BTL Radio Show – 08/24/2026 with director ALICIA MacDONALD talking FINDING EMILY and w/d CASPER KELLY talking all things BUDDY

 

 

 

It’s a fun show this week on BEHIND THE LENS thanks to director ALICIA MacDONALD talking about her new film opening on Friday, FINDING EMILY, and writer/director CASPER KELLY discussing his new film BUDDY, which also opens in theatres this Friday!

First up, we’re going to Manchester, England with FINDING EMILY.

Directed by Alicia MacDonald and written by Rachel Hirons, FINDING EMILY is the story of a lovesick musician named Owen who is given the wrong number for his dream girl, “Emily”, which leads him to team up with a driven psychology student from the United States, Emily Raine, to find her. Together, they spark a hilarious campus-wide frenzy that tests their own hearts and ambitions along the way. Side note for all of you – there are 40,000 students at the University. 318 are named Emily… plus some non-students also named Emily. And Owen’s ideas for finding “the right Emily” bring on all sorts of hilarity and heart.

Set in Manchester, England, and celebrating all things Manchester from locations to shops to music, FINDING EMILY stars Angourie Rice and Spike Fearn as Emily Raine and Owen, respectively,  (perfectly cast pairing, I might add) and Minnie Driver and the hard-nosed Dean Emily Watkinson.

FINDING EMILY is truly a revival of the British romantic comedy, and it is firing on all cylinders with a youthful energy while tackling themes of how to be romantic in today’s world, dealing with emotional messiness, starting fresh as you move into the next chapter of your life aka adulting.

Alicia’s feature directorial debut, this is a crafts-heavy film that fully creates and immerses us in this collegiate world while embracing Manchester and the UK, and celebrating the individual Emilys we meet along the way. As Alicia explains in this exclusive interview, the primary goal for FINDING EMILY was to create an authentic, honest romantic comedy with an “indie soul” rather than a glossy studio feel. And she succeeds thanks to Rachel Clark’s cinematography and visual grammar with resulting visual tonal bandwidth, Bobbie Cousins production design and color scheme, Sarah Hassan’s costuming which informs and defines characters, incredible editing by Phil Hignett in finding the funny and balancing comedic beats with serious emotion while developing perfect pacing that has a cadence that fits the film’s score by Morgan Kibby and plethora of fantastic needledrops from Manchester bands. By film’s end, you’ll feel like you’re in college and actually fitting in with the Gen-Z crowd!

Alicia and I cover it all!

FINDING EMILY is exclusively in theatres on August 28th!   And don’t forget, the soundtrack for FINDING EMILY is available on vinyl! 

Shifting gears, get ready for a fun-filled look into the world of BUDDY courtesy of writer/director CASPER KELLY. I had so much fun watching this film and speaking with Casper about it. BUDDY is very cool. Fresh. Original. A novel idea!

So, who is BUDDY? Well, BUDDY is a bright orange unicorn and star of the fictional classic childrens’ television show who brought joy and life lessons into your living room. And Casper takes us inside the world of “It’s Buddy!” where we meet a group of children who spend their days singing, dancing, and helping Buddy spread happiness, while learning important life lessons. But what happens when one child refuses to play along, displeasing and angering Buddy?

BUDDY may invite the easy shorthand of “R-rated Barney,” but Casper Kelly’s film reaches much farther back. Its real spiritual kinship lies with the earnest, brightly colored children’s programming of the 1960s and ’70s—especially NEW ZOO REVUE, with its anthropomorphic characters, songs, moral lessons, and unapologetically theatrical world-building—along with the handmade fantasy of Sid and Marty Krofft.  Kelly understands that world well enough to know that the surest way to destroy it is first to make us believe in it.

Bright, cheerful, relentlessly educational, and constructed with loving analog artifice, BUDDY initially plays its children’s television conceit absolutely straight. There are no knowing winks telling us how ridiculous this all is. Talking animals, singing children, friendly household objects, cardboard fantasy kingdoms, and lessons about proper behavior are simply the rules of Buddy Park. And then, slowly, cracks begin to appear.  By the time Kelly is finished, those cheerful life lessons have given way to something considerably darker. Blood. Death. And Dismemberment. Oh My! Murderous puppets. Mangled bodies. And crimes against innocent children’s television furniture that should frankly land somebody in prison. A candy-colored confection of comedy and fun becomes a dark horror.

As you’ll hear Casper admit, he wants BUDDY to entertain, but he also wants viewers willing to look beneath all that brightly colored fur to find something else, which is where his development of different worlds and influences like the beloved award-winning sci-fi novel A WRINKLE IN TIME, and even the WIZARD OF OZ, influence the Buddy world.

As we discuss at length, Casper gives us permission to go to the dark side as there are lessons to be learned there as well. As Patrick Swayze memorably taught us in ROAD HOUSE: Be nice until it’s time to not be nice. With Buddy, there definitely comes a time to not be nice.

A wonderful part of our conversation revolves around Casper’s work with cinematographer Zach Kuperstein, a favorite of mine and someone who I’ve spoken to at length about other films. Zach’s lens prints are joyously all over BUDDY.  And then there’s creating the analog tv world, and other worlds once we “go over the fence” and leave Buddy Park, eventually finding ourselves in a glossy digital land punctuated with 5.1 soundscape versus the mono of “It’s Buddy!”.   And we cover Anna Kathleen’s marvelous production design, Shawna-Nova Foley’s costuming, Josh Ethier’s editing and the incredible puppeteering work of Devon Ludlow and Sedwan Hooks, plus, terrific voice work, including a fave of mine Patton Oswalt as the voice of Strappy the backpack zipper.   Then there’s the score by Michael Yezerski and stand alone songs by Shawn Coleman that you will hear over and over and over again in your head for days on end.

A fun, fun, film that one might even call a bit twisted (ya think??), and an equally fun interview!

BUDDY is exclusively in theatres this Friday, August 28th.

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