The Big Picture

Collider’s Perri Nemiroff discusses
Sketch
with creator and first-time feature director Seth Worley and producer and star Tony Hale at TIFF 2024.

Sketch
is a heartfelt story blending family-friendly horror, comedy, and fantasy in a live-action and animation hybrid about a family navigating grief.
Worley and Hale discuss their seven-year journey from concept to screen, designing unique monsters, the inspiration from
Jurassic Park
and
Inside Out
, and so much more.

From first-time feature writer-director Seth Worley comes Sketch, a deeply heartfelt story about a family navigating loss and grief together on what Worley calls a “Spielbergian adventure.” With the help of star and producer Tony Hale, the two spent the course of seven years crafting this family-friendly horror-comedy that blends live-action with animation and VFX.

In Sketch, Hale plays Taylor Wyatt, a now-single father to his daughter Amber (Bianca Belle) and son Jack (Kue Lawrence). All three of them are grappling with the loss of their matriarch, and for 10-year-old Amber, that comes through her comically sinister drawings. Meanwhile, Jack has discovered something remarkable — a pond that can heal things. Jack believes he can bring their mother back, but when Amber’s notebook full of drawings tumbles into the pond instead, it’s up to the family to band together and confront their grief head-on as these frightening drawings come to life and terrorize the town.

While at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival for their world premiere, Worley and Hale sat down with Perri Nemiroff in Collider’s interview studio at the Cinema Center at MARBL to dig into this fantastical feature. From Jurassic Park to Hale’s other movie Inside Out, Worley shares how his dreams became a reality with the help of Hale, his production team, and co-star D’Arcy Carden. From overcoming first-time feature hurdles to the movie’s unique monsters, you can hear all about it in the video above or read about it in the full transcript below.

‘Sketch’ Is a Steven Spielberg-Esque Adventure Exploring Grief
Image via TIFF

PERRI NEMIROFF: Sketch is one of my favorite films of the festival. One of the greatest joys of going to any film festival is seeing a sales title and knowing that the entire world needs to get access to that film. The second I finished your movie, I was buzzing with that enthusiasm and energy. All the good vibes in your direction right now.

TONY HALE: We’ll take ‘em! That’s so nice.

SETH WORLEY: Our lead, Bianca Belle, who played Amber, emailed me your review last night and was like, “Look at this!” It was wonderful.

Clearly I know about your movie, but because it’s a festival premiere, a lot of our viewers are first going to learn about Sketch through TIFF, so Seth, I’ll give you these duties. Would you mind giving a brief synopsis of Sketch ?

WORLEY: It’s about a single dad, played by Tony Hale, who is still grieving the loss of his wife. He’s kind of swept up in this very insane, Spielbergian adventure when his daughter’s comically dark drawings come to life and begin to terrorize their small town.

I was reading your production notes and all of your movie comps really clarified to me why I was so immediately drawn to your film. Two of the first ones I read were Jurassic Park meets Inside Out .

WORLEY: That’s our big pitch that encapsulates the whole tone of the movie, the emotional goals of the movie, and the cinematic goals of the movie, as well.

Those are two of my top five movies of all time.

WORLEY: Well, yeah, because you’re a human being who breathes oxygen.

Image via Universal Studios

Just for fun before we get into the making of the movie, if you could go to the pond and drop in the movie of your choice and have things from that movie emerge, what movie would you pick and why?

WORLEY: Come on, Sneakers. That’s the movie I turn on when I wanna chill, like when I just need something on in the background. To me, it’s the perfect movie. But, Tony, yours has got to be more interesting. Tony’s seen a total of three movies.

HALE: Punch-Drunk Love. The piano from Punch-Drunk Love. That image of the piano, I’m like, “I wanna know the story behind that piano.” And it’s a great conversation piece.

WORLEY: I’m gonna regret telling this. Punch-Drunk Love — I’m taking over the interview — I saw it in college. I had just had to go to an extracurricular thing that was a yoga class that ended up being me and a bunch of, like, single moms, and I came back limber and like, “Yoga is great.” And then my buddy Kyle was like, “You wanna go see Punch-Drunk Love?” And he looked over at me halfway through, and it’s this hypnotic movie that’s like an incredible vibe, and he’s like, “Why are you sitting like that?” And I was contorted up. So that’s what I think of a Punch-Drunk Love. So, I’ll take his answer. Let’s do that.

I love how you two went with more heartfelt things, and I’m like, “Drop Jurassic Park in and have those dinosaurs crawl out!”

