Online Premiere: 'Handle With Care' (Michael Glover Smith, 2024)

The acclaimed new short from Smith is now available online, premiering through Split Tooth

Any aspiring young filmmaker who wants to move past “aspiring” best pay attention to Michael Glover Smith. The Chicago filmmaker works tirelessly to keep making films, screen them in front of audiences, all while encouraging other artists to do the same. He toured across the United States with his 2022 feature film Relative, delivering Q&As and engaging with audiences whenever possible, and cracked the Box Office Top 25 in the process. His recent pair of short films have been hits on the independent festival circuit. Smith’s success proves that to make it as an independent filmmaker, it takes relationships — both on and off camera, in theaters and online.

Last December Split Tooth Media hosted the online premiere of Paper Planes, a holiday-set short film co-directed by Alyssa Thordarson and Smith. This pair decided to team up again for a new short called Handle With Care. This time Smith wrote the film and takes the sole directorial credit, and Thordarson stars in it alongside Mickey O’Sullivan.

Smith’s films always focus on the intricacies of connection, and in Handle With Care, Smith tackles the ever-versatile premise of a first date. Neither Thordarson’s or O’Sullivan’s characters have been on a date in years, and they arrive with equal parts trepidation and hopeful anticipation. As Thordarson unveils her story of why she hasn’t dated recently, O’Sullivan’s reactions become the focal point as he listens and tries to find common ground. With only two scenes, Handle With Care is an exercise in dramatic brevity and creating memorable characters in a limited timeframe.

Split Tooth is proud to host the online premiere of Handle With Care, which is now available on Vimeo. Watch the film below and read an interview with director Michael Glover Smith conducted by Split Tooth editors Brett and Craig Wright about the film’s creation and his hopes for the future of independent filmmaking.

Watch Handle With Care:

Split Tooth Media: Since Relative, your 2022 feature, you’ve made two short films. What’s drawn you to shorter form movies for your latest projects?

Michael Glover Smith: The inability to raise money to do features. (laughs) Fundraising is the hardest part of filmmaking and I don’t like to go too long without working. I know a lot of independent filmmakers who have gone years in between projects, and I understand why. You don’t want to compromise if you have a vision for what you want to do. You want to stay true to that and you don’t want to have to cut corners. But on the other hand, I don’t like to talk about what I’m gonna do. I just like making things. And shorts are a great way to stay creative while waiting to do more ambitious things.

Several filmmakers have brought this up in Split Tooth interviews, that, if they could, they’d make a short every week, just to be making things all the time. But a lot of them feel there isn’t a strong enough culture for short films to justify it because a lot of people still see them as the ‘minor works’ between features.

Definitely. Or a calling card in order to make a feature. Like, ‘this is the short version, now drop a big bag of money in my lap so I can do the 95 minute version.’ (laughs) There’s no glory in making shorts. You go to a festival and you’re playing in a block with five or six other films and you have to share the spotlight with all of those other filmmakers. You might get asked one or two questions in a Q&A. No one is going to review your short film. (laughs) And of course, the potential for distribution and exhibition is a lot less. There’s NoBudge and also Omoleto, a YouTube channel. So that aspect can be frustrating, but on the other hand, it’s also kind of an exciting challenge to make something that’s 7 minutes and 59 seconds and to know it’s going to be that length and to say, hey, can I make something that’s going to affect people emotionally? How much drama and comedy can I pack into just a few minutes? Can I get actors to turn out great performances in just two brief scenes? That in and of itself is exciting. And that can kind of change the way you think about feature films, too. It feeds how you make features because you can take chances on a short in a way that you wouldn’t maybe want to do on a feature, doing something for the first time.

What were some of the chances you took making Handle With Care?

People who are familiar with my work will probably recognize the same voice in a film like Handle With Care, but I really wanted this film to be more about subtext, and what is not said, and what is offscreen. Those qualities are present in my features, but when you’re making a film that’s less than eight minutes long, all of a sudden what’s not said and what’s being omitted takes on a much greater importance. In Handle With Care, Mickey O’Sullivan’s character mentions having an invisible scar, and we never find out what he’s alluding to, but it seems to be important. It seems to be something that holds him back from becoming closer to his date than he otherwise might have. I think also on a formal level, in contrast to when I’m designing a shot list for a feature, I tend to think it through even more thoroughly in terms of, well this is a scene of two people talking in a bar. It’s going to last four minutes, so how do we do this in a way that’s meaningful? How do we light it? How do we frame the shots? Do we move the camera? Do we not move the camera? So how do we do it in a way that will have a maximum impact on the viewer? I shot list every movie I make, but sometimes the shot list is not super detailed for certain scenes. But for Handle With Care, everything was thought through to the last detail.

