‘Krisha’: How a Home Movie Became an Indie Film Sensation
Krisha Fairchild is the kind of person who shrieks with infectious laughter as she tells you that one of her index fingers was recently bitten off by “a nasty-ass” dog. Of course, she probably wasn’t laughing about it at the time — 40 years after earning her first professional credit, the actress was only weeks away from shooting the role of a lifetime when she reached in to break a fight between her pit bull mix and her neighbor’s comparatively petite terrier. Suddenly left with a cylinder of gauze where her right pointer used to be, the sexagenarian star-in-the-making called her nephew, filmmaker Trey Edward Shults, and told him that she couldn’t play the part that he’d written for her.
The 27-year-old writer/director/editor/producer of Krisha, however, wasn’t going to let a little thing like distress over a partially missing digit stop his movie. On the contrary, he felt that Fairchild’s injury was only going to make it better. “Obviously I didn’t want my beautiful aunt to lose her finger — I love her!” Shults explains. “But the filmmaker in me was thinking ‘Yes! That’s perfect for her character.'”
It was also perfect for his highly autobiographical portrait of addiction that would rather examine raw wounds under a microscope than pretend that they aren’t still bleeding. Taking “write what you know” to the next level, Krisha not only digs up a tragic episode from Shults’ recent family history — it stars the actual people who survived it. Shot on a shoestring budget over the course of nine days at his mom’s house in Texas and almost entirely cast with the director’s blood relatives , the drama is such an unflinchingly honest exploration that it feels like watching someone perform a public autopsy of their family tree. “He was basically outing the skeletons in our closet,” Fairchild says, “but we all knew that it might help.”
What they didn’t know was how many people would see it. Thanks to Shults’ unflinching vision and Fairchild’s searing performance, Krisha has become an unlikely indie sensation, winning both the jury and audience prizes at the 2015 SXSW film festival, landing a spot at Cannes, receiving the Independent Spirit Award for the year’s best film shot for under $500,000, and earning its director a two-picture deal from A24. Not bad for a home movie.