WORLEY: I think if you drop Jurassic Park into anything, it makes it better.

I 100% believe in that statement.

‘Sketch’ Was Inspired by the Director’s Children
Image by Photagonist at TIFF 2024

Getting into the writing of the film first, I love asking this question, especially when you have a really cool high concept at the core of your movie. What was idea number one for you, the thing that started it all? But then also, did you have a break story moment? Something you came up with that made you think, “It is whole now?”

WORLEY: The initial idea was just kids’ drawings come to life. I had done some animated shorts with my kids — I have three kids. I came home one day and my oldest at the time, who was in kindergarten, had drawn this mural of The Three Little Pigs. He started walking me through the story and his version, and Superman enters at some point. It takes these wild turns, and I just started recording him on my phone. Then I took pictures of all the art and animated the short film out of it and took his narration and made it narration. I’ve done that with each of my kids. And so, I had this thought, I was like, “This would be fun to do.”

Roger Rabbit was a huge movie for me and still is, and the idea of doing something that was this hybrid thing felt right in my wheelhouse. But then, not to get too spoilery, there’s a moment in the movie, the thing that kind of really did it for me was this image of this young girl who drew these things that came to life, and she feels responsible for it. But then giving her a place where those things are kind of her superpower and her staring down this other monster and just saying, “I’m not afraid of you because I made you, so imagine what else I can do!” That, to me, was like, “That’s the thing I have to make the movie for,” because it felt like the most powerful thing to me.

Image via Warner Bros.

I was reading that it took you five years to get this movie made, and that is par for the course in this industry, if not longer, especially when you’re making a first feature. Over the course of those five years, can you tell me some of the greatest hurdles you encountered and how you overcame them?

HALE: It was more like seven, actually.

WORLEY: Once you factor in finishing the movie, it was about seven. The hurdles were just first-time movie things. For me as a writer, I’d done a ton of shorts, but it was believing in the power and the validity of the larger thing that I was writing and that it was worth getting to the finish line. I had written features before, but this one, because it was so special to me, was really hard for me. Because no matter what, when you’re writing, it’s going to suck for a period of time, and when it’s that large-scale of a thing, and you have so much importance on it, it can be really tough and lonely getting through it.

How did I get over those obstacles? Honestly, Tony came on the project very early on and was giving me feedback and things on it, and he was constantly validating, “This is really good. This is really working. Can we get this up to here?” And another producer of ours, Steve Taylor, was also a source of that. It was just constantly finding that outside validation to keep going.

Tony Hale Says Supporting and Producing ‘Sketch’ “Felt Very Organic”
Image via Photagonist at TIFF 2024
 

Tony, I want to come your way to touch on producing. It makes me really happy when an actor who is well-known and has a big platform uses it to bolster newer filmmakers that we need to know more about. What was the thing that flipped the switch in your mind that you need to use what you’ve created for yourself in this industry to support others and support the stories you want to see get told?

HALE: I wish I had some perfect answer, but it felt very organic, this whole process. I had seen Seth work, we had become friends. His perspective on things, the detail — you’ve seen the movie, so you can understand — the detail that he puts into these special effects… Since Amber, our lead, draws them, they’re not these perfect [drawings]. They’re beautifully done, but they look as though a child drew them, and that refinement that he had, and I’d seen them in his shorts, and the whole concept of a girl losing her mother and processing through art and then it coming to life, it was just so beautiful. I think it’s really kind of ironic that I had just done Inside Out, and then this comes. The whole pitch of this, from the beginning, has been Inside Out meets Jurassic Park. Even though it took seven years, it felt very organic, the whole process.

WORLEY: To talk about Tony is someone who is very proactively kind and generous.

HALE: It comes from so much pain. So much pain.

WORLEY: [Laughs] It has to. He came onto this story when there was no reason to believe in it so much, I feel. Just looking at it objectively, it was such a seed of an idea, and [Tony] saw the potential in it and the potential for it. He just saw the very specific weird vision that I had for this movie, which is, it’s a small movie and a big movie at the same time. It’s an emotional, domestic family drama, at the same time being this big, wild, four-quadrant comedy, and also scary and an adventure. He saw all of it and saw how it all would work and trusted me for no reason at all.

HALE: Thank you for saying that, but also, the challenge was getting other people to see that because we would tell it, and then they were like, “Who is this for? What is this?” And we wanted to say, “No, you’re gonna get it once we’re doing it.” And then what’s so validating is now, when people do see it, they’re like, “Oh, I get what you were talking about.” It took seven years, but to get that validation is really, really nice.

