According to Mia, her bigger films are waiting for the right level of support. “All of those bigger scripts are on the back burner, ready to go the second that somebody wants to give me five million dollars, you know.”
Today, Nov. 9, I sat down with Mia Moore Marchant to discuss- among other things- her debut film Again Again and her journey as an artist and filmmaker.
Marchant is notable for her successful crowdfunding of the very debut film this interview centered on as well as her diverse talents.
I started by asking her “for the benefit of my audience: who are you, and what — why did you start making films?”
“Yeah, so I'm a filmmaker, actress, writer, comedian, model, musician. I don't know, I do a lot of things, but like, filmmaking was always the thing that I knew I was going to do, like ever since I was four years old. I knew that someday I was gonna grow up and do this. And it's funny because, you know, it gives you a lot of direction, to be like, "Yep, I have a goal and I know exactly what I'm gonna do and I never have to wonder." But then you have to, like — when you pick, like, an almost impossible goal, you're stuck, like, you know, for the first 30 years of your life wondering if you're ever actually going to do it on any level.
Marchant discussed with me how she first got excited about films.
“When I was really, really young and I was watching Star Wars and I just loved it, and somebody explained to me, like, "Oh, well, that meteor there isn't even a real meteor. It's like a cookie that they shot really close up so that it looked like a space rock." And that just blew my fucking gourd. I just knew that I wanted to be the person that put a cookie in Star Wars.”
Marchant is also somewhat famous on Twitter for posting about some of her future film ideas, such as When I Tell You which, as I understand it, is planned to be about a trans woman going back in time to crack her own pre-transition self’s egg.
I also asked her to tell me about Again Again “without too many spoilers” and why it was the first one she did out of all her planned films.
“Yeah, well, I started writing during COVID, and that was really, like, the impetus for me to actually get, like, the fire in my ass to actually get me writing again. Was like, COVID lockdowns, just like, I needed to do something with my time and it had to be productive, because I couldn't just get high and play video games all day. And so I wrote a movie during COVID that, like, kind of like — I talked about it on Twitter and the concept kind of blew up. It was like 150,000 people were like, "Yeah, we want to see this movie really bad."
But then, you know, you have no sense of scale at that point when you're just starting out. And so I think I wrote something that was, like, too big to actually make as my first feature. And it's funny, I actually looked at the Wachowskis as, like, an influence of, like, well, they wrote The Matrix and nobody will let them make The Matrix because it was just too big and it was just too wild and it was too much and too expensive, and so they wrote Bound and they made it so immaculately. And it doesn't feel like a movie that suffers because it's just a proof of concept for a bigger film, but it also shows the promise of that bigger film.”
This was not the only time in our conversation where Marchant mentioned the Wachowski sisters- especially Lilly.
“The Matrix was really, really, really big for me. It's like, wow, movies can be really impactful and meaningful emotionally and also make you think. And I don't know, I've just always been drawn to film and sci-fi especially.”
Marchant said that this film, Again Again, was her way of making “something that I could shoot in a motorhome, my mom's driveway, that would really show the promise of these bigger projects that I wanted to do.”
She and her crew, did in fact shoot this movie out of her mom’s driveway and by crowding a motorhome during production. The website for the movie reads on its “Behind the Scenes” page that, “The film was shot on location in Aberdeen, Washington. Our whole crew stayed at Mia's moms house. Thanks, mom!”
According to a local paper called The Daily World, shooting for the film started on Tuesday June 20, 2023.
“Marchant, who is not only making her directorial feature debut, wrote the script, is producing it and she’s also starring as the lead character “Aggie.” Marchant, a graduate of Hoquiam High School and Grays Harbor College, said back in April how she wanted to “make Aberdeen look really cool.”
“I love Aberdeen’s grunge,” Marchant said Tuesday…”
Support from Lilly Wachowski for Mia’s career and this debut film came in the form of a joint crowdfunding stream, plus something a little more personal.
“Lilly jumped on a crowdfund with me and just let me talk her ear off about the Speed Racer Wii game for, like, an hour and a half. And I knew that she didn't even work on it, but I was like — it was like a video game fundraising livestream. And so, like, I was just brain dead, you know, 10 hours into playing this video game, like, talking to Lilly Wachowski and, like, wow, this is a really surreal moment.”
Marchant also said that Lilly Wachowski aided in getting the film over the final hurdles of fundraising.
“She just mailed me a five thousand dollar check and said, "Go get 'em, kid."”
Later, that initial set of interactions turned into a producer relationship and Anarchists United (who Wachowski is on the team of) is in the film’s opening studio credits.
“Having my first film being produced by somebody that I just respect and love so much was — yeah. When she told me, I screamed and ran out the door and ran two miles and jumped up and down, and it was the best day of my life.”
I also asked Mia what she wanted people to take, or get, from her art and her work as an artist.
“Well, it's funny, because it changes per the project. Right now I have this really, really dire horror film in the works, and it deals with a lot of really heavy stuff of addiction issues and suicidality and transphobia and all this really heavy junk, and it's probably going to be my next project. But then also I have a cute little rom-com that I'm trying to shoot in the next year.It’s so all over the place, and it's like, I love horror and I love sci-fi, and those are probably the worlds in which I'm going to live for a long time.”
She said that her goal is to give trans people media that shows us as people. This approach of Marchant’s is a contrast to many media tendencies in the industry to portray trans people as tropes or victims.
“I want to make films that give people — what I've always said is that I want to make films that are informed by my transness and by the character's transness, but not obsessed with that aspect.
I don't want to make movies that are like, "rah, rah, let's lib out, fuck Trump," you know. I don't want to make movies that are like PSAs that are like trans 101.
I want to make movies where people watch them and they kind of feel like, "Wow, okay, so trans people are, you know, just like me, and can be such a different variety of things.”
[I want] to give my community a space to, like, be together and experience art together and, like, feel communally like there's something for us that isn't just transphobia and bigotry, you know.”
According to earlier coverage by Pink News which discussed Mia and her fellow executive producer Alexa Feeney,
“It’s this lack of diversity in the stories trans people actually get to be part of that drives the pair’s creativity.
Of the few Hollywood films that have tried to represent trans people, such as The Danish Girl – where a cisgender man played the lead trans role – many have fallen into controversy for missing the mark or making mistakes because there is little understanding of what makes a good trans character.”
For those interested in watching Again Again, Mia stressed that, “if anybody in the area of Washington, Portland, PNW has been sort of waiting for their moment to see the movie, Saturday November 14th is probably the last chance to do it for a while.”
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She also said that the film had been given the “huge honor” of being “nominated for the Best Pacific Northwest Film by the Seattle Film Critics Association.”
If you’d like to see the film in-person, your opportunity is this Saturday as it’s playing at 6:30 p.m. Pacific time at the SIFF Film Center in Seattle, Wa.
For those interested in what’s next from Mia Moore, she said,
“My next feature that I'm working on right now is called Synesthesia.
It's a found-footage film about a closeted grunge rock star in the mid-'90s who is being haunted by ghosts that are trying to get her to kill herself.
It's a really, really, really cool, weird found-footage musical where I get to play a man and then transition on screen.”
And finally, she teased something big in 2027.
“Nothing that I can announce just yet, but there are some really exciting stuff coming in the early 2027, and it's killing me that I can't talk about it yet. So get ready, something cool is about to happen, but we'll see when I can talk about it.”
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