“Follow the Queen” Interview with Director Shea Harris [Sublime 7]

Peace in, and welcome to the first installment of Sublime 7 with the Director of the new short film “Follow the Queen” – Shea Harris. Watch the trailer before you read the interview, or after, you’re your own person.

BA – Bathroom Atlantis

S – Shea Harris

BA:  What kinda milk you drinkin’?

S: I like 0% fat. Not skim, not diet milk. I’ve tasted whole and 2% – amazing. I was raised on 0%, I’ll die 0%.

BA: Enough small talk, let’s talk jazz: What’s the inspiration behind “Follow the Queen”?

S: My family is big on poker, and we play once a year when we go visit the rest of the family in Central Texas. When you play follow the queen, the queen gets put down and whatever follows is wild. Nothing follows the queen, nothing’s wild.
Two uncles get into it. Before the rules are set, everyone’s happy to be there. Uncle Randy is annoyed. 

“We are playing by the wrong rules.” He preaches.

Old Great Uncle Tommy is old and crotchety… dead now. Old Great Uncle Tommy thinks they’re playing by the right rules. The last card played is a queen. Uncle Randy figures out he would’ve won with the right rules, storms out, comes back with the fresh “right” rules printed out for Great Uncle Tommy, slaps them on the table and storms out again. Old Great Uncle Tommy states proudly, 

“I’m still right.”

The situation always stuck with family, brought up every time we got together in hushes and snickers. The exchange kind of festered in my mind and resulted in “Follow the Queen.”

BA: What was production like for the film?

S: “Make films about subjects you’re familiar with.” – [Someone at some point said that] I grew up playing poker.

Translating poker into film makes it really boring. I shot scenes for a montage to explain how to play Follow the Queen in detail. The movie was boring. It became an instructional video on how to play Follow the Queen. This movie was about drama, about Mark (the main character), not the game itself

The script was three times longer than what was actually used. I didn’t go to film school so I took it step by step one job at a time. Writing, producing, directing, acting, editing – it sucks directing your own acting.

There was one film major that helped on this project and they sucked. They didn’t help at all. The only person coming from the first film was our cinematographer, who was just a cool guy who knew how to use a camera.

No one knew how to use the boom except the film major who claimed it as the most important job, and then all audio from their takes was completely unusable, so the rest of us had to learn how to use the boom.

I have yet to make a profit creating films. I sunk money into this film, but I don’t regret it. This was a passion project made with good friends paid handsomely with pizza and beer.

BA: What audience needs to see this film?

S: Anybody who will enjoy it. Rounders, 21, Swingers – there’s not many poker films out there. I wanted to hit that niche. I wanted to make a movie that communicated the feeling of poker.

My goal was making ‘poker’ a character in this film for the audience to enjoy.

BA: Where’s this film going?

S: It’s being submitted to a couple of film festivals currently. A producer’s job is to get it shown so that’s what I’m doing. I can’t submit to an academy award festival until it gets into some smaller festivals. If it wins there, we go to bigger film festivals

This was my film school. I wanted to learn how to make a short film so I made a short film.

BA: When can we expect to see it?

S: If it doesn’t win anything in this initial round of festivals you can catch it on YouTube. But the longer you don’t hear about it, the better chance it’s doin’ pretty good!

BA: Anything you wanna plug right now?

S: I really want anyone who sees this movie to reach out and tell me how I can do better.

My next film will be feature-length, which may take months or years. Vaporwave market I’m coming for ya.

If I say I’m gonna do it, I’ll do it or die. Keep the name Shea Harris in mind so you can say I knew that guy when he’s snubbed for an Oscar.