Turning 'Chaos' into a Sundance Film Festival Darling with "Summertime"

There's people [in this spoken word poetry group] from every single neighborhood in LA – as far east, as far west, south valley, everywhere in between. So you were hearing stories all about their relationship to their community, their environment, their families, LA themselves, [and all] as different as could be. But it was all young people talking about existing in the city in 2019, which put them all together into this beautiful package. And that was really sort of how the idea of what this movie could look like. We said it would be one day in LA, it would follow characters from point A to point B, and then they would pass on the torch to the next group. We would find ways for some of them to stick around, some of them would just make one-off interactions. And the only structure that this would have is that these are all young people existing in LA on the same day. And then from there on, we opened up the door for the poets, essentially told them 'you're going to write and you're going to star in your own scene. What do you want to talk about? What is important to you today?' And from then on, it was a madness.