To follow up on what you were just saying about selling the concept in a whole manner, what was the key to doing that in the early stages? Is it a matter of going back to your shorts and the other art you’ve made to convey how the film will look?

WORLEY: I made a proof of concept short based on the script for this movie. What’s interesting about that was that my attempt was all the shorts that I’ve made before. It was kind of a popular thing on Vimeo to do a proof of concept that felt like a scene from a larger movie. A lot of them are great and work, but the shorts that I’d made were things that were meant to be shorts, so they had a beginning, middle, and end. But on this, I just pulled a scene, like a sequence out of the movie, and shot that with the cast of kid actors and with a limited budget. The VFX of it were cool, but I learned in that, I was like, “Why does this feel it’s lacking this propulsion that the feature script has?” It was just that it didn’t have any of the emotional context that the movie had. But it made a great sizzle reel, and that sizzle reel is what got a lot of people really excited about it to come on. It was just making a fake trailer essentially out of that short, and it really sold the tone and the energy of it for us.

I don’t want to throw other films under the bus, but I’ve seen so many live-action/CG hybrids where, even with the most beautiful CG creations, they just don’t feel right together. Yours are so specific and appropriately cartoonish, but still feel right in the real world.

WORLEY: She’s saying all the right things to us.

HALE: You need to be our publicist.

Happily!

Tony Hale Pinpoints How to Preserve the Creative Spirit on a Project
Image by Photagonist at TIFF

Tony, you’ve had loads of experience in this industry. What is something you have seen a producer do for a new director in the past that you wanted to hold tight to and give to Seth here, but then also, what is something that you wish more directors had from their producers in terms of support while bringing their vision to screen that you wanted to make sure this set had?

HALE: From what I’ve seen throughout my career, when directors feel supported by their producing team, we’re all — I can only speak for myself — human beings, and when there’s heightened anxiety around a development process or a set, it can really take out the creative spirit of the space. When the director feels like the team is grounded, even though hell is hitting the fan, there’s a sense of, like, “Hey, we got it. We got it. Don’t worry. I’m gonna let you do your thing and we’ll do our thing.” That kind of compartmentalizing for the director. But I think mainly, and this is for me, too, as an actor, when you feel seen by somebody, when everybody else is like, “Eh. I’m not getting it,” when there’s just one person that’s like, “No, dude, I see this…” when I feel seen, it’s like, “Okay, let’s keep going.”

Every single person who works on a film is of the utmost importance, but can you each name an unsung hero of Sketch , someone whose name we don’t hear as often as we should?

WORLEY: You don’t have enough time for all the unsung heroes.

I’ll take a couple if you want!

HALE: Definitely Dusty Brown and Steve Taylor, who are all-star producing partners; Jon Erwin, who’s been really foundational for this movie, very foundational; and just D’Arcy Carden coming on board to play my sister in this.

WORLEY: We could talk about D’Arcy for, like, five hours.

HALE: Exactly. And these kids who really brought an authenticity to the stage, which was just such a gift. Being young, you don’t really know sometimes what they’re going to bring to the table, but they just had this old soul to each of them.

WORLEY: They really did. Speaking to that, Jessica Sherman, the casting director who found the kids.

IMage by Photagonist at TIFF

I was hoping you would go there.

WORLEY: The common, conventional wisdom in the industry is that good kid actors are hard to find. That’s actually not been my experience in all of my time doing this, but especially on this one. The actors that Jessica brought us were just this assembly line of talent-filled machines built in a lab. They were so professional. They knew everyone else’s lines.

HALE: Which was intimidating, I’m not gonna lie.

WORLEY: Yeah, for all of us. And now they’re, like, 40 years old now that it’s been two years in post, and they’re even more intimidating because they’re cool teens. But definitely Jessica. Dan Stern, my visual effects supervisor, and the entire visual effects team. I would be really silly not to say anything about the visual effects team on this. We worked with multiple vendors and people who were all delightful and lovely people, who were so enthusiastic. I’ve never worked with a visual effects artist who’s not pumped to be there, and that’s why you see such great work.

Having gone through this experience, what would you say is a “do” and a “do not” in terms of incorporating visual effects in a live-action environment that you might recommend to another filmmaker about to do something like that for the first time?

