We’ve all encountered some kooky folks from the internet, right? Aside from dating apps, thanks to the countless online marketplaces available today, it’s not a totally uncommon experience to turn up somewhere to meet an unconventional stranger with a view to buying what they’re selling. I’m not necessarily talking about anything dodgy, but I’m certainly not ruling out anything… unusual. Well, Olivia Accardo takes that scenario and ramps it up to 11 in her 5-minute fever dream Baby Tooth. It’s a stylish, offbeat gem based almost entirely on a real-life meeting the director had with one such sassy seller – who would then go on to be the star of the film she inspired, which in turn would go on to screen at a host of festivals, including Tribeca. Accardo talks to Directors Notes about the making of her delightfully quirky comedy, the unfortunate circumstances that meant she could self-fund the film, printing out flyers to find more people to lend a hand, and how the Oregon Coast-based filmmaker eventually built a crew made up of Oregon talent and more flown in from LA.
Congratulations on Baby Tooth, a delightfully irreverent and highly entertaining film. Where did the inspiration for this short come from?
Thanks! It sprang from a much less interesting (and super wholesome) real life encounter with the main actress, Dakota Bouher. She was selling her grandfather’s speedboat (the one seen in the film) and I ambitiously thought maybe I could buy it. So, we met up and she showed me the boat, then we had a beer and became immediate and fast friends. I did not walk away with a boat, but I did walk away with a new friend! One month before we shot Baby Tooth, I got laid off at my little creative agency day job and also lost funding for my first feature that I’d been working on all year. I felt pretty defeated but also kind of energized by my quasi-failures, so I wrote something short and fast with Dakota in mind. I wanted the film super short, one location, minimal cast, and something I could fund myself with the severance I just got. Thus was born the 5-minute fever dream, Baby Tooth.
I initially wrote a way more wholesome script about mine and Dakota’s blossoming friendship but I hated it and needed it to have some sort of ‘twist’. So, Dakota came over to my house and we read the script a few times – until she suggested that maybe I should rip her tooth out at some point during the film, because she has a real life tooth that needs to be ripped out! I said no. Mostly because I’m mega squeamish, but there was something to that which I think gave the script the right bizarre edge I was looking for, so I rewrote and rewrote until I landed on something that felt right for Dakota and also right for me. I live in a small town on the Oregon Coast that is full of ‘characters’ and I wanted to capture a sliver of that energy in this film, the extreme and wide spectrum of folks who occupy the same scenic and wild space that is ‘the coast’.
I wrote something short and fast with Dakota in mind. I wanted the film super short, one location, minimal cast, and something I could fund myself.
Knowing this is all based on a true encounter, I now must ask, did the real-life boat get sold and did the tooth come out?
Ultimately, Dakota needed to keep her boat somewhere so she ended up keeping it at my house. I gave her a little money for it and now it is ‘mine’ kind of? It’s at my house, but it needs repairs and I just had a baby, so it has kind of fallen down a few rungs on the priority ladder. Dakota does indeed still have her real life baby tooth as well, and I believe she finally has a dentist appointment to get it removed this spring! The end of an era!
Thinking about personality, costume and look, how much of the real Dakota Bouher was the character we saw on screen?
Dakota is a professional dancer who specializes in improv movement in real life, who also at the time worked at a cool vintage clothing boutique in Eugene, Oregon (The Clothes Horse). The costume came from her place of work, and I definitely wrote Marina’s dialogue with Dakota’s natural patter in mind. Marina is a dialled up caricature version of Dakota, but very much inspired by her. I had a very different shot list in mind for the boat sequence that got totally thrown out during rehearsal. Watching Dakota climb up onto the boat and practice her lines made me realize we should take that scene in a way more fun direction.
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Very sadly, Keith Roy Chrismon has passed away since the making of Baby Tooth. How did you go about casting his role and what was the rehearsal and collaborative process like with both actors?
I had sent out a casting call online to the nearest ‘big cities’ (which are 5-14 hours away) like Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and got a few decent video auditions sent but ultimately I really wanted to keep as much of the project local as possible. So, I printed out flyers and put them around town, in the grocery store, post office, and the hardware store. I reserved a day to host in-person auditions at our local playhouse, in Bandon, Oregon, and Keith called begging me to wait for him to show up because he was on his way. His car broke down, he needed to find another ride, it was a whole thing. He showed up, knew nothing about the project, plopped down in front of me and cold read the script. Partway through his read, he paused, looked at me and laughed and said, “This is fucking weird, oh I gotta do this”. He had seen my flyer at the hardware store. Turns out he had lived in Los Angeles for years and was a retired SAG actor now working remotely doing voice acting and studying screenwriting out of his house in Bandon.
