SETH WORLEY INTERVIEW

The New Black Film Collective recently spoke with filmmaker Seth Worley, the writer and director of the children’s fantasy film, Sketch. Sketch, a Spielberg-esque movie for the entire family, about a creature that comes to life when a young girl’s sketchpad falls into a strange pond, has been commercially successful and earned critical acclaim.

TNBFC’s Tru sat down with Worley to discuss his process and how he was able to accomplish making such a wholly original and successful film.

TNBFC: I'm Tru of the new Black Film Collective. Thank you so much for talking with me today. How are you doing?

Worley: It's so great to meet you, Tru. Thank you for having me. I'm doing great. How are you?

 TNBFC: I'm amazing. Thank you so much for releasing your amazing project into the world. I absolutely adore Sketch. This was a fantastic watch. Because the film moves through tender and quiet moments with some intense scenes, how did you maintain the balance to create such smooth transitions?

Worley: I appreciate that. The movie was always so hard to make; it was hard to pitch and sell because it was such a tonally complex film, like you said. People would read it and expect The Babadook and be like, "why does this have so many laughs in it?" Or they'd read it expecting Goosebumps and be like, "why are you trying to make me cry?" And we kept saying we were trying to make Inside Out meets Jurassic Park. We want to make this big, exciting summer tentpole action-adventure film, but we want it to dig deep into emotional depths and be this emotionally intelligent and raw film. And I've just found that some of the people in my life who have experienced the most trauma also tend to be the funniest people in my life. And I think that if you lean hard enough toward trauma and toward tragedy, you'll find comedy whether you want to acknowledge it or not. And I think that it extends the other way, where I think if you lean into comedy, you'll start to find truths about the human experience and about living in this world. And I believe that, so for me it was always just about following my, well our instinct as I had an incredible team on this film, always following our instincts and just leaning toward where the story took us, and if the story takes us to a sad place let's lean into it and know that we're going to find laughs that get us right out of it naturally and not trying to force anything.

TNBFC: It definitely shines through in the dialogue because I found that the dialogue was nuanced in the fact that it’s true, and it sounds so seamless and natural, but also on the nose and hilarious at the same time. How did you find the process of writing jokes where it doesn’t seem like it’s overtly a joke?

Worley: Somebody taught me a long time ago that comedy can never be injected. It can only be extracted. And so that has always shaped my writing process. Two things factor into this. One is that comedy can only be extracted, and so you have to focus on building situations where you can find comedy in them, rather than trying to think of funny things and constantly following and responding to your instinct. When we’re uncomfortable, we want to make a joke, right? And if you’re writing human characters, they’re going to do the same thing. It’s constantly satiating that and entertaining that and letting yourself go down those tangents because a lot of time letting characters take tangents because often that leads you somewhere interesting and special. The other part of it is that I struggle to write scene action. I think a lot of writers feel that when you write action, it’s hard to get into the flow of a story. But when you’re writing dialogue between two or three people, you’re able to get into that flow state because the story is literally alive. There are people talking to each other, and so I tend to lean on that as a crutch to try to get to each of my story points. I have an outline of steps of action I need the story to get to, but I find that having the characters often argue their way to these points or through these points is, at least in the first draft, a way to help me organically get there. And out of that comes that kind of dialogue. I’m very influenced by him, but do not even attempt to claim to be as good as him, but I’m very influenced by Aaron Sorkin and specifically The West Wing. I’ve watched every episode of the first four seasons of The West Wing countless times, an absurd number of times. And I love the way dialogue flows like music in his writing and in the way that those actors perform it. And again, I don’t claim to be as good as Aaron Sorkin, but that’s kind of like me. I like to use dialogue to create that rhythm and pace and help the characters find where they’re going, if that makes sense.

TNBFC: Yeah, it does. What was the process like for finding locations and deciding which ones work?

Worley: Well, the woods we shot here in Nashville, Tennessee, which is where I grew up. And so, a lot of the fact that there's so much in it that takes place in the woods comes from the fact that I grew up in a neighborhood surrounded by woods. And there are lots of neighborhoods like that here in the suburbs of Nashville. But we needed a house specifically for a large part of the movie. And we needed a house that we could, without spoiling anything, we could do a significant amount of damage to the inside of. And surprisingly, it was hard to find people who were willing to let us do the things in their house that the script called for. But then we had a PA named Finley Joel, who had just directed a music video of her own, where she had found she had gotten access to a city database of houses that were set for demolition. And so she was able to shoot this music video in this house where the artist had a sledgehammer and was destroying the house as they sang. And so she pointed us to this list, and she found on the list this house that was set for demolition, so we could come in and do whatever we wanted to it. We were going to be the last people to experience this house. And so that gave us a huge amount of freedom. Funny enough, though, six months after we wrapped, which by the way, I have to say we did so much damage, but we did even more damage after we wrapped to celebrate. We put holes in the walls, ripped cabinets off the walls, and then six months later, we're in post, and I happen to look up the house and find that it's on Zillow for sale. They didn't destroy it. They just patched up the drywall and put new cabinets back on. And for the first run of press for the movie, I was saying in interviews, I can't wait for some family to be sitting in the theater and go hang on a second. And then that family commented on one of my Instagram posts and said, "Well, that is us. That's our house." So we got them free tickets to the movie and sent them some Sketch swag. But it's just crazy to me.

TNBFC: That’s brilliant. That’s such a cool full circle. Have the changes in technology influenced your approach at all, creatively or technically, on this project?

