As part of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking team presents “Behind Their Lens,” a series of panel discussions with some of the most exciting artisans, directors, and producers of 2026.
On the directors panel, “Blue Heron” writer/director Sophy Romvari, “Josephine” writer/director Beth de Araújo, “Custom of the Country” director Josie Rourke, “The Good Daughter” director Steph Green, and “Toy Story 5” co-director Kenna Harris spoke about their different paths into directing — a fair amount of team sports — and how they approach everything from thinking about locations to communicating their vision clearly with different members of their crews.
But the panel also spoke about the ways in which film as a medium is constantly changing and skills they would like to be able to bring to future projects, and that all directors might want to be aware of.
Rourke, whose first feature film had the challenge of creating a sweeping historical scope for “Mary Queen of Scots,” has been thinking about how directors and visual effects artists can work better together since she had to drop some (digital) castles into some Scottish hillsides.
“I just knew it wasn’t working, but I couldn’t figure it out. And in the end, I called a friend of mine who’s a really good architect and said, ‘Listen, just pop into the edit,’ [to look at the castle assets], and he looked and went, ‘Yeah, that wouldn’t stand up,’” Rourke said. “It was really interesting because my body had a visceral fear of wanting to use that structure. It’s just an imaginary castle but [I knew] it was dangerous.”
Rourke’s instinctive awareness is something she’s since worked on trying to better communicate with VFX teams, but there’s even more nuance to how those discussions are had. “Some of the smoke and mirrors about [VFX choices] is about cost. So I don’t even know how to look at this and go, ‘Here’s how I would achieve that more economically,’” Rourke said. “I know how to cut costume or cut set or cut script or cut the schedule, but I don’t know how to be in dialogue that is sensibly and creatively managing the budget for visual effects.”
Harris, who has been embedded in the world of digital animation for years as a story artist before fusing into a hivemind with their fellow co-director Andrew Stanton to tackle “Toy Story 5,” still has things about the process they want to learn, too.
“I wish I understood simulation a little bit better because I want to learn how to talk about in a way that feels more collaborative. And the reason I say that is because there are certain things that even today in a really fancy studio like Pixar that are still hard to crack, visually,” Harris said.
One of those things is folds in clothing — the ability to create the sense of clothing moving along a character’s body naturally or bunching up around the elbow in a believable way, the seemingly simple but actually quite complicated to craft illusion of a hood lying against someone’s shoulders.
“If I was gonna say, ‘Hey, I really care about sleeve folds,’ I’m sure my producer, Lindsey Collins, would be like, ‘What? Why? Why, why would you care about that?’” Harris joked. “But artistically, I’m fascinated by it. We’re still relying on these physics-based engines for things like that, and when I look at a lot of 2D art, there are people who can design the hell out of just making clothing [work], it’s beautiful the way that cloth works on our bodies, and it’s just so hard to do on a feature scale. And so, I think it would be awesome if I understood simulation more technically because then maybe I would get closer to having a conversation of finally getting to see the sexy clothes folds that I’ve wanted my whole life.”
Clothing is something that’s both important and underrated in live-action, too. For as much and as proudly as “Blue Heron” is an indie film, it was the first time that Romvari had worked with a costume designer and saw the power of what having a creative collaborator in that department could do.
“It’s often seen as this very frivolous and just clothing and, you know, often is treated as just like a woman’s department and who really, you know, just put something on them. But I’ve learned so, so much through working with my costume designer, Maria [Katarina], how integral it is for continuity, aesthetically, but also for actors’ safety and comfort,” Romvari said.
Costume does a lot of silent work in “Blue Heron” since it is a period piece set in the late ‘90s (horrid thought) with sections taking place in a more contemporary timeline as well. The shift in clothing, and how characters feel about themselves through how comfortable they are in their clothes, articulates things that they themselves can’t quite say.
“Just so often costume designers are asked, ‘Can you just throw something on them?’ And now I understand the inner turmoil that they go through when they’re like, ‘Do you know how much time I spent dying that shirt and then using this artificial scrub to make it look like it’s from this other period?’ Just so much work goes into it that’s just not respected, and it’s so integral to what you see on screen,” Romvari said. “ So I think I’m just speaking up for costume designers. It’s a really important element that I think is undersung for its value.”
