In conversation with Elizabeth Stam, Wendy Robie, Brookelyn Hebert, Mary Tilden, and Heather Kuhlmann.
Some films move like a straight line. “Hekla doesn’t. It rushes, swerves, collides—then bursts into color at the exact moments when performance becomes oxygen. Built around one chaotic day in the life of an actor, the film captures a familiar contradiction: the work can be exhilarating, ridiculous, transcendent—and still leave you alone with yourself at the end of it.
At the center is Elizabeth Stam, who not only plays Hekla but helped write her into being. Around her: Wendy Robie’s intimate narration, Brookelyn Hebert’s wry view from both sides of the audition table, Mary Tilden’s grounding presence, and Heather Kuhlmann’s design that turns inner life into texture, fabric, and stagecraft. Together, they describe a film shaped by speed, trust, and the strange alchemy of collaboration—where even a recorded conversation about Lady Macbeth can become the emotional spine of a scene.
From a Long-Held Seed to a Fast-Moving Script
When Cinema Femme asked Stam what first sparked the idea for “Hekla,” her answer began with origin and ended with momentum.
Michael Smith, the film’s writer-director—had been carrying the concept for years. “He’d had it for a long time—since around 2016, I think,” Stam said, recalling that an earlier version was imagined with a different actor. The core fascination was there from the beginning: “He wanted to explore the life of an actor in the city.”
Stam and Michael met in 2019 on “Relative.” By the time the original actor moved away, the project’s shape changed—and Stam found herself being invited into it. At first, she wasn’t sure how real it was. “I didn’t know him very well at the time,” she admitted. “Now I know: if Mike has an idea, he’s serious.”
What followed was less a gradual development than a sprint. “After “Relative,” he wrote so fast,” Stam said. “He was like, ‘Here’s draft 12—read draft 12.’” That was the moment she fully stepped in. Michael asked her to do something both liberating and daunting: read the script and “completely rewrite it” in her own words. Stam remembers doing rewrites while working her day job—stealing time wherever she could.
The process became a rolling exchange, drafts stacking on drafts. “I think my pass became draft 23 or something,” she said, laughing at the pace. Michael was revising while she was rewriting—“Oh, and here are my new changes too”—until the finished script felt like what she called “a marriage” of both voices. It all happened close to production, which, in Stam’s words, made everything “very, very fast.”
The Narrator as Witness—and Co-Creator
Wendy Robie describes her role in “Hekla” with a kind of amused inevitability: she was collaborating before she realized she was collaborating.
“It’s funny—I was part of developing this project whether I realized it or not,” Robie said. Conversations with Michael had a pattern: she’d begin with a simple “Well…” and end up in a story, a memory, a tangent that felt like life being processed in real time. “He was definitely taking mental notes.”
One conversation, in particular, stayed with her. After watching “A Complete Unknown,” Robie couldn’t stop thinking about a scene in which Bob Dylan is recognized—then essentially assaulted by strangers. She saw it as a moment every actor meets sooner or later. Sometimes the recognition arrives softly, almost sweetly: a restaurant applause after a show, a startled “Oh—thank you so much.” But it can also become something else. “Almost sickening,” she said.
Robie connected that feeling to her own experience when “Twin Peaks” first aired. The show’s popularity hit fast. Back in Seattle she was still adjusting to what it meant for the world to suddenly know your face. Then a stranger shouted here character’s name at her on the street. The shock flipped into panic. “I ran all the way home,” she said. She called her oldest friend—someone she’d known since kindergarten—because she needed to hear a voice that knew her before the public did. “I had to know that I was still me.”
That’s when the cost of visibility clarified. “With fame, you lose something precious and you never really get it back,” Robie said. “And you don’t even know what it is until it’s gone—privacy.”
Years later, she says, it happens less. She doesn’t “look like that person” anymore. But on the rare occasions it returns, the sensation is immediate. “Kind of sickening,” she repeated. Watching Dylan, she recognized the future of “Hekla” in the present tense: “This is going to happen to Hekla. You need that in your script.”
And Michael heard it—the way a director hears. “He hears you,” Robie said, “but he also hears something else. He hears his own version too.”
Two Sides of the Table
For Brookelyn Hebert, “Hekla” began as a role adjacent to the spotlight. She initially signed on as casting director—not as an actor in the narrative, and certainly not as Macbeth.
“I actually thought it would be fun to play someone on the other side of the table,” she said, describing the appeal of embodying the quiet power of casting: the gaze, the notes, the measured responses.
