Posted in: Exclusive, Film Festival, Interview, Movies, SXSW | Tagged: Edie Arnold Is a Loser

Edie Arnold Is a Loser: Directors, Stars on Catholic School Punk Story

Edie Arnold Is a Loser directors Megan Rico and Kade Atwood, and stars Adi Madden Cabrera and McKenna Tuckett break down difficult scenes.

From the directors to the stars of Infigo Films' Edie Arnold Is a Loser, the film was certainly a learning experience as a unique coming-of-age story rooted in punk, set at an all-girls Catholic school. The film follows Edie Arnold (Adi Madden Cabrera), who finds her place in life singing in punk along with her best friend Frances (McKenna Tuckett) in a band called NunDead, along with two other girls at their Catholic School. Along with the pains of focusing on the work of becoming relevant in the local music scene, Edie has a variety of struggles growing up in life including trying to make sense of her feelings with school crush, Walter (Lucas Van Orden), practicing with her band in secret since she's borrowing her church's instruments, and dealing with her overbearing, protective mother (Cherish Rodriguez). While promoting the film at SXSW, Cabrera, Tuckett, and directors Kade Atwood and Megan Rico, who also wrote the film, spoke to Bleeding Cool about the film's memorable opening sequence and its use of animation, as well as their most difficult scenes.

Edie Arnold Is a Loser: Directors Kade Atwood and Megan Rico, and Stars Adi Madden Cabera and McKenna Tuckett on Editing, Difficult Scenes, and More

BC: Were there any scenes you reluctantly had to cut, or did everything work out as expected?
Rico: We reshot our opening credit sequence in like a very scrappy, unprepared, pickup session, and we ended up being really happy with how that came out. Another thing that we cut was the bleacher scene, the "Edie is a bitch scene." There was like a whole scene before the song, and we ended up consolidating it into this musical sequence, because it just was feeling very…Kade was the one who was like, "This is feeling very like a teen movie, capital T, capital N, like TEEN movie," which is not the vibe that we wanted. We always wanted it to feel very authentic and its own voice, so those were two things that stick out to me.

What was the most difficult scene to shoot?
Atwood: It was definitely the music scenes. Megan and I are not musicians. We don't have a background in music. We like to listen to a lot of music, and we really love music, but we don't play instruments. We are also not music video directors. We would love to, now that we are done.
Rico: Now, we are, I think. [Rico and Atwood laugh].
Atwood: Those scenes were the most challenging in terms of wrapping our heads around it and storyboarding, because we'd never done anything like that before. I'm curious, Adi and McKenna, if you guys have any thoughts on this.
Cabrera: My most difficult scene, you guys know what it is. You know the scene. There's this scene where Edie sings in front of her mom (Cherish Rodriguez) at the dinner table. I don't know why it was so hard for me to do that scene. I was getting so stressed out about it, and then also, naturally, the crew didn't like laughing at me singing so horribly, because they're not supposed to, because it'll ruin the take. I was like, "No one is laughing at me, I'm not funny, and this is so embarrassing." That one was so difficult for me for some reason. I don't really know why. I don't get it as much now as I did at the time.

Tuckett: Yeah, there's a moment in "Edie is a Bitch" and I don't actually know if it exists in the movie, but we filmed it where I'm supposed to get up on a ladder and jump off of it into a crowd surf. We had a stunt coordinator, but I was like, "Okay, McKenna! I'm going to do it!" I was like, "Whew! Okay!" And I mean it was doable. It was really safe, but in the moment, the adrenaline of like, "Am I even going to do this?!" It was crazy.
Rico: And then we didn't use it [laughs]
Atwood: Yeah.
Rico: I was going to say that for me, the hardest scene to film was the book club scene with all the moms, because to shoot that as quickly as possible, and get the coverage that we needed, we decided to shoot with two cameras. Kade was operating our second camera, which left me to direct our actors, and then in the middle of it, I got the biggest nosebleed of all time. He's doing his thing, I'm like bleeding out of my face, and we're just like, "Action!" And I remember being like, "I don't know what that's going to be like. We'll see if it works."

For more on Edie Arnold Is a Loser, you can check it out here.

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