Jagged Little Memories: Director Chandler Levak on her latest film Mile End Kicks

Photo credit: Joe Fuda

Director Chandler Levak made her directorial debut with the wonderful and emotional coming-of-age film I Like Movies, following Lawrence (Isaiah Lehtinen) as a socially awkward video-rental store employee as he learns how to navigate his changing friendships before heading off to university. 

Lawrence isn’t always the best friend, and part of what made Levak’s film so captivating was her ability to make the audience feel almost painfully empathetic towards her characters. You recognize yourself in their moments of social anxiety, in their awkward fumbles for romance and their youthful uncertainty. It was why I was so excited to hear her latest film Mile End Kicks, starring Barbie Ferreira as the lead Grace Pine, was also based on Levak’s own experiences as a music critic in the early 2010s. 

She describes her process for writing the film as an exercise of filtering her own memories through the structure of a romantic comedy, saying “even doing the outline for the script was just me remembering what happened to me and thinking that it could be a good idea for a scene.” 

While in her twenties she might have gone to a house party and felt out of place, by writing the script for Mile End Kicks, her memories could transform. Levak describes it as thinking, “‘I love this moment,’ but what if it happened at that party where that guy was kind of weird to me? And then instead, I [ran] out into the street, and we kissed?” It leaves the audience feeling completely immersed in the world Levak creates, as if instead of watching a movie playing out on screen, you’re listening to a story from one of your best friends. 

“It was a lot of shared memories of things that happened to me and my friends, and so it became a way of writing a movie through [my] own past,” says Levak.

As the film unfolds, we follow Grace as she attempts to finish her 33 1/3 book about Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill and instead falls in love with two members of the same indie-rock band. By using her personal history as the starting point, Levak creates characters that feel fully realized. She describes the process as natural, “I feel like when I'm writing the script, the characters just become my friends, and I'm just having these imaginary conversations with my friends all day.” 

Photo credit: Joe Fuda

But there were also challenges in drawing so heavily from her personal experience. Though Lawrence in I Like Movies was also a stand-in for Levak, in many ways she felt that there was a “protective layer” between herself and the character because of the gender switch, a layer that was quite literally removed by having Ferreira pull her costumes from Levak’s own closet. 

“There were a few parts where it just felt a little bit surreal,” Levak says. “I think she's wearing my old t-shirt from SPIN when I was an intern there, and my Sonic Youth t-shirt that I got at a concert when I was 20.”

While shooting the film she had to remind herself, that her and Ferreira were “creating a character together,” saying "the more ownership I gave Barbie over the character, and just letting her follow her own natural instincts of what like she wanted to do as an actor in the scene, the better and richer the scenes got.”

By deepening her collaboration with Ferreira she felt the story truly come to life, saying, “my favorite filmmakers are people where you almost feel like they have an ensemble of actors that they love so much,” adding that she would never want to make another movie without including Isaiah Lehtinen now. 

With both of her films taking such deep inspiration from her own life, she highlights one of her favourite scenes, a two shot of Lehtinen and Ferreira sitting side by side, describing it as feeling like “the evolution of man,” the actor who played her teenage self in I Like Movies comforting the character that represents so much of her twenties in Mile End Kicks. 

We end our chat talking about Levak's own musical influences. Her music taste ripples throughout the soundtrack of the film, which features tracks from bands she loves like Peaches, TOPS, Cecile Believe, and of course, Alanis Morrisette. 

“When I was like eight to 11 years old, Alanis was my everything. I was just obsessed with [Jagged Little Pill], I would just listen to it over, and over, and over again."

It’s infectious to hear Levak speak so highly about an album she loved for so much of her life. Unintentionally riffing off the title of her debut film, she ends her praise with, “I just love music.”