Connar Brown Sprenger: I called them chicken nuggets
Connar Brown Sprenger is an actor, puppeteer, voice actor, and award winning filmmaker who somehow makes all four look easy. She joins Ilse to talk growing up between Tokyo, London, and Atlanta, playing all seven brothers in one production of Grimm, and the practical, gross, wonderfully weird world of her short film Grilled Cheese.
Catch Grilled Cheese on the festival circuit:
TromaDance Film Festival (New York), September 4-6. Delaware Horror Film Festival, September 24-27. Massacre Horror Movie Marathon at the Pickwick Theater in Park Ridge, IL, October 10.
Connar and Ilse get into the wild logistics of growing up multilingual across three countries, what it's actually like to be a stage understudy who finds out she's on three hours before curtain, and the delicate art of writing a feature film with a friend without losing the friendship. Connar also shares the very specific, very gross inspiration behind Grilled Cheese, the practical effects work from her "goo gang," and a genuinely unsettling haunted house story from her childhood in London.
In this episode:
- 03:08 - Chicago to Tokyo to London to Atlanta and back: the elevator pitch
- 03:56 - Juggling Japanese, Spanish, and English in one brain
- 06:04 - Knowing this was the job since a school production of Snow White in Tokyo
- 09:02 - Understudying Ride the Cyclone and the reality of being on-call
- 11:00 - Writing Grilled Cheese and a feature script with writing partner Tommy Martin
- 11:54 - What she learned producing her first multi-location shoot
- 14:27 - Bribes, threats, and the business brain vs the artist brain
- 20:22 - Hot Cakes: sour patch kids, deep dish, chicken nugget puppet wings, and more
- 23:20 - Ghosts, aliens, and a haunted house in London
- 28:27 - Where to catch Grilled Cheese on the festival circuit
Follow Connar on Instagram @jgcbrown97 for more.
Hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Say hi / follow along here: @ilsezacharias
Mentioned in this episode:
Thank you to our sponsor, Joel Maisonet Photography: maisonetphotography.com
