Leah McKendrick (SCRAMBLED): “I have to make the kind of work that I want to see in the world”
SUCOPRESS/Raquel Laguna. Actress and writer Leah McKendrick makes her feature film directorial debut with SCRAMBLED. The film premiered at SXSW 2023 and is based on Leah’s real journey through egg freezing and 30-something singledom. In this interview, Leah McKendrick talks about her biggest challenge making the movie, her character and about her next projects. In SCRAMBLED, quintessential eternal bridesmaid Nellie Robinson (Leah McKendrick) constantly finds herself between weddings, baby showers, and bad dates. When she begins to feel like the clock is ticking and is faced with bleak romantic prospects, Nellie decides to freeze her eggs, setting her on an empowering journey to a brave new world where she ultimately discovers “the one” she is looking for might be herself. SCRAMBLED earned the Critics Choice Seal of Female Empowerment in Entertainment (SOFEE). Leah McKendrick has multiple projects in various stages of development including the Paramount romantic comedy BETTER LATE THAN NEVER which she is attached to direct, and penning the screenplay for TriStar’s reboot of the 80s cult classic, TROOP BEVERLY HILLS. Up next, she will be writing the legacy sequel to the 90s slasher, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER.
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00:00 I think initially the biggest challenge was trusting myself
00:05 to steer the ship.
00:08 That I felt like I could handle Nellie
00:11 because I lived a version of Nellie's life
00:14 and I know my story and I know what egg freezing is,
00:19 but I definitely felt in some ways
00:23 like I didn't deserve to direct my own film.
00:27 In some ways it was trusting myself
00:30 that I could pull it off,
00:32 but deep down knowing that I wrote it, it came from me.
00:36 So if anyone's gonna get it, it's probably me.
00:39 At first it was really scary
00:41 'cause I think coming into it originally as an actor,
00:45 you don't really have any power.
00:47 I mean, at my level, Leonardo DiCaprio has a lot of power,
00:50 but at my level, you're gonna wear
00:52 whatever they wanna put on you.
00:54 You're gonna say what they tell you to say.
00:57 You're gonna stand where they want you to stand.
00:59 So I don't think I was very accustomed
01:01 to having a whole lot of say in things.
01:03 So it was a big, some growing pains there for sure.
01:07 But then once you kind of get into the swing of it,
01:10 it's so empowering.
01:12 And I just think that all women in film should direct.
01:17 All my friends that are actors, my female actress friends,
01:21 I'm like, they're like, "How did you do it?"
01:23 I'm like, "You could do this.
01:25 "You should do this."
01:27 I believe that if you are a storyteller,
01:29 there's many ways to tell a story.
01:31 And I think as kids, we were sort of told
01:33 there's kind of three jobs,
01:34 a director, a writer, or an actress.
01:37 And a lot of times they kind of funnel us
01:39 into being actresses and call it sexism,
01:43 call it just a limited view of the craft and the industry.
01:48 But I too thought that, well, I like attention.
01:53 I like to act.
01:54 So I will be an actress.
01:56 And then I realized after many years of doing it,
01:58 how powerless I felt and how much more I had to say
02:02 and how limited the roles that were available to me were.
02:05 And I just said,
02:07 "I don't know if I'm gonna be good at this at all,
02:08 "but I know what my film is because I lived it."
02:11 When I was freezing my eggs, I felt a lot of loneliness.
02:15 I felt like a failure.
02:19 And I was on my couch and I was bloated.
02:24 And I felt like a loser.
02:25 And I was Googling a movie that I could watch
02:28 about my experience and there wasn't one.
02:31 And I felt really frustrated by that
02:34 because it was one of those times in my life
02:36 where, God, you just need a movie.
02:38 You just wanna watch a movie and you wanna cry
02:41 and you wanna be held and you wanna feel left alone.
02:43 And I felt pretty bummed out that no one had made that.