How often do you break from the shot list?

That always happens a little bit because whenever you’re in a physical space it always feels different than when you’re thinking about it at home on your computer. (laughs) Also, when you are in a space by yourself, knowing it’s going to be a location, it feels different than when you’re there with actors, and with a crew, and with equipment. There are always adjustments that we make, and it’s not just me. It’s a conversation with the DP. We had an extraordinarily talented cinematographer on this film, a guy named Pouya Shahbazi, who sadly has left Chicago for LA. We lost another one to Hollywood! But he’s a great Iranian DP. His father is a great director, Parviz Shahbazi, and he’s had films that have played the Venice Film Festival. And Pouya actually shot his dad’s last feature, Roxana (2023), which is excellent. He also shot Paper Planes, and that was a really positive experience so I could trust him 100 percent. And to give you an idea of what I mean when I say we’re talking about how to light something in order to give it maximum impact, there’s one moment in Handle With Care when Mickey’s character says, ‘That’s a hell of a thing to learn about somebody on a first date,’ after she confesses to him that she could become paralyzed for life. When he says that line, a light flashes on his face and it looks like it’s from a passing car, headlights, but it’s not. That was Pouya’s idea. He wanted to flash a light on Mickey’s face to underscore the drama of the moment. So that’s the kind of contribution I want my DPs to make, and he’s full of good ideas like that.

On the subject of people you worked with on Paper Planes, you’re back with Alyssa Thordarson. How soon after Paper Planes did you decide to make another short together?

It was almost a year later. We shot Paper Planes in January of 2023, and we shot Handle With Care in January of 2024. We shot the whole film in one day, on January the 19th. But it wasn’t until December of 2023 that we decided to do a movie the next month. (laughs) Kind of on the one-year anniversary of Paper Planes. Originally I was going to make a feature that was going to be a spinoff of Relative. I wrote a script about Hekla, Elizabeth Stam’s character from the film, a very busy day in her life as she’s going on auditions several years after the events in Relative. We had cast the whole film, we’d hired the crew, we found all of our locations, and then the money fell through at the last minute. Alyssa was going to play a prominent role in the Hekla movie, and Pouya was going to shoot it. Pouya came to me and Alyssa and said, ‘I have nothing to do in January. Can one of you guys just write a short that we can shoot?’ (laughs) Alyssa, I don’t think, had anything in her pocket, and she said, ‘Mike, why don’t you write it and I’ll produce it and star in it?’ I said OK, and I just hammered this out in a day or two. I initially asked Alyssa if she wanted to co-direct it, just like Paper Planes, and she said, ‘no, you do this one.’ It was probably because I wrote it solo, in much the same way that I asked her to direct Paper Planes with me because she wrote it, and I felt like it was more her film than mine.

Where did you start with the idea for Handle With Care?

Handle With Care is about a first date, which is a subject that I think is fascinating, and it’s a scenario that is rife with possibilities for both comedy and drama. A couple of my features have first dates in them. Cool Apocalypse is about a first date, there’s a very memorable first date in Relative as well. But I think what appeals to me about that scenario is the fact that when two people agree to go on a date with each other for the first time, they both are feeling the same thing. They both are hopeful. You don’t go on a first date if you don’t think it’s going to go well. (laughs) And not only are you hopeful, but you’re also fearful because you don’t know what’s going to happen, and there’s always a little bit of anxiety that goes along with that. You can spin an infinite number of scenarios out of that basic situation. The challenge for me in writing this was how do I get the dramatics really high, really quickly? And that’s when I hit on the idea of a woman who makes a confession to her date about the fact that she has this disability, and then it’s all about how does he respond to that? He’s obviously uncomfortable, and then is he going to also share with her something that is similarly personal to him?

I thought it was interesting when we hosted a screening of Mercury in Retrograde here in Portland, the film played totally different from when we watched it by ourselves beforehand. When it was just the two of us, we saw it mostly as a drama, but then seeing it with a group, the crowd really responded to the film’s comedic elements. What has the response been like during screenings of Handle With Care during its festival run?

I think that’s true of all of my films, to be honest with you. And that’s true with Handle With Care. If you see it with an audience, people laugh throughout the first half. The moment where Alyssa pulls out the straw and puts it in her wine glass, that’s the first laugh. And then people laugh at Mickey’s uncomfortable reactions to her. But when he gets up to look at her scar, that’s when the laughs stop. Then it’s always very quiet for the rest of the film, which is what I wanted.

