Hell's No Place for a Pretty Face (2026)

Mike: Tell me a little bit about you. How did you get involved in filmmaking?

Seth: I've been, I guess, unprofessionally doing it for about 10 years now. I started in high school, and then progressively each short film became a little more professional, which led to a feature, which led to opportunities opening up. I did two years at the BFI in London, and then came back down and continued here in Texas. Yeah, no, it's honestly a pretty straightforward… It's just one short film after the next until we started to get into the feature game, which is, it's been fun, but stressful.

Mike: That's fantastic. What even got you interested in being a filmmaker?

Seth: So, again, being in Texas, it gets very hot here, so you tend to do… Your activities are limited to whatever you can do in the AC. As a kid, I was watching movies a lot. My dad put me onto a lot of stuff, and me and my brother would constantly go out and just find stuff. The circle of friends I had would gravitate towards trying to find the craziest thing we could watch. And then I guess that just morphed into the goal of making movies.

Mike: Tell me a little bit about your short films. What do you gravitate towards with those?

Seth: So I'd say my two home genres that I've always ended up bouncing back and forth between were Western and noir. Those are the things that I really love. And mainly with the shorts, they tended to be more noirs, because I could do that with one light and limited resources, right? I'd say the first professional short film I did was called The Big Red, White and Blue, and it was very simple. It was a one-day shoot. It was about two guys who meet in a hotel room, and essentially, as the conversation goes along, you realize they orchestrated the JFK assassination. It did really well for us.

It took us to Austin Film Festival and to a bunch of other festivals, and that was the first one that got us some recognition. That one really helped kickstart a lot of the more professionalism in the stuff that we made.

Mike: That's fantastic. You were involved with one co-directed, I believe, called Streets of Fire. Was that a remake of the Walter Hill musical?

Seth: No. That's a funny one, actually. Technically, I guess that would be considered the first feature that I shot, but never got made, really, or never went anywhere. I was a junior in high school, and my friend, who is still one of my best friends today, he's older than I am, he had this idea for a movie, and it was about race cars, and it was about street racing and stuff like that. And he would literally pick me up from school, and we would go and shoot after school. That was probably some of the best film school I ever did, because we did every single thing incorrectly, and that really put us on the things not to do for future reference.

It was a lot of fun. I love that we got a cool trailer out of it. That was what we were very proud of. We still show that to this day.

Mike: Awesome. So tell me the story of Hell's No Place for a Pretty Face. I just wanna say this up front, it's a great movie. I had a really good time watching it.

Seth: Well, that's awesome to hear, because right now it's very limited, the number of people who've seen it, so hearing that is… Especially from this podcast, man, that's awesome. Yeah, no, so it's essentially a Bonnie and Clyde kinda story. The logline that we use is, what is it? It's two porn stars driving cross-country robbing porn theaters. And it's just a functional logline to pull in people's attention. I think it's an attention-grabbing hook, I believe. But essentially, we wanted to make a romance movie, and I think that's one of the things that is lacking from that subgenre. You have Bonnie and Clyde, True Romance, what was the other one recently? Queen and Slim. And you have this whole subgenre, and I love that genre, right?

And the thing with that category of movies is that they tend to revolve around a couple who… They meet, they accidentally kill someone in self-defense or find a briefcase full of money, and then they're being followed and they have to run, and they always end up in Mexico or dead. There's two options. And the main conflict of those movies tends to be whether they're gonna make it out alive. And since we don't have the budget for big shootouts and stuff, we were relying on the question: are they gonna stay together? I think focusing on the romance aspect of a story like that is infinitely more interesting and doable. So that was kind of the goal. It blossomed from that idea.

Essentially, we wanted to make a road movie and just include a lot of imagery that we really like, right? So, cowboy hats, cool cars, deserts, movie theaters, and just morph a story around that imagery.

Mike: What movie audio am I hearing when they go into theaters?

Seth: Dillinger. The Warren Oates movie?

Mike: All right. I thought I recognized the voice, but I could not place it for whatever reason. All right. Thank you.

Seth: Yeah. We were gonna use Bonnie and Clyde, but that was a little too on the nose.

Mike: Yeah, granted. I totally understand that. Tell me about how you put this together. Once you come about the idea and start to write this, where do you go from there?

Seth: I have a core group of people that I tend to work with, going all the way back to some of the early short films, including the guy who used to pick me up from high school and make that… We made that short film, or that feature. So I wrote the movie while I was in London. I ended up getting very passionate about it while I was up there, and I ended up ending my BFI course a lot earlier than I should have, and I moved back down here and just got it off the ground, started funding it myself.

And once I got my main three people, Mason Hunsicker, who was the DP, Jafet Velasquez, who was my AD, and RJ, essentially that core group, they really helped push each and every aspect forward, right? And then again, we tried to write something as doable as we could, right? We shot it in, I'm not gonna say our backyard, because it's a good couple hours west of Texas, but it's using places and imagery that we know and we're pretty well associated with. So we knew the lay of the land ahead of time, and because of that, things started to roll a lot more fluidly. And also, the last feature film that we did was one called The Hard Goodnight. It's the same case scenario.

