Film Collective and their Lebanese lineage. The story is about being in the West, connecting to grandmother’s magic as a way of getting through being in the belly of the beast. So that’s a sprinkling of the projects.
Having more attention to the way that we communicate with each other and the planning and the scheduling, it’s having more caring relationships with other actors. We have Google Forms where we ask “Are there any specific accommodations that you would like on set as a way of incorporating disability justice?” but not in a way that outs someone. If someone wants to share some of their needs, like their mental health or well-being, or if they’re nervous about subject material, they have an opportunity to say that, but they’re not required to disclose that to us.
In terms of the feature film, I was able to teach the framework to the whole crew before. We did a few days of orientation that covered everything from why we do it, why we’re here, and, because it was a movie I was directing, I talked about creating the conditions for care and trying to understand why people fail at loving each other even when they’re trying their best. We talked about a lot of different things, like accountability, moving through conflict, pathways of reporting.
The day of, we had an intimacy coordinator on the film. There’s multiple intimacy scenes, and we had several meetings and a process with the intimacy coordinators, so that whenever we went on set, the actors would know ‘OK, this is what we’re doing, and here are spaces to pause.’ Here’s your autonomy within this. … Having those types of conversations in advance with the hope that when people are on set and something happens, there is a way forward to reconnect and keep things moving without just sweeping it under the rug. The thing is, it’s a bunch of people in a group for a month—things are gonna happen.
There are also other organizations in bigger-budget filmmaking that do amazing equity work and disability justice reports that benchmark the industry and how people are being treated. Ava DuVernay is a prime example. She is really mindful in the way that she holds her actors and her people on set. I’ve read so much about the mental health support that she makes sure is available to her actors because she knows they have to go to such deep places to show what they’re showing.
You shot this entire feature on what you described as a “microbudget” of $45,000. How did you raise the funds to make this ambitious production possible?
The budget was an ever-moving number, mostly going down, but we ended up shooting the film for $45,000, which is what’s considered a micro budget in film and is pretty wild because it’s not an easy amount of money to raise. But it was entirely self-funded, so the value was raised over the course of two and a half years. It was a blend of crowdfunding campaigns. … We did some really lovely events at Killer Queen in Durham to help fundraise, which was a blast, as well as [events in] Winston-Salem and Asheville. Some of our funding came from grants from different organizations, majority of which were independent for North Carolina-centered film or art grants in the state, so really, a lot of local and Southern support to get the movie financed.
One of the big linchpins was being able to partner with Western Carolina University. We had 18 students on set who received a stipend. Everybody that was on set as crew received the same stipend, whether they were students or professionals. And then the students also got a class credit for one of their practicums. The students were stellar. They did such incredible work, and sort of the blend of students and professionals was how we were able to create the film on what is a pretty low budget considering the large amount of casts and locations that are in the film.
When I speak to people in L.A., there’s a lot of hopelessness and sexism. I would so much rather look around in my community, be in North Carolina, be in Durham, be in Asheville, and push forward on figuring out how I can make the films that I want to make and support other people that are at different stages of their career in telling the stories that they care about. I would so much rather do that, even if it’s more scrappy or less straightforward than spending five years trying to package a film for an industry that is fickle and run by people that don’t care about independent film.
Your older sister, Shawn, costars in this film. You mentioned that her influence is what first got you into acting as kids. What is it like now getting to work with her as collaborators?
We did theater and chorus together at Jordan [High School]. She has been pursuing theater and we’ve been on different timelines; both of us have been on our distinctive gender identity and sexuality journeys and navigating our own identities and what that means to us in relationship to our artistry. So actually, it’s been really beautiful. In the same way that our relationship has shifted and changed as we’ve gotten older, figuring out what it means to us to be visible within filmmaking has honestly been an incredible thing to be navigating alongside her with this project.
I love my sister. We’re very close. We have a blast together. I think, if anything, sometimes if we’re not clicking or if I can tell something’s not landing, I’m like, ‘Why aren’t we mind-melding right now? We should be getting this.’ But I try to treat all actors with the same amount of respect and care. We’re super candid with each other. And I think the mutual love and the mutual trust definitely makes it easier to navigate the creative things on set.
Bringing your first feature home to Fletcher Hall at the Carolina Theatre is a massive milestone. What are you most excited for the local community to experience when they sit down to watch Whistle Down Wind?
Thinking about Durham and the people that will be attending the premiere, it’s really beautiful and powerful to think about how there’s so many people that are going to be able to experience the film that have supported me at so many different points of my life, including folks that supported the funds for the feature film that are legitimately excited that the movie came out and that there is film coming out of Durham.
A lot of the way that we create the visuals within the film is by shooting on location in North Carolina and working within the community. So, definitely, people can expect to see Western North Carolina in all of the locations, from the in-town locations to the outdoor more rural areas.
I mean, it’s about two best friends who meet when they’re kids, and then we see how their friendship and the context of how the small town that they’re growing up in impacts their ability to be in a relationship with each other as adults. It’s very much a coming-of-age story, a character study. There’s definitely silly throwback moments to the early 2000s. The interesting thing is that it will be different for everybody; that’s one thing I’m personally excited about.
There are a lot of different characters within the film, and I’m excited to hear who people connected with and why. And I hope that people come into a little bubble in Fletcher Hall and be presented with a story and experience that can be a moment of entertainment or spark something bigger.
To comment on this story, email [email protected].
You must be logged in to post a comment.