Meet Freddy Macdonald, the 23-Year-Old ‘Sew Torn’ Filmmaker Who Dazzled SXSW

The phrase, “a change of heart,” would forever alter the course of Freddy Macdonald’s life. 

Last month, the 23-year-old wunderkind’s feature directorial debut, Sew Torn, premiered at South by Southwest to glowing reviews, capping an extraordinary five-plus years for the young filmmaker. As a high school senior, Macdonald — whose American family had relocated to Switzerland a handful of years earlier — started applying to film schools, and he decided to take a lofty crack at the American Film Institute’s (AFI) graduate program. As part of the application process, Macdonald had to make a short film that told a story involving the aforementioned idiom, “a change of heart,” and so he started trading ideas with his father, Fred Macdonald.

The father-son duo soon found themselves in the oeuvre of the Coen brothers, specifically No Country for Old Men. The inciting incident of the Coens’ best picturing-winning neo-Western involves Josh Brolin’s Llewelyn Moss stumbling across multiple dead bodies in the desert, as part of a drug deal gone wrong. Of course, his decision to then make off with the now-unattended briefcase full of cash would prove to be fateful.

So the Macdonalds decided to put their own spin on the drug-deal-gone-wrong scenario, opting to tempt a struggling mobile seamstress named Barbara Duggen with a much-needed cash infusion. On the way back from a house call, Barbara drives upon a crime scene where a drug dealer and buyer are both wounded and incapacitated on the side of the road. And recognizing that a briefcase of money is hers for the taking, Barbara uses her sewing skills to rig a mutually lethal trap that would make John “Jigsaw” Kramer beam with pride. With this concept in hand, Macdonald shot the short on an empty road in the Swiss Alps, and the Sew Torn (2019) short was born.

From there, the short went on a remarkable journey, as the now Oscar-winning producer of Nomadland Peter Spears got a hold of it and became an executive producer. That led to Searchlight Pictures’ acquisition of the short and an Oscar-qualifying theatrical release alongside Ready or Not (2019). Macdonald even landed representation via UTA. As for his original AFI application, the whirlwind of events surrounding his short turned him into the youngest director applicant to be accepted into the conservatory.

The story is far from over, as the Sew Torn short eventually made its way to one of Macdonald’s sources of inspiration: Joel Coen.

“We blasted [the Sew Torn short] out into the world, and my hero, Joel Coen, actually ended up seeing it. So he wanted to meet for coffee, and I was absolutely terrified, because I thought he was going to want to sue us for stealing that [drug deal gone wrong] setup,” Macdonald tells The Hollywood Reporter. “But he was actually incredibly encouraging and said, ‘You guys should turn this into a feature and do the Blood Simple method. Go to friends, family and your dentists to raise the money independently, and do this thing.’”

So Macdonald and his father did just that, but turning the short into a feature script was by no means a slam dunk. The writing partners wrote 22 drafts of a linear narrative, but they nearly gave up on the proceeding when they struggled to sell that version of the script.

“After two years of writing, we got the same notes on the most recent 22nd draft that we received on the first draft. We put so much time into this and it clearly wasn’t working,” Macdonald recalls. “So we went on a long walk and basically decided to throw out the script that we had written. We actually went back to that AFI prompt about a change of heart … and we realized, ‘Oh, Barbara really only has three choices when she drives through this crime scene. She can either call the police, drive away or commit this perfect crime.’”

So the Macdonalds structured their newly revamped script around the three different choices Barbara has upon discovering the drug deal gone awry, exploring each outcome in three distinct chapters. At that point, having cracked their script, they eventually landed financing from a number of sources before filming their quirky neo-noir for a month in the Swiss Alps.

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Macdonald discusses the validation of Sew Torn being accepted into South by Southwest and what’s next for the well-received indie as it pursues distribution.

First of all, are you sure you’re only 23 years old? Have you checked your birth certificate? Because Sew Torn does not look like the work of someone in their early 20s. 

(Laughs.) That is very, very kind, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that. And I am 23, yes. 

Did your parents basically put a camera, Final Draft and Avid in your crib? 

That is exactly how it started. My dad used to run an animation studio a while ago, and so, literally at the age of nine, he taught me stop-motion animation. And at the time, I was really interested in animation, but I wanted to do all of that stuff kids like to do, such as trying to do a lightsaber in After Effects. But very early on, I started collaborating with my dad and he told me, “You have to come up with a concept. You have to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and an end that subverts expectations.” So very early on, he drilled that into me, and we had a lot of fun brainstorming shorts and animating them. So I just spent hours in our garage animating puppets frame by frame, and that’s what I loved to do. I always said that I was never going to switch to live-action because live-action was too easy in my eyes. But then I went a little bit crazy in that garage, and I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to switch.” So that’s kind of how it all started. 