But as the project evolved, Michael asked her to step through the frame. She would play Macbeth—an opportunity Hebert describes with the kind of incredulous joy most actors reserve for dream roles. “How do you say no to playing Macbeth?” she said. The twist did more than expand her screen time; it gave her a deeper understanding of her character. Suddenly, the person evaluating performance was also someone who “lives and breathes performing,” whether behind the table or under lights.
And, she noted, the Macbeth casting choice mattered: the film’s Macbeth cast was all female. For Hebert, it wasn’t just cool—it was cohesive with the film’s overall insistence that performance belongs to whoever claims it.
Mary Tilden’s path to the film followed a different rhythm: long silence, then a return. Michael first reached out “probably 2020 or 2021,” after seeing “Rough River Lake” telling her she’d be right for a part. Then the thread went quiet. “I assumed it wasn’t happening,” she said.
When Michael reached out again, it felt less like a surprise and more like a testament to his persistence. She came in to read with Stam, and the chemistry was immediate. “It was just really fun,” Tilden said. “The role fit my voice, and I really related to the character.”
Designing a Mind: Fabric, Texture, and a Stage That Appears in Color
Heather Kuhlmann approached “Hekla” like a designer reading between lines. The film unfolds in frantic motion, but she wanted the visual world to feel intentional—built from the question of where Hekla has been and where she’s going, even if the audience only sees “a snapshot.”
“It’s frantic,” she said, “but it’s also like she brings the stage to her.” That idea—Hekla carrying theatricality into daily life—became a design principle. Fabrics. Textures. A sense of performance embedded in environment.
While designing the in-color sequences with Stam, Kuhlmann received an unusual directive from Michael: “Don’t even tell me—just do it.” She laughed remembering her disbelief. “No updates? You want nothing?” But that trust opened space. Stam focused on Hekla’s mindset; Kuhlmann chased a visual language that could hold it.
Her key idea: the color world as a “classic, simple stage,” with a feeling of revelation—layers pulling back. In earlier moments, the stage is covered; when Hekla reaches Lady Macbeth, it becomes the final set—where she wants to be. But there’s tension there too. “She’s stagnant in that,” Kuhlmann said, even as the black-and-white world continues to churn forward.
In black and white, texture does extra work. It becomes emotion you can touch. Kuhlmann also handled wardrobe, and she loved the control that gave her. “It felt good to have everything composed together as one visual language.”
Later, she emphasized how deliberately each audition environment was designed to shift. Every room needed to feel different—like the viewer was on a “roller coaster” with Hekla—while still maintaining an underlying theatrical thread.
Her proudest achievement remains the color world itself. When she first joined the project years earlier, those “glimmers” didn’t exist. The story was there, but without the surreal spark. Kuhlmann remembers telling Michael: black and white made sense, but Hekla had too much in her—too much tragedy and vitality—not to crack open into color somewhere. After delays and a return to pre-production, the idea matured into a set of “rules” for the in-color sequences—how they would appear, what they would mean, even how an “in-world” camera recording Hekla could function as part of that language. “Then in the edit it evolved even more,” she said, describing color bleeding into the black-and-white world in ways that deepened the concept.
“People Are Living Inside My Brain”
For Stam, the film’s intimacy wasn’t theoretical—it was physical. She describes “Hekla” as the most artistically vulnerable thing she’s done. Watching it for the first time was a shock. “People are living inside my brain,” she said. “It’s scary.”
That vulnerability was made possible by trust—both personal and practical. Like Kuhlmann, Stam felt Michael’s confidence in his collaborators. It allowed real relationships to form quickly across the set, and it created a kind of shared ownership of the world. She described cinematographer José coming to her home during production, filming a full day in her partner’s condo. At one point he was “literally in bed” with her to get the shot—crew surrounding her in her own personal space. Stam remembers welcoming it with a strange kind of openness: “Come in, come in, everyone.”
But beyond logistics, the closeness was emotional. Michael invited Stam into casting and world-building, making the project feel deeply communal. “Every person that’s in this project, I feel like I have a close relationship with,” she said. That chemistry wasn’t incidental—it was the reason those people were brought in. They could “vibe off each other quickly,” and the film’s speed demanded exactly that.
The Macbeth Conversation That Became the Scene
If “Hekla” is partly about how impossible it is to film acting—how do you capture the inner life underneath the performance?—then one of the film’s answers came from a conversation.
Robie, as narrator, approached her voice as a gentle presence. “Soft, loving,” she said—less an omniscient guide than a companion. Some moments were straightforward: she “just read it,” letting the writing hold her. Others carried a different weight, like the Emily Dickinson poem about a volcano—language that asked to be felt as much as understood.
Then came the surprise: a recorded exchange between Robie and Stam about Lady Macbeth, sparked by Michael’s writing. Robie disagreed with his interpretation. “To be honest, I feel completely differently,” she told him.
