What happens when a perfectly spontaneous first date goes exactly according to plan.

Director’s Vision for ‘The Perfect First Date’

We are living in a dating dystopia. And if things weren’t bad enough before social media and reality tv, now we have a whole new pressure to make every first date a perfectly distilled impression of who you really are into one short lunch. That pressure started to mount on my friend Tommy Dickie, who finally burst when he wrote a short play that we decided to make into a hilarious comedy short.

We also felt a desire not to make this a dramatic LGBTQ coming-out piece, but to make a gay meet-cute story that allows space for queer characters without having to stand up and say “pay attention to me!” Our two leads are queer actors playing queer characters, and that’s just part of the world we live in now and we can have fun with that without having to make a political statement.

Tommy and I both came from a theater background and both attended the prestigious National Theater School in Connecticut, so we love a good breaking-the-fourth-wall moment. And I have done a fair amount of work in reality television production, and we thought we could have fun with the idea of mashing up those two styles into something that the audience isn’t quite sure if it’s real or a movie, or a movie-within-a-movie. You decide! Isn’t it fun!

We were blessed with a fantastic crew, led by another great friend: my DP, Rachel Dusa. She did everything she could with a very short schedule and a very small crew, shooting everything we needed in the middle of a beautiful DTLA restaurant, in one single day they would allow us in.

I hope you enjoy this silly little film we made!