So you really did devote your entire childhood to this pursuit.

Yeah, I love filmmaking, and ever since I was a kid, I was neck deep in it. And it was such a blessing to have my dad by my side. His name is also Fred, so it’s very confusing. He’s Fred and I’m Freddy; I’m the fifth Fred in my family. But whenever I tell people that I work with my dad, they’re often like, “How do you work with your dad? I can’t imagine working with my dad.” But we really have the exact same taste. And so ever since I was a kid, we’ve been co-writing scripts and making them. So that’s what built up to the Sew Torn feature. 

Sew Torn’s protagonist, Barbara Duggen (Eve Connolly), is like John “Jigsaw” Kramer or MacGyver with a needle and thread. 

(Laughs.) I love that.

What inspired this character and her superpowered sewing ability?

So it’s kind of a crazy story. The feature is based on a short film of the same name, and the short film was my college application film. I made the short in high school, and I was just trying to get into a film school. Every film school has a different prompt, and ultimately, I knew that AFI was my number-one choice. And AFI’s prompt was to tell a story about a change of heart. 

So my dad and I started brainstorming a premise to do that, and we thought about the Coen brothers’ work, because No Country for Old Men is one of our favorites. So we loved the premise of coming upon a drug deal gone bad and the choices that you’re faced with there. And so we tried to think of a character that would be the exact juxtaposition to a drug deal gone wrong. And we pretty quickly came up with a seamstress. We just loved the contrast there of the thread and the gun and the blood, and we didn’t want this seamstress to just come upon this deal. We wanted her to take advantage of it in some strange, unexpected way and come out on top. So once we figured that out, it became this roller coaster of all this Rube Goldberg stuff that we love and trying to figure that out to subvert expectations. 

So, long story short, once we made the short, we blasted it out into the world, and my hero, Joel Coen, actually ended up seeing it. So he wanted to meet for coffee, and I was absolutely terrified, because I thought he was going to want to sue us for stealing that [drug deal gone wrong] setup. But he was actually incredibly encouraging and said, “You guys should turn this into a feature and do the Blood Simple method. Go to friends, family and your dentists to raise the money independently, and do this thing.” So that was the journey of creating Barbara as this crazy seamstress superhero. I love how you described her. 

Once you started writing the feature script, how soon did you arrive at the movie’s fork-in-the-road structure that explores each of Barbara’s three different choices (commit the “perfect” crime, call 911 or drive away from the accident scene)?

It was a long screenwriting journey, and it started at AFI. I started developing a version of it there, and my dad and I co-wrote it. The first 22 drafts were a linear narrative that continued the short film’s inciting incident, and after two years of writing, we got the same notes on the most recent 22nd draft that we received on the first draft. So we made a complete circle, and we were like, “What are we going to do?” We put so much time into this and it clearly wasn’t working. 

So we went on a long walk and basically decided to throw out the script that we had written. We then started to think about what made the short film successful and what the short film was about. And we actually went back to that AFI prompt about a change of heart. It’s really about choice, and we realized, “Oh, Barbara really only has three choices when she drives through this crime scene. She can either call the police, drive away or commit this perfect crime.” So that’s when we started exploring those repercussions, and that’s how the current structure of the feature came to be. 

I don’t really care if the physics truly work or not just because Barbara’s exploits with a needle and thread are so cinematic, but how much bending of reality did you have to do for most of her traps and devices? 

So the film is, of course, very heightened in nature, but despite how outlandish they are, my dad and I were adamant about making sure that these contraptions work, physically. So we spent hours in our backyard with thread and cardboard guns, and we really played with these Rube Goldberg set pieces. And once we’d get one to work, we’d write it down, and then we’d actually shoot each set piece shot for shot. So they were shot kind of how they ended up in the film, and then we distributed [this footage] to our cast and crew. That way, they’d know that these things work and that we’re going to be able to execute them on set. Eve [Connolly], our Barbara, practiced shooting that dart gun around our house during the lead-up to production, so we really wanted to make sure everything worked physically. 

Barbara is a struggling mobile seamstress, and her brick-and-mortar shop is also going under. That’s where her unique talking portraits are displayed rather prominently, and she also lives among them in her living quarters. They’re like ghosts on her ceiling, as recorded audio is tied to each portrait. Is this a real product that exists? 

