She Dies Tomorrow
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SOMETIMES, RATHER THAN TRYING TO EXPLAIN SOMETHING, it’s better to do it yourself. That’s the mentality behind She Dies Tomorrow, the evocative new psychological thriller from writer, director and producer Amy Seimetz, out now on VOD via Elevation Pictures. In a literal sense, the film works exactly as its title suggests: main character Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) has a premonition that she’s going to die tomorrow, and when she tells Jane (Jane Adams), the paranoia spreads. Still, the film is far more impressionistic than its premise suggests, and that’s because the act of making it was really an act of self-discovery.
“I try to not talk about anything that I’m writing to people,” Seimetz says. This line of thinking led her to an epiphany while talking to a potential financier on the phone: she’d sooner finance the whole project herself than have to explain what it was. “I’m not faulting them, because obviously when you’re spending money you’re like, ‘What are you making?’” she says. “They’re just doing their job. But I was like, ‘I don’t want to answer to you.’ And the only way that I don’t have to answer to anyone or overexplain myself is if I do this myself.”
Fortunately, Seimetz had the means to sidestep the need for producers. In addition to her work as an independent filmmaker, she’s also the brains behind shows like The Girlfriend Experience as well as an accomplished actor. As such, she set aside the money from her role in the recent horror reboot Pet Sematary to fund the film. “I’m not a big spender,” she admits. “I don’t shop a lot. Strangely, I just want to spend all my money on making films.”
The decision to self-finance lends a true independent spirit to She Dies Tomorrow. “As a filmmaker, it’s so rare that you get to do your craft,” Seimetz admits. “Whether or not it was a disaster, since I was funding it myself, there was no fear. Because I was treating that paycheque like it doesn’t exist and I wasn’t going to spend it on anything other than developing my craft.”
Using a mainstream movie to fund a purely DIY film harkens back to a day when the mainstream and the underground were more separated, although She Dies Tomorrow will most certainly find an audience. That’s in part thanks to its quality as a film and also because of how we access media. “We have so much access to so many things that we would have called obscure,” Seimetz says. “But this idea of mainstream is sort of fictional at this point. There is just access to ideas and art and all of these things, so that it sort of becomes overwhelming.”