Worley: That's a great question. Honestly, I think the tools that we used to ultimately make the movie were all around when I started writing it. However, I'm sure you're kind of getting at the in between the time that we wrapped production and the time that we wrapped post, in that period of time was the advent of AI-generated imagery. There was no MidJourney or ChatGPT, I don't believe, when we started, when we wrapped production. And so this stuff started coming up as we're trying to finish this movie, and we're trying to work through a very limited budget to create these really ambitious visuals. And of course, it crossed our minds, could we use this to finish the movie? Is there a way for us to use this to finish some of these monster shots more cheaply? And it was kind of encouraging to me that we found we couldn't. And the reason we couldn't was because none of these models could generate the specific style we were going for, because what we were going for hadn't been done. It had nothing that had been trained on, so there were no monsters, no movies to train on with monsters that looked like ours. And that was encouraging to us because we were like, "oh, I guess we're doing something unique and fresh and new." Because this thing has no idea how to do it. And so we ended up still having to do it the old-fashioned way, which was wonderful. 

TNBFC: It definitely shines through because there's a lot of character to just the whole entire process and how it comes together. How did you approach the subtleties of the relationships between the characters without overexplaining?

Worley: That's a great question. When you have six to seven years of trying to get a movie off the ground, you have a lot of time to develop the script and hone it. I just always find that audiences love to be rewarded, and I'll just speak for myself as an audience member. I love being rewarded for my patience. I love getting to feel like I'm problem-solving, even though the movie has things figured out for me. I don't need it to be a David Lynchian cryptic puzzle that is completely open for interpretation. I heard someone say, “you never repeat a piece of exposition twice. Never tell the audience the same piece of information twice.” And I think it's so easy to do that out of fear that the audience won't be able to follow things. But if you want to follow the story, it actually works for you because it makes the audience feel like they're being trusted. And when we feel like we're being trusted, it makes us want to reward the movie by trusting it.

TNBFC: Is there anything you learned on this project that you plan to use in your future features or shorts.

Worley: Well, the biggest ones are weirdly hyperspecific things. One of the biggest ones, that is not a very sexy answer, was how I found that when we were submitting to film festivals, we had to submit usually by uploading it to Vimeo with a private Vimeo link with the password, but I had to pick a thumbnail. And that was often going to be the first thing that any programmer saw before they watched our movie. And the assumption is, well, let's put one of our movie stars on there. So, I had a picture of Tony. I was like, but this doesn't represent how big the movie is and how exciting the movie is and how ambitious the movie is. And then I found that every image of a monster, none of them had the backs of the heads of our movie stars. They didn't have their faces. And I was like, "okay, now on the next one, I have to make sure I get at least one, ideally multiple shots that show the promise of the premise and the thing that we're spending all the money on and also shows our characters' faces." And I realized this is why you get the American posters. For the movie Twisters, everyone made jokes about the fact that it's a tornado, and then the stars are looking away from it toward the camera. Like what? The tornado's behind them. What are they looking at? And that's why. Because we want to see a tornado and our movie stars. Like Spielberg, his stuff is all behind me, but Spielberg is a master at it. He knows how to get images that are iconic and represent the movie, and are perfect for marketing to just snatch right up and use.

TNBFC: Did you have a play in the cinematography as well?

Worley: Stacy was our director of photography, and working with her on this movie was one of the most fruitful and fulfilling collaborative experiences of my career. I have an eye for composition and camera movement, but it's never a one-way like this is what we do and this is what we're going to do. It's always a discussion, and it's a conversation. 99% of the time, our plans would be born from the two of us walking through the scene and talking about it, and often I come to it with a clear vision in my head, and I walk her through it, and then she pluses it and makes it better and pokes holes in it, and that's the way to do it. I don't have an eye for lighting, but I have a pretty keen eye for composition and for camera movements. I couldn't exist without her, and it's important that she always knows that and that everyone knows that. But no, it's a collaborative experience, like 500%.

TNBFC: Are there any rules that you’re aware of that you completely broke?

Worley: Oh gosh. I mean, actual rules we stuck to and did not break, laws, and labor laws. But that's a great question. I mean, the thing is they say never work with kids or animals and we had kids and then like 13 unique creatures that had to be built from scratch that weren't animals per se, but there's a lot of visual effects that I did that were purely because I on the day said we can fix it in post and then I subsequently was the one who had to fix it in post. The thing is, it's just you're always breaking rules to make these things. It's never comfortable, no matter how comfortable you make it. And it's always challenging. Your plans never go the way that you hope they will. And so you're constantly having to bend and break the so-called rules, but those rules are simply just like this isn't how it's commonly done. And I guarantee you, a big studio movie that does everything the way it's commonly done still has to do things the uncommon way in order to make it happen because it's such a chaotic, strange art form filled with so many variables. So, unfortunately, I don't have a really fun sound bite answer for you.

TNBFC: No worries. What do you hope audiences will take away from this film?

Worley: You know what? So when I saw Jurassic Park when I was nine years old, I walked out of that theater and decided I'm going to see this as many times as possible by taking every family member I have one at a time and going to see it. And around the sixth or seventh time, I realized I was watching the person that I brought more than I was watching the movie. And I was kind of taking credit for their entertainment experience. Like, aren't you grateful I provided this for you? And that's the feeling I've been chasing ever since. I chased it right into this career. So, I would hope that audiences will go to see Sketch and will walk out, and what they'll take from it is that they can see it as many times as possible by taking every family member and friend one at a time, and experience it as many times as possible. That's my hope. Also, that kids and adults will feel equipped with ways to healthily process complex and dark emotions, that they shouldn't be scared of, and that parents, friends, and family should feel empowered to create a safe space for the people in their lives.

TNBFC: Amazing. That was beautiful. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for talking with me.

Worley: Thank you. It was great meeting you.

Sketch was released in cinemas on 24th October 2025