Michael asked her to explain. She and Stam began talking—naturally, freely—and they recorded it. That conversation became audio in the Macbeth sequence: Robie’s voice not performing narration, but speaking her own thoughts in real time.
“It flowed so naturally,” Stam said. “It’s one of my favorite parts—it adds so much.”
For Robie, the result is a rare cinematic trick that feels like truth: you watch the character perform, and underneath you hear who she is. “Different media telling the same truth,” she said. That layered approach, she believes, is how the film lets the audience experience what an actor experiences while acting. “And it’s all truth,” she said. “I was blown away.”
Favorite Moments: Dry Panels, Perfect Light, and the Party Before It Ends
Asked about favorite scenes, Hebert returns to the audition sequences—especially one involving actor Conor Foley who plays Christian, a director who is auditioning Hekla for his production. She loves the deadpan realism of the panels. “So dry,” she said. “I love it.” The oddness is part of the point: in auditions, you’re constantly adapting to the room, to the silence, to the unreadable faces. “Everybody’s just like, ‘Mm-hmm.’ You have to roll with it.”
Tilden hasn’t watched the finished film yet, but her memories live in the body: a party scene before it gets shut down, and the kind of movement work she loves—choreography mixed with improvisation. She recalled a moment that felt like an accidental cinematic miracle: she sat down beside Stam because it felt right, and the crew reacted instantly—“Whoa”—because the light landed perfectly. Everyone freaked out. Tilden laughed. “It made me feel great, so I was like, I’m going to sit here forever.”
Stam, asked about a scene with actress Sadie Rogers (who wasn’t present for the conversation), described it as unexpectedly grounding. She spoke about “glimmers” where the real Hekla appears beneath the constant performance—moments with Tilden, and moments with Sadie, where you can feel Hekla’s sincerity: her admiration, her respect, her passion for the people around her. And she shared a small casting detail that feels telling of the project’s instincts: Sadie was the only one who auditioned. “We were like, ‘Yeah. Boom. Done.’”
What They Hope You Take With You
When the group turned to what they hope audiences see, the answers converged on contradiction: chaos and devotion, comedy and ache.
Tilden hopes people recognize the intensity of an actor’s daily life—the relentless, often unbelievable logistics and emotional whiplash. “It’s an inexplicable way to live,” she said. Seeing it portrayed can be cathartic for artists, but also revealing for anyone who’s never lived inside it. She also described “Hekla” as an unusually strong character study—one that might change the way you see people afterward. Like an “iconic” character who becomes a lens.
She even framed Stam herself as part of that lens: a rare, genuine “effervescence” that the film captures and preserves, so viewers can recognize that quality in others.
Robie hopes audiences feel pleasure—pure enjoyment—from the film’s spirit and from Hekla herself. She singled out a physical-comedy moment in a lobby audition: a pratfall that sets off instant pandemonium, Hekla breaking “every object within a three-foot radius” in one blur of disaster. Robie described it as the kind of catastrophe that’s both ridiculous and true. “That happens,” she said, delighted. For her, it’s the film’s comedic heartbeat—Hekla’s unstoppable momentum.
Hebert’s hope is tied to the film’s aesthetic logic: the day is chaotic, but performance brings color. That shift is symbolic—not just pretty, but emotional. “This is what I love to do,” she said, describing the joy that floods in when Hekla is acting. The madness has a reason. “It’s love.”
Kuhlmann returned to Michael’s early framing: “It’s a tragedy—but it’s a comedic tragedy.” You laugh at Hekla, then with her, then you recognize yourself. For Kuhlmann, the film isn’t only about actors; it’s about artists of any kind—anyone who invests time, makes mistakes, gets back up, keeps going. She hopes it grows empathy and appreciation. “It’s really a film for artists,” she said.
And Stam held both truths at once—the joy and the heartbreak. She wants the film to make people laugh, but she also wants them to see the cost of Hekla’s relentless giving. Hekla brings so much to each interaction, but she can’t quite accept herself; she wants others to be satisfied with her, and she isn’t. That’s the tragedy.
At the end, Stam said, Hekla has had a beautiful day. She has shown up. She has given her all to rooms full of strangers judging her. And still—alone—she’s sad. It’s the kind of sadness that doesn’t make sense until it does. “People might think, ‘Why?’” Stam said. “But if you’ve felt it, you know.”
In “Hekla,” the chaos is real. The comedy is real. The color is real. And so is the quiet devastation of wanting the world to see you—and not being sure you can see yourself.
“Hekla” premieres at the George Lindsey Film Festival this Friday, March 6th.