I did a follow up read of the script with Keith and Dakota over Zoom (Dakota did not live in Bandon at the time). The chemistry was palpable and obvious. Keith’s part of ‘The Man’ has a long, angry monologue at the end that kind of peters out and becomes inaudible. In anticipation of it being muted in post, I told him to basically say whatever he wanted because we were probably going to cut it anyway. I also told both Dakota and Keith, if lines didn’t feel right to them at any point to just say what felt more comfortable as long as we were still hitting the same narrative beats. Dakota stayed exactly true to the script, while Keith took that direction and ran with absolute full force.
Partway through his read, he paused, looked at me and laughed and said, “This is fucking weird, oh I gotta do this”.
The day of production, our whole cast and crew were essentially crying laughing between takes because of the shit that was coming out of this man’s mouth. I did occasionally have to get him to reel it in, but he basically used my script as a loose outline, that at the beginning he stayed pretty true to and as his character got more and more unravelled, he deviated more and more from the script. It was a lot of fun and worked great for his part. We ultimately did not cut much of his lines, and instead tried to figure out ways to use more of them. Dakota staying exactly true to the script was perfect too, because I had written it very specifically and exactly for her, while Keith was more of a wild card casting choice.
The film has a very stylish look, especially when Dakota is pitching the boat’s finer qualities. How did you go about capturing this with your cinematographer Gemma Doll-Grossman?
Gemma and I had so much fun in pre-pro with this project. It was our first time working together and she did a really excellent job at pushing me to go weirder and more stylised. She is LA-based so we had a call once a week for the whole month leading up to production. I was fine-tuning the script, she was fine-tuning the shot list. I would put together reference images, she would put together reference images. She flew up a few days before production and stayed at my house. We watched movies together like Greener Grass, which really helped us dial in on how we wanted Baby Tooth to look.
I had one afternoon of rehearsal on location the day before production, with just me, Gemma, Keith and Dakota. Gemma and I had thought we had locked the shot list until we watched the actors perform with each other in person (for the first time, by the way) and we threw it away and redid it, and I think it is so much better because of that. Absolutely still influenced by the films and reference images we shared with each other, but dialled in to interact with the characters in a much more intentional way.
The colour grade, edit and music all add to this style beautifully. What was the post-production process like for you?
My main producer, Kristen Politis, jumped into Baby Tooth with both feet and brought together a really amazing team – our DP Gemma being one of those people, thanks to Kristen! She brought in our composer and colorist and we worked with one of our long-time close friends and collaborators, Will Mason, on the edit. Will was on set all day, organizing and dumping footage and setting up the project in a small boathouse just off to the side of our set. His presence during production absolutely helped us dive into post the literal day after our intense one day shoot.
Music-wise, I made a playlist of house music I had been really into at the time, then shared that with Kristen and Will to try to hone in on that kind of energy for Marina’s character. Kristen shared that playlist and the script with a DJ friend of hers, Henry Taptas Rivaz (also known as Jogging Club) and after a very excited phone call, he quickly sent us a few original tracks that he felt suited the project.
I hate dragging my feet on projects or overthinking things, I feel like that’s when things get mired and die. I wanted Baby Tooth to live!
Eric Vent did the color, Kristen has worked with him for years and he has done the color on a few other projects of mine. Usually though, I am not so precise or specific with direction for color and I just sort of let Eric do his thing. But for the first time ever, I had a very particular vision for how I wanted this to go, and how I needed one scene to be colored almost like it was an entirely different movie. I took single frames of the raw footage and tweaked their color in Photoshop, then had my husband, Adam Ferriss (he does this kind of thing for all kinds of things), refine it even further — then gave those reference images to Eric who totally got it.
We wrapped post in under a month, had a solid rough cut by the Wednesday after our Saturday shoot. I hate dragging my feet on projects or overthinking things, I feel like that’s when things get mired and die. I wanted Baby Tooth to live! It helped that Will and Kristen were staying in my house for the week so we had like our own personal little film camp going in my home office.
