San Luis Obispo has long been a place where art passes through and leaves something behind. From the ’70s through the early 2000s, the city became a stop for touring musicians and emerging acts, from early punk bands like Black Flag to future indie favorites like Matt Costa and Delta Spirit. While Cal Poly concerts drew exciting new performers, local staple Boo Boo Records stocked its shelves with edgy, undiscovered albums.
That history reverberates in the city’s venues and record stores. A reminder that music isn’t just listened to, it’s circulated, passed between listeners, and preserved.
It’s a fitting place for a film festival dedicated to breakout visionaries, and especially attuned to an artist like actress and director Britt Lower.
During a tranquil Sunday last month, amid the final days of the San Luis Obispo Film Festival, Lower was honored with the Craft in Focus Award. The event, which included a career retrospective and screening of her new film Sender, highlighted her eclectic filmography.
While many know the 40-year-old for her role as Helly/Helena on Severance, she’s also portrayed a woman who quells the ache of a broken relationship by joining the circus (Circus Person), a muted librarian haunted by mysterious letters (Darkest Miriam), and a frustrated author’s wife who gradually tears at her polished exterior (Psychotherapy).
When I asked Lower what she hopes these films will mean to audiences years from now, she compares indie filmmaking to recording an album: an analog, collaborative process.
“When you made a record, it was a record of an event. There’s something about independent filmmaking that feels like making a record where it’s a timestamp,” she shared before receiving the honor. “It’s gone through all of these people’s hands and has little grooves. Everyone is all hands and hearts on deck, grabbing the duct tape, grabbing the Band-Aids, and pressing that record together that hopefully will feel timeless when you pick it up again in the future. It’s obviously a digital film, but there’s an analog feel to independent filmmaking.”
Britt Lower and Russell Goldman at SLO (The Knockturnal)
That ethos runs through Sender, her latest film, which was shot in just 17 days. Directed by Russell Goldman, the genre-bender has been causing a stir since debuting at SXSW in March. Like the musical acts that have passed through SLO on the road between Los Angeles and San Francisco, Lower and the creative team behind the production had just come from the Bay Area, where they screened the film the night before at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Lower stars as Julia, a woman in addiction recovery who begins receiving packages she never ordered filled with eerily personal items. What happens from there is a pulsating descent into her fractured mind. The musicality of each frame is amplified by a soundtrack featuring lurching, textural, and abrasive tracks by Cindy Lee, Jennifer Lee Lindberg, and Norm Block.
The mesmerizing headtrip is a true showcase of Lower’s artistic range. A Fine Arts major at Northwestern, she can frequently be found touring with circus troupes, an experience that inspired Circus Person, performing with the Brooklyn improv group Frat Boyz, or bringing her theatrical talents to venues across the country. It’s these pieces that fused together and gave life to Goldman’s Julia, a dancing, drumming, crossbow-shooting woman on the brink.
After receiving her award, Lower reflected on her road to Severance, noting that making her directorial debut, Circus Person, gave her the skills she needed to create her now widely known self-tape for the series.
“I try to think of a self-tape or any audition as, you’ve shown up on set and the director didn’t show up, and you have to block the scene and direct yourself. It’s a chance to work on good material,” she told the audience. “I truly thought, ‘At least I get to be Helly today in my bathroom.’”
Her passion for intimate, small-scale work came into play during season two while filming the “Woe’s Hollow” episode in New York’s Minnewaska State Park Preserve. She and her costars, Adam Scott and John Turturro, relied on one another between quick shot setups. It reminded her of the many scrappy, low-budget sets she’s been on.
Zach Cherry, Adam Scott, Britt Lower, and John Turturro in Severance (Apple TV)
“We’d have to try to film before the sun went down,” she gleefully recalled. “It would be John Turturro brushing snow off of my shoulder, and then I’d be fixing Adam’s hair before the take. It was all hands on deck out in the wilderness.”
It’s that ability to be creative on the fly, both as a performer and filmmaker, that moved Goldman first as a fan and then as a collaborator.
“In my letter to you, I remember talking about Circus Person and how beautiful I found your work in it behind the camera and in front of the camera,” he told Lower, reflecting on how he first reached out to her about Sender. “I got to work with a director as well as an actor.”
The way the director looks back on collaborating with Lower on set evokes the image of two musicians experimenting in a recording studio.
“The crew is really supporting the character, and Britt is supporting the timing and the tenor of the film so much and inventing so much. I get very excited when actors invent, and nobody invents like Britt does.”
After reliving the excitement of joining circus troupes after both seasons of Severance, Lower returns to the record metaphor. Herself a touring artist like the many that have passed through the city, she noted the cyclical nature of creativity.
“It’s a circle,” she said of her craft. “Also, the circus is a circle. We’re coming full circle.”
If independent film is a “record of an event,” Lower’s performance in Sender feels like one of those early punk albums once stacked at Boo Boo Records: raw, collaborative, and destined to linger like the crackle of worn vinyl.