WORLEY: I’ve said this before, don’t ever play it safe. I don’t wanna get too technical, but if you don’t know anything about visual effects, don’t just assume, “This is a visual effect shot. I’ve been shooting handheld the whole scene. I should lock it down on a tripod or something so that we can get a safe shot.” Your shot will feel like that. It’ll feel completely off. Shoot a little dangerously, trust the process, and make sure you have someone smarter than you as your visual effects supervisor, even if you have extensive work doing visual effects.

Obviously, the monsters are a huge pro of visual effects for us, that we had monsters in the movie, but the other thing was our production came in on time and under budget, 90% thanks to our cast and crew. Then I’d like to say a little bit of a percent of the fact that I was able to say things like, “We don’t need to stop and wait for base camp to move. Keep them in the shot. I’ll paint them out later. I know how to do that.” Or, “Kue [Lawrence] is good in take one, but Bianca is great in take two,” and I’m like, “I’ll just stitch them in post.” The most fun is if someone actually looks in the camera; it’s like, “We’ll just replace their eyes for that.” No one doesn’t freak out when they hear that. They’re like, “That’s the creepiest thing you’ve ever said, but I’ll trust you.”

Image via TIFF

HALE: I didn’t know that. Which eyes? Which scenes did you switch?

WORLEY: What’s funny is no one looked at the camera, but there are some shots where you think people look at the camera, so you just fix it anyway. It’s the stuff we do in the commercial world all the time, and they do it in feature films all the time, but especially on an indie movie, it helps save time and money so much.

Can you shout out your favorite monster of the movie?

HALE: Dave is mine. I also really like The Tattler. We have a blind monster, and then we have The Tattler, but the blind obviously can’t see, and no one knows where they are, but The Tattler screams to let the blind monster know where they are. [Laughs] But I love Dave. Dave is this glittery blob of joy, and then has a turn.

WORLEY: The Tattler is my favorite. There’s a very specific Jurassic Park reference going on in that whole scene. But my favorite is when our concept artist, Michael Cribbs, did these first mock-ups of The Tattler, I had a loose idea in my head of what it was. In fact, I think what I told him, and I don’t know if we landed there, but a combination between the 2001 [A Space Odyssey] Monolith and a Furby. If we can find some way to find the middle of that. What he gave us was, there’s this one image with this face, and I was like, “This is the funniest thing. Do not lose this face.” And I sent it to Tony, and he was like, “Well, that’s my inner monologue. That face is me.” The Tattler is, I think, my favorite.

Image via TIFF

Distribution needs to come first, I want it to get out to the widest possible audience, but you’ve also gotta make toys of these.

WORLEY: I agree. I 100% agree.

Seth Worley Ranks the Jurassic Park Films With Perri!
Image by Federico Napoli

I hate asking this because it’s putting you on the spot, but you’re clearly a very big Jurassic Park fan and now I need to know this because I feel like it’s gonna tell me so much more about you. Can you rank the movies?

WORLEY: Sure, I’d be happy to. I don’t want anyone to think that any movies are low on the list because I don’t appreciate something about them.

That’s the exact way I define my Jurassic list.

WORLEY: I would go, obviously, Park 1 first, Lost World goes right below it because it has my favorite death in it — Peter Stormare’s death by Compys is my favorite death scene in the movie. That’s the whole reason the Eyeders in the movie exists because I love the death-by-a-1,000-cuts death. I would go Jurassic World right after that and then I would go [Jurassic Park] 3 after that. I don’t know Dominion or Fallen Kingdom, which order I would put them in. What’s yours? Tell me yours.

It changes depending on the mood I’m in. Park is definitely number one, Lost World is number two. I love the Compy death but also many others. I love the raptors in the field.

WORLEY: There are a lot of good deaths in that one, honestly.

I love Jurassic World . I think one of the coolest things ever is that you fell in love with this original movie in 1993, and then, so many years later, John Hammond’s vision actually came to life and it was operational — and then crashed and burned.

WORLEY: It was so fun! And the way they got to do all the little bits and pieces. I love when he’s hiding behind the amber statue on the main square. It’s like, “This rules! I love this.”

Then I’ll go [ Jurassic Park ] III , which I don’t think gets nearly as much credit as it deserves. I understand it’s tonally a little different, and some people poke fun, but the raptor dream …

WORLEY: No, it’s actually good. The cinematography is great, and the raptor dream! Come on, a talking raptor!

Custom image by Federico 

It’s got thematic heft that people don’t give it credit for. And then I’d probably go Fallen Kingdom, and then I would go Dominion . I also think Dominion needs more respect for certain things it takes from the book and actually puts to use.

