Notes from the Trenches: Making Before the Fire
Production on "Before the Fire” didn’t face challenges. It faced impossibilities. Our female-led team battled extreme conditions over several seasons to capture this epic story, in what proved to be the most challenging and exhilarating experience of our lives.
The journey officially started when Jenna and I made the choice to no longer surrender to being chosen. We were both incredibly frustrated with how impenetrable Hollywood felt, especially as female filmmakers, and we began to realize if we wanted more opportunities, we had to create our dream job ourselves. So we sat around a table and took inventory of what we had available to us. We could get an airplane, a burning house, military humvees, a working farm… Then, we reversed engineered the story around those set pieces.
Once we had the script, we rounded up our most wild and adventurous friends, and made the journey to South Dakota, where our local businesses, police force, and even National Guard pitched in to provide the resources and support that we needed.
It was an exercise in relentlessly pushing forward, and if I learned anything during the filming of “Before the Fire" it was this: the most important part of any production is to populate your film with your strongest supporters. Jenna and I found our tribe in each other, and once we focused on what we had available — we set the parameters and built from there. Our constraints didn’t paralyze us, they sparked our creativity in ways we couldn’t have imagined. It’s a lesson I hope to carry with me always.
