Laurel and Brendan Brady We’re very excited to have some time today with award-winning sibling filmmakers Laurel and Brendan Brady! Before we start, how has your 2023 been? Laurel Brady: My 2023 has been really good so far! It’s been a mixture of CHRONIC being screened at a number of amazing festivals, consulting and story editing on some wonderful writers’ scripts, and working on my writing projects that are in development. Brendan Brady: 2023 has been a great year. In addition to Chronic premiering at festivals around the world, A feature film I executive produced, Fitting In, premiered at TIFF, the final season of Letterkenny, which I was a producer on, is set to air on Christmas, and I started my own production company, Accent Aigu Entertainment with my business partner, Jacob Tierney.
Congratulations on your new film CHRONIC! Laurel, for anyone not in the know, can you explain the series of very personal events which inspired CHRONIC and how that translated to the final screenplay of the new film? Thank you so much! So, I sustained a mild traumatic brain injury and whiplash from a work-related injury back in 2019 and wasn’t allowed to work for 6 months. It was an incredibly painful, debilitating, and extremely lonely experience. The injury itself is tricky. It’s taken years to heal, and even now, I still have chronic pain and certain after-effects that I’m living with.
I initially wrote the drama-comedy TV pilot version of “Chronic” ten months after my injury which ended up becoming a semi-finalist at LA’s Screencraft’s TV Pilot Competition. I then decided to write the short to explore the terrible, misunderstood (and sometimes darkly funny experience) of going through a brain injury and also let it act as proof of concept for the larger project. Brendan was naturally my first choice to team up with as a director and my co-producer because a) he’s awesome, and b) he has his own experience with chronic pain, so he understood what I was going for. I really wanted the short to touch on the private grief around experiencing a body and mind that has been changed due to injury and illness while also exploring the situational humor of navigating your new reality. After my injury, I found many people didn’t necessarily understand what a brain injury feels like or how debilitating it can be, so I wanted to infuse the short with some of the same hyper-extreme versions of loved ones not getting it or being thoughtless juxtaposed with the relief of finally connecting with folks who do! Brendan, from the very beginning of the creative process for the film, was humor always a major player in the script? 100%. Laurel infused the script with a lot of humour, and it was very important to her to show that even in stressful, traumatic experiences, there can still be moments of levity. This is essential to how Laurel is in real life. We also have a shared sense of gallows humour, so it was easy to jump into it.