WORLEY: I do appreciate the fact that it does take a lot of that nostalgic stuff for us who read the [Michael] Crichton book and tried to bring that. Yes, 100%.

I needed more Biosyn. I’ll also highly recommend the animated series.

WORLEY: My daughter loves it. I watched most of it with my daughter, then she watched it without me. So now I’m just a grown man going to watch an animated Jurassic Park series by himself.

I have so much respect for your daughter that she just didn’t wait and she watched it though.

WORLEY: She went and started watching Lost recently without even telling me. I’m like, “This is one of your dad’s favorite shows of all time.” She was like, “Okay.”

I could talk about Jurassic all day long, but I could also talk about your movie all day long so it’s easy to veer back on course. We have to highlight Kue and Bianca a little more than I already have. Seth, from your perspective, what is the very first thing you saw them do, either in prep or on set, that made it click, “You are not only perfect for these roles, but you’re gonna take them beyond what I wrote?”

WORLEY: I mean, everything. Kue originally auditioned for Bowman, and I was like, “I think you should play Jack because you are the sweetest creature I’ve ever seen in my life.” He’s so sweet and kind. His audition was he read, and then he showed us his breakdancing skills. But there’s something about him that feels like you can watch the kid murder somebody and still want to adopt him. He’s so deeply caring.

With Bianca, I had originally envisioned more of, like, an Abigail Breslin in Signs kind of character for Amber, but the second I saw Bianca, she was an older soul, but it’s like she had multiple characters inside her that could come out at any moment, but they maybe were too timid to or something. She also had this punk rock look to her that I really, really loved.

Image via TIFF

HALE: There was no indication of, like, “I’m angry,” or, “I’m sad.” You could just sit there, and you knew the internal monologue that was happening in her.

WORLEY: There’s no extra mustard on any of the emotional part of it. It just felt like she’s a girl with a lot going on inside that we get to see come out over the course of the movie.

Tony, now for you working alongside them. You’re obviously a very experienced actor, but I love the fact that with every new generation, we get new mentalities, a new set of techniques. Given they are newer actors in this industry, is there anything you saw the two of them do that made even you think, “I want to back-pocket that and try that myself on my next movie?”

HALE: Man, anytime you get the opportunity to work with kids, and Kalon [Cox], who played Bowman, there’s just a freedom that you’re always reminded to get back to. I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years, you can find yourself getting into kind of a mechanical place or the temptation to get into a mechanical place. But when you see them on set and there’s just this kind of freedom, having a good time, playing cards, really doing the work, getting attached to it but not getting so heavy about it, and just finding that play — we’re always trying to get back to that play as actors, and the kids just obviously organically have it.

Tony Hale Didn’t Have to Captain the ‘Sketch’ Ship – And That’s a Good Thing!
Image by Photagonist at TIFF

I wanted to make sure to end on this particular question. It’s for you, Tony, but it’s something inspired by what Seth said in his director’s statement. He said, “If I only get to make one movie in my life, this is the one,” which I do think is a very beautiful sentiment, but it’s also not true. You made a fantastic movie, and you will and should make many, many more. As an actor in his movie and as a producer working alongside him, what is something about Seth as a creative partner that you appreciated and you’re excited for even more actors, producers, and then some to experience in the future?

HALE: Well, I want to be the only one working with him. No, it’s hard to encapsulate that. The one thing an actor does not want to feel on set is unsafe. When I feel unsafe, I’ll start captaining the ship. I’ll be like, “Who’s in control? Because it doesn’t feel like anybody is, so I’m gonna start taking control.” When you feel like somebody’s captaining the ship, when you know exactly what their vision is, you know obviously which direction you’re going, you can just relax and kind of go back to that play. Seth, we always knew he was captaining the ship, but not just that; he was not an a-hole about it. He was kind. Because a lot of directors do captain the ship, but there’s an edge to them, an unfortunate edge. With Seth, there was just always a kindness, a security, and that equation is, I think, going to be a gift to a lot of other actors, definitely.

Special thanks to this year’s partners of the Cinema Center x Collider Studio at TIFF 2024 including presenting Sponsor Range Rover Sport as well as supporting sponsors Peoples Group financial services, poppi soda, Don Julio Tequila, Legend Water and our venue host partner Marbl Toronto. And also Roxstar Entertainment, our event producing partner and Photagonist Canada for the photo and video services.