The film was shot on the Oregon Coast in a town called Bandon, with half the crew travelling in from LA and the other half based in Portland. How did that team come together?
My husband and I moved to the Oregon Coast from Los Angeles during the pandemic, so my network is still mostly based in Los Angeles. I saw this as an opportunity to meet new Oregon-based film crew, it was also important to me to have our crew nearly entirely women/LGBTQ folks. My producer Kristen was based in LA at the time, and she pulled in some LA contacts, but we also collaborated with LA-based folks we’ve been making movies with for 10 years: Will Mason (editor), Sofia Snyder (co-producer), Kristen’s partner Corey Vent did the sound, Corey’s brother did color. This project was very low budget so I knew I could only fly in so many people from Los Angeles, I also wanted to do a better job at establishing roots in Oregon. I knew a film community existed in Portland (which is a 5 hour drive from Bandon) and I thought this was a great opportunity to utilize it.
Kristen and I contacted Desert Island Studios, a small independent production house based in Portland, and asked for their help. They signed onto the project as a co-producer, allowing us to use their insurance, and gave us a list of names for potential crew based in Portland. And lastly, I found our incredible set photographer who also shot portraits of Keith and Dakota for the key art, through some straight Instagram stalking. Bailey Lemkau is amazing and a gift to us all.
I stayed up late baking tooth and boat shaped cookies with my producers the night before all production flew or drove in, then threw a little welcome party at my house the evening before our one day shoot and I think that really warmed us all up for a good time — I genuinely believe the warmth and goofiness on set is part of what made the film itself so much fun.
With the film screening at Tribeca in 2025, what has the reaction of audiences been like for you? Particularly that of Dakota seeing herself on screen for the first time.
It’s been such a fun ride, and each screening of the film has been to a different room of types of humans (even just at Tribeca throughout its various screenings). It’s fun seeing what jokes land with certain audiences, which don’t, what things make people gasp, cringe or applaud. I’ve had people come up to me after screenings just to tell me I’m weird, or tell me what they loved, or to even quote some of Dakota or Keith’s lines right back at me.
We had our world premiere just before we got the news from Tribeca, also in NY at Nitehawk Shorts Fest in Brooklyn. That was Dakota’s first time ever seeing herself on the big screen, and it was a sold out theater with an after party at the same venue. I think at one point I found Dakota in the bathroom, and she said, “I’m overstimulated”, but people love her. I loved watching people pull her aside to tell her what big fans they were of Marina.
I’ve had people come up to me after screenings just to tell me I’m weird, or tell me what they loved, or to even quote some of Dakota or Keith’s lines right back at me.
With this short now ready to set sail in the online world, what’s next for you?
I’ve been working on two feature length scripts for a few years, one about growing up homeschooled in rural New Jersey (Fucking Losers) and the other about the cranberry pageant culture in Bandon, Oregon (Cranberry Heaven). I just had a baby so I’m mostly climbing out of a sleepless newborn malaise and just beginning to return back to work. I hope to shoot a proof of concept short for Cranberry Heaven titled The Blessing of The Bog, maybe this fall, if I get my shit together. I’m actively seeking funding for all these projects, so holler at me if you love me (or if you think you could love me). Baby Tooth was financed by a severance package I received after I lost my job, so would be cool if that wasn’t the case again.
And finally, what short film have you seen recently that you would recommend to the Directors Notes community and why?
Baby Tooth played alongside this short at Tribeca that I have not stopped thinking about since I saw it. Håkon Anton’s Sorry I’m Late (but I Brought A Choir), a Norwegian short that is exactly what the title suggests. A partygoer is late to his friends’ housewarming party, but he picked up an entire choir along the way. I saw it three times at Tribeca and cried laughing each time. It’s super lo-fi feeling, one location, dialogue that almost doesn’t even matter, silly banter of drunk characters talking over each other. Wobbly camera movement that is perfect, grainy low light, a cat, and an Imogen Heap song at the end.
It just being a great ride aside, it is earnestly ‘indie’. It’s clearly shot on a shoestring, looks like a cast of friends shot at a single location that they know, the script and concept are super simple, nothing about it is ‘try hard’, there’s not really a ‘deeper message’. It’s just exactly what it says it is without being pretentious. I like movies that look like they were probably fun to be on set for, and this is that.