Every single dollar of that budget comes out of my pocket, essentially, and you try to learn how to stretch every dollar and where to put every dollar to its best use, right? So utilizing a very small crew, utilizing one camera, we only shot on one lens. We didn't ever change out the lens. Minimizing the cast. It's just trying to lend ourselves an easier time to make the movie.

Mike: Absolutely. And talk about your cast, because these two lead actors that you have are terrific.

Seth: Awesome. Thank you. They're gonna be pretty happy to hear that. Yeah, we lucked out big time with our leads. So Nathan, who plays Dylan Campbell, he's the Clyde half of that couple. We worked together briefly a couple of years ago on a feature film. We enjoyed working together a lot, so much so that essentially when we wrote the script, it was already written for him. And then for the female part, the Bonnie half of that couple, I had to throw a wider net out there. I was working on a couple of those vertical shorts that are starting to become a lot more popular, opening myself up to that aspect of production.

It's essentially a big, gigantic pool of good-looking actors who wanna be in bigger projects, and who are very good. So we essentially tapped into that pool of actors until we found Meg Bush. Her audition was pretty much on point with exactly what we were looking for. It was awesome. She came in, and it was one of the easiest and most gratifying director-actor relationships I've ever had, because she just fell right into it. She essentially just played herself, and that's what I really wanted. A big part of the movie is trying to encapsulate that honeymoon aspect of a relationship, so it's having fun. I think having fun is a very difficult thing to convey on camera.

I'd say almost more so than crying or anger or anything like that, which she does throughout the movie, but having fun is a very important aspect of the movie, and she killed it. Her and Nathan, they just gelled really well. And they only met two days before the actual shooting of the movie. We really lucked out with the chemistry aspect.

Mike: I imagine that on a low-budget film like this, you didn't have a lot of time for rehearsals. The film has a great look. You mentioned your DP. Can you talk about how you figured out how you're gonna go with this look? Especially towards the end of the film, when you start using some still images and the black and white. From frame one, though, it is very captivating the way that this is shot.

Seth: Rehearsals are not an option. Appreciate it. Yeah, that's Mason Hunsicker. He was the DP for the movie, and essentially, he's my right-hand man on any project I've done within the past six years. He's been the guy. We have a very deep love for '70s and '60s cinema. We will nonstop just nerd out over The American Friend or any early Wim Wenders stuff. My personal guy is always Sam Peckinpah. That's my hero through and through. Everything is by the gospel of Sam Peckinpah. So we tend to watch a lot of those movies, and we tend to pull ideas from those. Our biggest thing when it comes to production is practicality. How can we practically shoot something and not burn a hole in our wallets?

Or how can we convey this to its maximum effect, still do it not under budget, but cost-effectively? So we watch something like The American Friend, and one of the biggest lessons we take from that movie is each scene is almost maybe three shots tops. There's a lack of camera movement through a lot of it just makes sure that every frame counts. Every single frame pushes the story forward, and it doesn't need to be flashy, but it just needs to be competent. So we go off of that mentality where whatever we do, let's frame it correctly. Let's frame it as nicely as we can. We don't need to do a lot of camera movement. We don't need a lot of tricks or anything like that.

We just need to focus the story within the frames. Because of that, I think it does end up inadvertently lending a certain style to the movie. It gives us a uniform look that we really like. And then for something like the shootout, because again, on a practical level, it's very difficult to do a shootout, we made photography a constant theme throughout the movie, and this one will go to our second unit photographer, Sarah Ferencova. She was the main photographer for all the stills that are taken throughout the movie, and she essentially helped co-direct that whole shootout sequence. That was just a really effective way to make a unique shootout and also push the story forward and also keep it on budget.

So I think we'll always go in with the idea of being practical.

Mike: Absolutely. Yeah. The use of sound in the movie is fantastic too. You get some of those things like the shootout, even when your main character shoots near the cop and probably deafens him. That's all done through audio. It's really smart.

Seth: I appreciate it. Again, it's all a matter of we don't have a lot of time or money, and that drives a lot of the creative decisions. I'm very grateful and very happy that I think they ended up paying off, because we were taking a gamble on not getting a lot of coverage for almost most of the scenes. We weren't shooting for coverage, we were shooting for just, let's get it and get to the next scene. So I think it did lend itself to a creative look.

Mike: Absolutely. When did you actually shoot this?

Seth: We shot this in October of last year. So actually, a year ago today, we were on day three or four of shooting.

Mike: And tell me about your post-process.

Seth: Post-process took me, man, forever. I'm so terrible. I dragged my feet like crazy. I cut the first draft of the movie, and we finished in October. I think I was too scared to touch the movie until January. I had a cut by May, and I hated it, and I ended up essentially scrapping that whole cut. And then I met some guy named Marcus Aviles, who's now one of my best friends, and we clicked really well together. We ended up falling in love with the same movies. We had a language that we spoke. We took a crack at editing the movie, and I think in the first couple of days of editing, we realized, okay, this is a really good lockstep process.