02:47 And so I thought, well, I'm gonna have to make that.
02:50 And then I kind of put it aside
02:51 and I didn't make it originally
02:53 because I had to go write my writing assignments.
02:56 And then they killed a couple of my movies in one day.
02:59 And I thought, number one,
03:02 I'm not gonna spend my whole life
03:04 creating stuff that can be killed in one day.
03:07 And number two, I have to make the kind of work
03:11 that I wanna see in the world.
03:13 I hope that you can relate to Nelly
03:15 whether you want kids or not,
03:17 whether you're gonna freeze your eggs or not,
03:20 whether you already have kids,
03:22 whether you're a man and this is not your experience,
03:25 but you're witnessing someone
03:27 who's going through something really lonely
03:29 and really harrowing.
03:30 I have no idea.
03:32 And that's why this is so scary
03:33 'cause I didn't think it was ever gonna come
03:35 to this many theaters.
03:37 But I know that I made something that was honest
03:42 and that's all I can do.
03:44 And I just pray that it resonates for someone out there
03:48 that was feeling very isolated and alone.
03:52 Sometimes people don't wanna work with first-time directors
03:56 because you're a guinea pig in a sense, right?
04:00 And not just first-time directors,
04:03 but a first-time female director.
04:05 Sometimes we have our own internalized misogyny
04:09 and we don't necessarily trust a young woman.
04:13 And she's starring in it.
04:14 So this was a big chance for all of them to take.
04:19 They had to really give me a vote of confidence to...
04:23 And nobody's getting rich on this film.
04:25 Nobody was paid much on this film.
04:26 So they had to really believe in me
04:28 and believe in this film.
04:30 And so having actors of that caliber
04:33 being willing to be in my directorial debut
04:38 that could have been a complete train wreck
04:40 is a really big accomplishment for me.
04:45 And I'm really grateful to them
04:47 and I'll be indebted to them forever
04:49 because they don't need this movie.
04:53 They've all proven themselves.
04:56 They don't need to do a small indie film, but they did.
04:59 Most important message is that you have time.
05:04 You have time to become who you want to be.
05:06 And I'm not just talking about babies.
05:11 I'm just talking about finding yourself,
05:15 becoming the human that you want to be,
05:17 taking care of yourself, taking care of your health,
05:20 becoming a better daughter, brother, sister, son,
05:26 husband, wife, partner.
05:29 There's time.
05:31 And I hate this idea, this constant pressure
05:35 of you're running out of time, you're running out of time.
05:37 You're not gonna be able to live your dreams.
05:39 You're not gonna be able to be a mother.
05:40 You're not gonna be able...
05:41 It's just enough.
05:43 So I hope that if anything else,
05:46 people leave feeling I've got time.
05:49 I got my next directing job, which I'm very excited about.
05:54 I'm directing one of my other scripts,
05:57 "Voicemails for Isabel,"
05:58 which is the love letter to sisterhood.
06:01 And in many ways, my little sister is Olivia Isabel.
06:04 So it was a dedication to my little sister
06:07 and that's a romantic comedy.
06:09 So I'll be directing that next.
06:10 I'm starting working on that.
06:12 And I just wrote the next installment
06:17 of the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" franchise.
06:19 So we've got that coming soon, hopefully.
06:22 And honestly, I'm not done talking about this,
06:28 about the contradiction of being a woman,
06:32 being told that you need to hurry up,
06:35 you're running out of time,
06:37 being told that follow your dreams, follow your career.
06:41 You can have it all,
06:44 but wait, you have to have it within this timeframe
06:46 and you need to hurry up and you're running out of time
06:48 and you screwed up over here and you screwed up over here.
06:51 So I do feel like I'm digging in deeper.
06:54 What's the level below scramble
06:56 to go even further into the paradox of being a woman?
07:01 So look out for that.
07:04 I'm not sure if I could talk about
07:06 what that next level is yet,
07:08 but I'm still in this world.