Based on a true story, the powerful and heartwarming My Dead Friend Zoe is coming to theaters nationwide February 28. I had the chance to sit down with director and co-writer Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, to learn more about the film. From grief to forgiveness and a cast made up of 90% veterans, Kyle shared what makes this film so timely and a must see.
Kyle Hausmann-Stokes Interview
There were so many powerful moments in the film, not only in the dialogue, but in the visual storytelling as well. One of the lines that stuck out to me was about how we become different people when we lose someone we love because we don't know how to live without them. But also the visual representation of running away from those strong feelings every time Merit laced up her sneakers and hit the pavement. As a writer and a director, what was your process like crafting those conversations as well as the environments in which they were happening?
Crafting those conversations, that dialogue, and then the settings around them, it was both incredibly easy and incredibly difficult. I think it was easy because the difficult part, I had just lived through myself. This film [is] autobiographical.
I kind of keep telling people it's 93% autobiographical. I feel like I was just really transcribing things that had happened to me, conversations, ways of talking about lost loved ones, and dealing with feelings that I had kind of absorbed via osmosis and talking with other veterans…so yeah, it was difficult because I lived through it, but then it was very easy to put it on the page, [I] spilled my guts. Then the visuals. Yeah, I really appreciate that. There's a lot of that stuff.
I also really love that there are a lot of veterans in this film and how at the end we got little bios about each one, as well as, that beautiful dedication to your friends and squad mates who inspired the story. Going back to those group therapy scenes, were those scripted at all? Or did you just say, hey, when it's your turn, stand up and share what you want to share?
I did not write dialogue for them very intentionally. I know all those people…I had written this film for years and then I was trying to make it for two years and then eventually made a short film as a proof of concept, just to try to build my own inertia. And in doing that, I did this exact same scene, the group therapy scene, [but] different. So it was a special moment when I got to call them up and say, yo, we're doing the feature. You're in it, you already auditioned once, you're coming to Portland, and you're going to play opposite another veteran. His name is Morgan Freeman.
Then I said, same as last time, I'm not going to write anything for you. So the script literally says it's a group of veterans, they represent the best of America. There's teachers and doctors and lawyers and artists, and they each stand and share their experience. And that was it. And they did it.
My Dead Friend Zoe is coming to theaters nationwide February 28, 2025.
Watch the Full Kyle Hausmann-Stokes Interview
Watch The Making of My Dead Friend Zoe
About My Dead Friend Zoe
MY DEAD FRIEND ZOE is a dark comedy drama that follows the journey of Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green), a U.S. Army Afghanistan veteran who is at odds with her family thanks to the presence of Zoe (Natalie Morales), her dead best friend from the Army. Despite the persistence of her VA group counselor (Morgan Freeman), the tough love of her mother (Gloria Reuben) and the levity of an unexpected love interest (Utkarsh Ambudkar), Merit's cozy-dysfunctional friendship with Zoe keeps the duo insulated from the world. That is until Merit's estranged Vietnam veteran grandfather (Ed Harris), holed up at the family's ancestral lake house, begins to lose his way and needs the one thing he refuses…help. This autobiographical film from writer/director and U.S. Army combat veteran Kyle Hausmann-Stokes is an unexpected, uplifting exploration of a complicated friendship, a divided family, and the complex ways in which we process grief.
*this interview has been edited for length and clarity
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