Did you ever have anyone on a date pull out a straw?

I did not. However, most of the rest of what happens in that film did happen to me. When you asked where the idea came from I gave you a more philosophical answer, but the truth is I did go on a date where that basically happened. I added the straw, and I added the part where she asks him to look at the scar and he gets up and walks around because those things are more cinematic. But the whole thing about the woman cancelling the first date because she had an MRI scan and then telling the guy that she cannot turn or tilt her head without the risk of being paralyzed, someone did say that to me way back in 2005 on a first date. So that always stuck in my brain. And it kind of haunted me ever since. I was drawing on my own personal experience. But of course, once it ends up on the screen it’s fiction. Which is something that I think some people don’t understand. Like, I’m almost hesitant to say that that happened to me because then I think that people are assuming that I identify more with Mickey’s character. I don’t. I think both characters are equally important, and I identify with her just as much. In fact, I think one of the most important moments is the very last shot when he walks away and she just watches him go. The fact that the camera is with her is very important, that she watches him walk away before she goes inside.

How did you develop the characters with Alyssa and Mickey? They have a lot of work to do with these characters in seven minutes. Are you the type of person who, for instance, writes backgrounds for characters or do you let the actors come up with their own?

I didn’t come up with backgrounds, but we did do a lot of work together. I never told Mickey the subtext of his character’s scar. I had an idea of what it was, but I didn’t want to tell him because you never want to limit your actors to your own imagination. You want them to bring something to it and have ownership over the character. So Mickey came up with something on his own. But the first time he said that line, ‘Mine’s invisible,’ he said it in a very offhanded way, a neutral way. And I said, ‘Mickey, whatever it is, the fact that you even have to allude to this is difficult for you. It’s almost torturous for these words to come out of your mouth.’ And he said, ‘Oh! OK!’ And he did one more take, and that was the one that’s in the film.

Did you have much time for rehearsals?

We did a lot of work. Alyssa and Mickey did a Zoom rehearsal with each other before they rehearsed with me. Then they came over to my condo the week before we shot it and I kind of told them what I wanted to explore. That’s one of the most helpful things that I can do as a director is tell them why I wrote it and what I’m trying to do. I said I want to make a film about the difficulty of being honest on a first date and the dilemma of ‘how open should you be?’ We talked over lunch about first dates and honesty because that’s something they could relate to. When we were done eating, we read through the entire thing. I gave them a few notes and then we went through it again, then went outside to rehearse the second scene, which we shot in front of my condo. It was important to rehearse the walk in advance for the blocking. We had to figure out where they would start walking, and where they would finish. I knew I wanted them to stop in front of this particular building, so we started there and I had them walk in the opposite direction while saying their lines, so that’s how we knew where to start from.

Smart! What about the restaurant? How did you pick that?

Oh, man. I really lucked out. That kind of fell into my lap. I feel like there’s a sense of destiny about it. When I wrote this first draft I didn’t know where we were going to shoot it. Then I got a message on Instagram from someone I did not know, a 20-year-old aspiring filmmaker named K.Z. Zmolek and they basically said, ‘Hey, you are doing what I want to do. I want to be a filmmaker. Can I pick your brain about this? If you’re interested, why don’t you come into the restaurant where I work and I’ll buy you a drink.’ It ended up being that restaurant. And not only did we end up shooting there, K.Z. plays the server who serves them their drinks. They also ended up being a production assistant on the film. So that worked out really nicely. I love that the restaurant is on an extremely busy street. When I watch the movie now I tend to just watch the cars in the background and the traffic, and the headlights, which is so visually interesting, especially in black and white.

It looks great.

If that hadn’t fallen into my lap, I would have sought out somewhere else to shoot, and I don’t think it would have been on a street that busy. I really like the contrast between how urban that restaurant scene seems and then how quiet the residential street is where he walks her home. Another thing I want to point out is there’s snow on the ground in the second scene. That was a little miracle because it was not snowing that day. It was not snowing when we filmed the scene in the bar, and then we took a break for dinner and it started snowing. And then after dinner we shot the next scene and there was that snow on the ground and all of a sudden it felt like a winter movie, whereas it would not have if you didn’t have that light dusting of snow.

Did you write the film with the intention of shooting in black and white?