So what we ended up doing was, in August, we went to France, and we stayed out there for two weeks, and he cut the entire movie while we were there. We also went and got supplemental footage, because France does end up playing an aspect of the movie. So we tried to maximize the effectiveness of being in France. And yeah, it was awesome, because we came out with a cut and a lot of really cool footage. And yeah, no, the post-process got very easy and fun once Marcus got brought onto the project.

Mike: That's wonderful. And how about your music?

Seth: Music. Okay, so that's our guy Grant Locklear. Similar thing, we met by coincidence maybe a week or two before the actual shooting. He actually came to visit the set a couple of times. And then once we had the cut, me and him started working together, and we have completely opposite hours. He's a night owl, and I like to go to bed at 8:00 PM. So while I'm knocked out, he would be at his place, and he would send me drafts at 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, and I'd wake up and say, "This is great." No, he's great. Similar thing, we were trying to…

I think we had a process of learning how to work with each other, because this is the first time that I worked with a professional composer. Now I think I'm more equipped for the next one, which, God willing, it'll be again. But I had such a cool time working with Grant, because music is second thought in the back of my head, but it's not something that is on the absolute forefront. So when Grant came in, he had a lot of really cool ideas and a lot of directions where it was a very trustworthy relationship, where he can take the ball and run with it.

Mike: That's wonderful. Did you show this to friends to get feedback or do any sort of test screenings to hone this?

Seth: We did one test screening. Okay, so it was half a test screening, half a showing it to some friends, because we played it here in Austin at the Hyperreal Film Club, and we got a lot of people who we never met, we have no relations whatsoever, but they came in, and we got a lot of really good feedback. It was awesome. It was really, really promising to hear the reactions, especially during the shootout. That was awesome, because we get very visceral gasps and "oh, shit" moments. Next month on the 17th in LA, we're gonna be premiering the film at the Laemmle NoHo 7. And that'll be our big premiere. That's the one that we're gearing up for.

Mike: Oh, that's wonderful. Are you doing festivals and stuff as well?

Seth: No. So this is… We're not gonna be doing that. Instead, what we're doing is we're gonna be taking it on the road ourselves, essentially, theater by theater across the country. The NoHo 7 premiere, that's gonna be essentially our kickoff, and then from there we move it to Austin, to New York, and then expand outwards from there. I would love to take it back to London, because I have a lot of friends and a lot of… I went to a lot of movie theaters out there. I'd love to be able to bring it back home, in a certain sense. But no, we do wanna treat this like an on-the-road production or distribution model.

This was meant for an audience that isn't just festival-going filmmakers and things like that. I would love to bring it to as many eyes as I can. So right now it is an experiment. We're trying it out. I'm very excited for it, and as we get closer to it, we're gonna have the dates, release, and all that stuff.

Mike: Oh, that's wonderful. And where can people find out where these dates are? Do you have an Instagram or website or anything?

Seth: Yeah, we have both. We have an Instagram and a website. If y'all look up 42nd Street Pictures on Instagram, and also on just Google, you'll come across the page for the movie, the trailer, all that stuff. That's where we're gonna be releasing all the details about where we're gonna be, where it's playing, the times, all that stuff. And yeah, no, that's essentially the idea. And then we're gonna be gearing up for our next movie, which I'm very excited for. But yeah, no, it's been a process. I'm happy to see that we're finally here.

Mike: Oh, yeah. No, I imagine it was obviously more than a year, since that's when you were shooting. But when did you actually come up with the idea? It must've been quite a few years ago.

Seth: Yeah, so I think the idea came around two and a half years ago. That's when I started writing or jotting it down on napkins and stuff like that. And then two years ago, I think, is when we had the script, and then from there we just started trying to move forward as effectively as we could.

Mike: That's awesome. And I know that this tour is gonna take up a lot of mental energy, but you said you're getting prepped for your next one. What is the next one gonna be?

Seth: So the next one, I'm not gonna be directing it. I'm producing it and writing it. This is gonna be for my friend Jafet Velasquez, who's an LA guy. It's a horror movie, so that's something that me and him essentially bonded over, just trying to out-crazy each other's movie picks. So this is finally, "Okay, you know what? Let's really sit down and come up with our own crazy horror movie." So right now it's called Psychosomnia. And, quick little backstory, the way I funded my first movie, I did the Robert Rodriguez style. I went to the medical studies, and I did that for a year. I hate those. They're the worst things in the entire world.

I was in there for a year just getting poked and prodded. So essentially we're making a movie about that. It's like, "Let's come up with the craziest medical study and just put some people in there and just give them the worst time ever."

Mike: Ah, that's wonderful. What a great journey, and I'm so excited to see what you do next.

Seth: Thank you. Appreciate it. Me too. I'm very excited to see what we do next. I hope we keep on going.

Mike: Yeah. Well, congratulations on the film, and I just hope the best for you, because I had such a fun time, and I really look forward to other people being able to experience this as well.

Seth: It is very gratifying. I am very proud of the project. I am very excited to show it to as many people as I can and get the reactions and see what that's gonna look like.