Five Dollar Friday — Emily Rolen & ‘The Shorn Lamb’
A filmmaker and their short film deserving of your attention
Happy Five Dollar Friday!
I’m excited to introduce you to Emily Rolen, a journalist-turned-filmmaker based in Austin, TX.
Her upcoming directorial debut short film is called The Shorn Lamb.
When a couple’s close friend arrives at their home for a haircut, they find themselves crossing boundaries from friendship into something new, exciting, complicated, and terrifying. The Shorn Lamb explores the ways friendship, platonic love, and romantic love intersect. Where the lines blur, and things get complicated. It begs the question: Where are the borders of our relationships, and what happens when we cross them?
In your campaign video you talk about the feeling of standing on the edge of something, in between a yes and a no. It seems your community has given you a resounding yes! At the timing of writing this, your campaign is at 96% funding. How are you feeling now?
Who knew! Certainly not me! Although I, of course, hoped! We were green lit within a few days, and I think everyone on our team has been in a state of delighted delirium. Right now I feel like I’ve been pushed off the cliff of pre-production, and now we’re falling into production. It’s a new feeling, one I think I might get addicted to.
If you think this is addictive, just wait until you wrap production on your own project. I tell everyone that’s a high I’ll be chasing for the rest of my career.
What compelled you to want to make a film? What compelled you to want to make this film?
I come from literature, and so filmmaking for me started with my tinkering around with scripts as a palette cleanser from fiction. I often feel entirely enmeshed in the inner lives of my short story and novel characters, and most of the time there’s no one to collaborate with, save for that character (which is, essentially, me). Now I sound crazy! I guess I’m trying to say fiction can be lonely.
In another life I was a part-time stage manager in theatre while I worked as a reporter in Philadelphia, and I soaked up as much as I could from the professional and DIY scene there. I learned so much. That time left me with a real desire to work with actors, which I’ve come to realize is at the heart of my interest in directing. And it sparked a yearning for collaboration.
So I began adapting my short stories as experiments. I put on a staged reading in Austin, where I’m living right now, and then I started work on a novel. I was having trouble finding the narrator’s POV, so I tried it as a (very) bad feature. After that I wrote many, many short scripts from that world, with those same characters, just to figure out these people and what the hell they wanted.
One day in early January I wrote a script called The Shorn Lamb and sent it to a friend of mine who is a gifted fiction writer and producer who I dearly trust. And he said, in so many words, this is the one. Make this.
Because of that whole process, this script feels very intimate. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with these characters. They’re imperfect in a way that, for me, makes them real and complicated and even frustrating. Their conflicts are something I haven’t seen depicted on screen quite yet, and they were borne of this desire to see people in queer relationships (although I’m not sure these characters would impose those labels on themselves) try new things without the expectation that they will end poorly. There are no villains, and there are no heroes. It feels like the right time in film for this sort of story. And it feels like the right time for me as an artist.
You mentioned a narrator’s POV in the novel version. Do you see this as a story told through the eyes of one character in particular? How are you approaching POV in this film?
I don’t, no! Something Zach Morrison (the DP) and I agreed on quite early was that we were going to be witnesses to these characters. The script takes place over just one evening, so we (the camera, the audience) are there to witness a dynamic between four people over a couple of hours with a more omniscient POV.
A little secret, however, is that because I’m interested in this POV question we are going to experiment a bit with Marion, who is a cold and strategic yet self conscious and tender woman navigating the strange new world of this relationship between her, her husband, and their friend-turned-lover Alex.
I want us to watch how she moves in private spaces, and then in public. I’ve always loved exploring this idea of the individualized character versus a character in a community. We will see Marion a few times alone—and that’s when the POV will get smaller and smaller. I want to fool around with the lightest touch of a surreal, claustrophobic quality when we're in her head, with her. And then, just like that, we're omniscient again. I want audiences to think, wait did that just happen? And by the end of the film hopefully those questions will be answered.
Speaking of Zach Morrison, I was very impressed with his reel. How did the two of you cross paths? And what have early conversations been like in conveying your vision to him?
Zach is one of those Austin filmmakers you often hear about (though now he’s based in LA) and I met him recently at a screening for Andreas Streuli’s film Central and Remote. I liked that film a lot and was immediately drawn to the way Zach seemed to insist on lingering in spaces with actors as a witness—never imposing the camera in a way that made it feel like a character in a scene. There is an urgent quietness to that kind of filmmaking that I find really refreshing and exciting. It allows for more, more, more: more character work, more complexity, more grey area.
Because this was my first time talking to cinematographers about my own work, I was perhaps ignorantly struck by Zach’s interest in talking about character on a micro level. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I really admired the questions he asked; the dignity he gave to the conflicts. The way we were able to connect about the material as people first, filmmakers second. I thought, how wonderful. I want to work with this guy.
That’s so lovely. What else has surprised you while prepping The Shorn Lamb?
Oh, so much. I guess more specifically I’ve been struck by how easy it was to fill out a cast and crew. Austin has a rich film community, and I underestimated how willing members of my community would be to support this project. It was easy to find like-minded creative people who want to help me make this, and as a result there are so many different kinds of creatives on this crew. And most of them happen to be my friends. I'm really happy about that.
Have you found your cast yet? Since you’ve spent so much time with the characters in various forms, I’m curious to know how it feels to now bring actors into the mix.
We have! We’ve cast Olivia Applegate as Marion, Jose Raul Corres as Ben, Scot Johnson as Alex, and Stevie Marceaux as Veronica.
It’s always sort of disorienting when a character from my head becomes a breathing person in front of me, and this time is certainly no different. Thanks to their talent and professionalism, it’s been quite easy to start playing around and experimenting with their characters. And the dynamics between them. We haven’t begun rehearsals quite yet, but they’re all such pros. I feel really lucky.
As I mentioned at the top, you're very, very close to reaching your initial funding goal — but as we both know, "100%" is just the baseline, not the finish line. Now that you're in a position to think beyond that first milestone, how would additional contributions help elevate your vision?
Our film is DIY and scrappy and I’m so proud of that. But exceeding our goal would support us in almost every area. It would allow us more freedom during production with additional equipment and crew for Zach, more resources during post-production to add those pretty finishing touches, and allow us to submit to festivals once the film is complete. Long live indie film!
Hear, hear. Thank you, Emily, for your time! Best of luck!
You can join me in supporting Emily and her film The Shorn Lamb by contributing to the campaign here:
Thanks to the help of paid subscribers, my weekly contribution for Five Dollar Fridays has grown from $5 to $16.
Again: it’s better for everyone involved if you contribute directly to the filmmaker’s campaign yourself and don’t become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. But, if you ain’t got time for that every week, you can click the ‘easy’ button and I’ll contribute on your behalf.
💰 Vimeo is offering $30,000 grants for short films! The application window is currently open and closes April 18, 2025.
🥳 Congratulations to Anna O’Donnell on the successful conclusion of her campaign!
⏳ There’s still time to contribute to Jon Densk’s campaign for Axolodyssey.
🏘 Reader-submitted campaign looking for support: Jesus Salazar Montero’s Behind Closed Doors
✍️ And, finally, feel free to write back if you have a question for one of the filmmakers, an update on a short film project of your own, or if you just want to say hi!