“It’s been a dream come true,” says Voicemails for Isabelle director Leah McKendrick of her summer. In June, her film premiered on Netflix, causing a slew of social media posts showing people emotional over the romantic comedy and dancing along to Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own.”
McKendrick, who’d been working on the film for several years, always believed in the film but wasn’t expecting so many people to connect with her. Her producers were always confident the movie would defy the odds. And it did. Now, months after the film premiered, it’s still holding strong.
Despite her belief in the material, McKendrick always had a seed of doubt that people just wouldn’t get it. “There always is a little of that worry and it is a trust fall,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter on a recent Zoom. Thankfully, as evidenced by TikToks of fans crying as they watched the film, people did get it.
Below, McKendrick speaks with THR about the film’s success, how she’s dealt with the reactions and how validating it’s all been.
What has the response been like?
It’s everything that I hoped it would be and more. As you prepare to release a movie that’s so personal to you, you dare not dream this big because you want to keep the relationship to your work pure. You try not to put too much emphasis on outside reaction. If you can just find your people and your weirdos, that will be enough. This isn’t my first movie, and I feel like in my previous films, I managed to find that little core group of people, and that has always been enough for me. But to have a film that connects on this scale was a totally new experience. They tell you how hard it is to receive criticism, but nobody tells you how hard it is to receive praise.
What have people been saying?
[I got] so many DMs and so much love. Honestly, my favorite part is probably the dance going viral because that’s something that I very much manifested, it was not accidental. That was always the goal. We reverse engineered it to make it something that you could learn at home, something that was fun, something that two little girls could have made up in their bedroom. It’s actually not that easy, I will tell you. It looks easier than it is. It took me a long time to learn it.
Was there anything that surprised you of the reaction?
I didn’t know people were going to cry like that.
Really?
Yeah. I knew that I cried every time I saw it. Este [Haim] and Amanda [Yamate], my composers, were some of the first people that got brought in to see it that weren’t editing it and on set with us. I knew that it was very emotional for them. But again, I’m like, that’s because we’re all weirdos. These are the core people that are connected to the film because we’re making it together. We did do a test screening and a bunch of people were leaving the theater crying. All the videos, that trend that started, “Here’s me before watching Voicemails for Isabelle, and then here’s me after.” I did not expect that.
How did that feel?
I love to cry. I’m such a crybaby about everything. I’m an artist, so I cry when I’m writing my scripts. I cry when I’m shooting my films. I cry when I’m on screen. I’m just a crier. It seemed like America really needed to cry. The world really needed to cry. I got a lot of DMs of people saying that they had lost somebody and that they hadn’t cried about it until my movie and that the movie somehow offered some sort of release or catharsis. I don’t know what could be better than that.
This seems like a personal story. Is it validating that so many people felt the way they did about the movie?
I do believe that humans respond to specificity, even if it’s not their own experience. Humans respond to something that feels real and authentic, whether or not they can relate in their own life to that exact experience. I’ve found that as an audience member, I’m interested in people’s stories. Wherever they are in the world, whatever their upbringing is, I am fascinated by that and humans and whatever their journey is. I’m not interested in slop. I’m not interested in corporate advertising to me through a narrative filmmaking. I’m interested in human stories, so I think I learned that at some point along the line that the truer I was to myself, the truer it would feel to audiences.
But there is always that sneaking suspicion that no one is going to get it. There always is a little of that worry and it is a trust fall, I guess. The more people that join you in the fight — whether it be your producers, your studio executives, your actors, your HODs, your composers, everybody, the artists, musicians that gave me their songs — and hop on the ship, the stronger you feel. The more confident you feel. But it does just begin with me and my laptop getting weird in a corner and semi sure that no one is going to get it.