I love black and white. I kind of want to shoot everything in black and white, and the truth is, when you make a feature people always try to talk you out of it. The money people do, and often the crew will, the cinematographer will, because a lot of people think that it’s going to hurt the chances of what you’re doing commercially. Which I don’t agree with. This film was too small for anyone to tell me that I couldn’t do that! (laughs)

So both Handle With Care and Paper Planes share titles with famous pop songs. What’s coming next for you, and what songs are currently stuck in your head?

(laughs) Well, of course, Handle With Care is named after the Traveling Wilburys song. But the fact that both of those films share titles with pop songs wasn’t intentional. I’ve also in the past wanted to name films after Dylan songs, like the original title of Relative was Together Through Life, which is a Dylan album from 2009. And everybody told me I could not name the movie that. They said, ‘you’ve gotta change that title.’ (laughs) So I said, alright fine, fuck you guys, but I’m gonna have someone in the movie say, ‘together through life.’ And I swear it was not originally spoken in the film, but Melissa DuPrey’s character says it when Rod (Keith D. Gallagher) is talking about family. So naming a film after a Dylan song or album is kind of like shooting in black and white — I can only get away with it on a no-budget short film. (laughs) It should be more obscure. “Shot of Love” would be a good title for a movie. But maybe I should keep going down that road and do 10 short films, all of which are named after pop songs, and put them together into a feature.

Make an album!

It’s a visual album! And every film will be about a first date, and it will all take place in Chicago during the winter time. I like the idea. I should talk to Alyssa about it. We’ll just do a short every January.

With Relative, you flew Spirit Airlines to attend as many screenings across the country as possible, and the film cracked the Box Office Top-25. You basically took that film on tour.

Relative was my most successful film. We grossed over $26 thousand theatrically. We screened in 17 different states plus Toronto, Ontario. That was really gratifying. And now Music Box Films is the distributor. I thought that would translate into it being easier for me to raise money for another film, and it has not been. I’ve been pulling my hair out. But I don’t want to complain too much about it because that’s also what’s great about it. If you want to do it, you have to have the attitude of doing it by any means necessary.

I hope people will follow my example. I talk to a lot of filmmakers because people will occasionally reach out to me and ask how I did it — how I raised the money or how I was able to get Relative into theaters. I always agree to meet people for coffee and tell them how I did it because the more information we share as independent filmmakers, the better off we all are. And in Chicago people can be a little bit competitive at times because we’re all to a certain extent asking the same investors for money. So I think a lot of people want to keep their cards close to their vest, but I try to be as transparent as I possibly can, and especially with the route of self-distribution. I want people to follow me down that road. It actually makes me sad when people make independent feature films that never play theatrically. Then they just kind of dump them on Vimeo. It’s like, you need to be cold emailing independent theaters across the country and asking them to show your work. A lot of them will say yes. They’ll split the box office with you, especially if you’re willing to go there and do a Q&A. And sharing it with an audience, to me, is the most gratifying part of the whole filmmaking process. Especially when I’m far from home and there are people I don’t know there. That’s who you want to reach.

You put in a lot of work on social media, building contacts and spreading word on your films and those of your contemporaries, but many artists recoil at the very thought of self-promotion. What have been some of the most crucial lessons you’ve learned along the way in self-distributing and self-promoting your work?

Well, it is a lot of work. It’s a full-time job. You have to figure out how to use what you have. With Relative, I worked with Wendy Robie, so we used the fact that she was a Twin Peaks cast member. We premiered at a festival in Florida where we won the Best Actor award, so we used that. We had a poster, we had a trailer, we had some blurbs from critics who saw it and liked it. We shared all of that with the theaters that we sent it to, and it worked out in a lot of cases. When we screened in Seattle at the Grand Illusion Cinema, the Seattle Times did a story on the film. They wanted to interview Wendy because they remembered when she was there doing Twin Peaks. That was probably the biggest newspaper article that ever appeared about our film. It’s important to figure out how to market what you’ve done.

And some directors don’t want to do that because all they want to do is make the movie. But if that’s you, then you need to find someone who will help you. You need someone on your producing team who’s going to do that work because the truth is, there’s an audience out there for every film. There’s a lid for every pot and you have to figure out how to maximize the viewership of your films and find your audience. Even with a short! I know people who have made shorts that never played anywhere. And that’s sad. You went through all the trouble making it. I think sometimes people aim too high, like they only submit to Sundance, and South By Southwest, and Tribeca, they get rejected, and they kind of lose heart with it. But we’ve had a good run with Handle With Care. Our 15th and probably final screening will be in LA at the Sherman Oaks Film Festival. And it’ll go on to have a streaming life with the help of Split Tooth Media.

Watch Handle With Care:

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