Megan Griffiths is not a Seattleite by birth—she was born in Athens, Ohio and received her MFA in Film Production from the Ohio University School of Film—but she has fully embraced the city and its filmmaking culture since moving to the Pacific Northwest fourteen years ago. After receiving her first feature credit was as cinematographer on Shag Carpet Sunset (2002), she made her first feature, First Aid for Choking, in 2003, and then spent most of the decade on the film sets of fellow Seattle filmmakers. She was an assistant on Lynn Shelton’s debut feature, We Go Way Back and a first assistant director and / or producer on films by Todd Rohal (The Guatemalan Handshake, The Catechism Cataclysm), David Russo (The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle), and Robinson Devor (Zoo), among many other productions.
Toni Collette in ‘Lucky Them’Her 2011 feature The Off Hours, starring Amy Seimetz as a waitress stuck working in a twenty-four-hour diner in a dreary highway town, debuted at Sundance. It earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for cinematographer Ben Kasulke and helped launch Seimetz as one of the most talented and in-demand actresses of the indie scene. Her follow-up film, Eden, won the Audience Award at SXSW 2012 and was showered with rave reviews on the festival circuit and its brief theatrical run. In Lucky Them, an offbeat buddy movie set in the margins of the Seattle music scene, Griffiths directs Toni Collette and Thomas Haden Church. It’s the first film she has not scripted herself and her biggest production to date, and it premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.
Griffiths brought the film, which was shot in Seattle, back home for a gala screening at the 2014 Seattle International Film Festival, where we caught up with the director to talk about the film and her commitment to the Seattle film community.
IFC released the film in New York and On Demand on May 30.
Keyframe: You wrote your last two films. How did the script for Lucky Them come to you and why did you decide to take it on?
Megan Griffiths: It came to me through director Colin Trevorrow, who made Safety Not Guaranteed. He and I were talking during the SIFF screening of that movie a couple of years ago. He knew Emily Wachtel, who wrote the script, and had been talking to her about trying to find the right director for it because they were friends, and as we were talking about it he said, ‘You know what? I think you’d be really good for this. Do you want to read the script?’ I read it and talked to Emily within the next couple of days, and we got along and it just kind of snowballed really quickly from there. We cast and in a few months we were shooting. It just kind of showed up through a friend.
