Josh Sternfeld admits he wasn't the likeliest guy to tackle a crime drama set in a small town. He's a city guy and a relatively new director, whose first feature Winter Solstice was a small-scale family story set in New Jersey. But unbowed, Sternfeld didn't just write Meskada as a story about murder, family, and class tensions between a rich town and a poorer town, and one cop-- played by Nick Stahl-- who is caught between them.
Meskada is premiering at this year's Tribeca Film Festival; you can read more about Meskada in my review, then check out below the interview I did with Sternfeld and Grace Gummer, who makes her film acting debut as a bartender in the poorer town of Caswell, where she inadvertently winds up at the center of the murder mystery linking the two towns. We talked about the challenges of filming on location in rural upstate New York, how to tackle those tricky class differences between the two towns, and getting yourself pumped up for intense acting scenes-- and trust me, Meskada has a lot of these. Check it all out in the video interview.