Well, I’m so glad you asked, because my dad and I are like, “We should turn this into a product.” But we were trying to think of an interesting device, something that we haven’t seen before, to communicate Barbara’s connection to the store. And throughout the narrative, she’s fighting for this briefcase to save the store, but we didn’t want the store to be a literal store. We wanted it to be a ghost of her mom that traps her, and so we really wanted to design these portraits to be a window into her past and to show that she is trapped by these things. The whole ceiling in her bedroom is covered by this suffocating web-like thread, but it’s also somewhat beautiful and touching. Some people have told me that the portraits feel eerie, so I don’t know if that would make a good product, but maybe it’s something we should look into. 

Once you finished the script, how complicated was the road to actual production?

Being our first feature, it was pretty tricky, so we learned a lot. Fortunately, I had AFI as a great guidance to steer me in the right direction, but we got very lucky in terms of financing. I met two twin producers at a film festival when I was 15, and they loved the Sew Torn short film. So they signed on to help raise the money, and they were just phenomenal in terms of pitching the short film. Even though the short film was a proof of concept, it is a pretty odd concept, but they were able to pitch it around and get a lot of exciting investors involved. We also had our producer, Barry Navidi, who sourced a lot of great people as well. So the financing came together over time. But the biggest struggle, as I mentioned, was the writing and making sure the script was as tight as possible, so that when we went into production, we knew how to shoot these contraptions and how to direct it. 

Had you just shopped the script around, I’m not sure that people would’ve understood what this is on paper. So having both the short and the script must’ve been invaluable.

Absolutely, and it’s hard to grasp the tone of our writing and the complexity of it on the page. For example, an early draft of the script had about ten extra pages of thread description, and everyone who read it would just say, “I can’t wrap my head around this. What does this even mean? Is it needed? Can you cut it out?” (Laughs.) So we had two versions of the script: one that was extremely dense, and one that was readable. But it was definitely helpful to show the proof of concept to people and say, “Hey, this is the inciting incident.” It was also terrifying for me to have it, because, in the back of my mind, I knew that we were going to go back to that exact same road and shoot that exact same short with more money and a different team. And so my biggest fear was Joel Coen seeing the feature and saying, “Wow, the short’s better.” So that was a whole other side of it. [Writer’s Note: Coen has been sent a link to the feature, and the Macdonalds are currently awaiting his response.]

Did you use the same car as the short?

It’s the exact same car. My mom actually found that car in a Swiss garage, and she asked the owner if we could use it in a movie. And she was like, “Of course!” So it was incredible of her to let us use her car for the short and then for a long feature shoot.

Was that music switch already installed in the car? That proved to be a dynamic source of tension. 

I’m so glad you feel that way, and yes, the switch was already in there. I just loved the absurdity of having that single switch for the music and playing up that tension. 

To me, the movie is partially about not taking shortcuts or chasing instant gratification, and even though you’re well ahead of schedule in your fast-rising career, you clearly put in the work from a very young age. Do you have your own thematic takeaway?

Well, that’s very kind, and I really appreciate that. The theme of the film was something that we dove into a lot, and it was a difficult thing to wrap our heads around. A lot of people ask what the right choice is and what Barbara should have done. And, ultimately, we really just wanted to present the repercussions of each of these choices and contrast that to whether or not Barbara got her emotional need as a character, as opposed to her want of the physical briefcase. So it was a long journey figuring out the theme.

Are you guys going to keep traveling to festivals until you find a deal you’re happy with?

That’s the hope, yeah. Just getting into South by Southwest was huge for us. I also cut my own work, and so I’ve seen the film millions of times. And I was at the point where I was like, “What even is this anymore? Is this any good?” And getting into South by was huge for my dad and I to get the courage to sit back down and start typing again. We had a fantastic experience there, and so we hope to continue to screen it until we find a great partner to distribute it. 

Lastly, you likely touched on it already, but what was this movie’s own fork-in-the-road moment? Was there a decisive moment that could’ve upended the entire enterprise had you made a different decision?

Not to harp on the same point, but it was definitely throwing out the script after the notes we received on the 22nd draft. We pitched around the short and the linear version of the script, and we were at a point where we were literally talking about scrapping the entire feature and moving on to something new. The short-to-feature process is just so difficult because there’s all this baggage associated with the short, and we were very close to not even making the film. So it took a lot of walks and a lot of time with thread until we realized that maybe there is a path forward. And if we decided not to go on that one brainstorm walk where we cracked the code and figured out the concept, then this feature never would’ve happened.