How Do You Create a Believable Popstar in a Movie?

If I don't say so myself, fictional movie popstars are having a moment—particularly in the genre space. Last year gifted us with two hot pop girlies in Trap and Smile 2 with Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) and Naomi Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), respectively. While not a new idea, the streak of notable popstar characters is a fun one and continues this year in full force with writer-director Emma Higgins' SXSW entry Sweetness.

The popstar at the center of Sweetness is the Harry Styles, Brendon Urie-adjacent Payton Reed (Herman Tømmeraas), taking on the modicum of the band Floor Plan. The foil to Payton Reed is Sweetness' main character, Rylee (Kate Hallett), a tormented high schooler whose borderline obsession with Floor Plan's catchy pop lyrics has helped her work through the tragic death of her mom, as well as some particularly vile bullies. Her fandom is innocent enough until, after fulfilling her dream of seeing Floor Plan in concert, a chance encounter with Payton Reed leads her down a dark path of trapping him in her neighbor's basement, handcuffed to a pipe. Yikes!

The Misery-esque plot offers insightful and sympathetic commentary on modern toxic fandom and how, in many ways, the music industry fuels it. With a seasoned background in both the music industry and music video production, Higgins perfectly immerses us into a believable story about how far a fan might go to pursue what they perceive as true love.

Below, we were delighted to chat with Higgins about everything from building a movie popstar from the ground up, how to write songs that don't exist yet into a script and the art of shooting a concert scene. As a big-time music fan, this interview was a ton of fun—I hope you enjoy it as well.

Editor's note: The following interview is edited for length and clarity.

The Art of Songwriting for a Fictional Popstar 

"When I originally wrote the script, I had a bunch of musical references throughout it, which is something I know that not a lot of people recommend. I would put links in the script, or song descriptions—so it would be, "Brand New's "Jesus Christ" starts playing over the sequence," or whatever, so that readers would get a tone.

The band [Floor Plan] didn't have any. I had written lyrics in [here and there]—the lyrics will be something like this, but better because a songwriter is going [write them]. I'm a scriptwriter, not a songwriter. And they did. Our composer, Blitz//Berlin, wrote all the songs and lyrics in the movie. I would write, "It's a song about love," and this and that, and having troubles, and then they're like, "Okay, that's the assignment." And they went and made it good.

All the Floor Plan songs are totally original, so I hope we can release an EP for them eventually. I think it would be so cool. So that's my dream. I want to do the Floor Plan EP, I want to do the full, we have all the merch and the band's identity. I worked in the music industry for so long too, so it was cool. I felt like a manager or something at the time. The band's photos would look like this, and they'd have t-shirts that look like this. And so working with our different graphics art department to make that and music, I felt like Simon Cowell creating a band.

Yeah, so that's probably my next endeavor. I'll start creating boy bands or something."

Crafting a Toxic Fan With Sympathy 

"[Rylee has] a crazy journey. I worked at a record label for a bit of time, and I toured with bands too, so I'd see there were a lot of very intensive fans, but I also felt that that's what the whole music industry is selling—[in a way] you're manipulating [this crazy fandom] if you're successful.

There's a lot of community around fandoms and stuff, so I think there's a sympathy that I had for the character and just how [extreme fanaticism] can creep up when you really feel like there's something as momentous as what feels like love at that age. I think of the Meatloaf song "I'd Do Anything for Love" as the mantra. Riley will do that. She'll do it all. There's no line for her."

How to Economically Shoot a Believable Concert Scene 

"We shot the concert scene in one day, and that's where I can shine. Coming from music videos, I shot so many live performances, I can do that in my sleep, and I was like, "Give me 30 extras and a day and we can do this thing." So there's no one really at that concert. Maybe it shows, but it's like strategic camera placement and person placement and then just rocking and rolling through—covered as quick as we can.

Our goal was just to make the band look cool. If we'd had more money and more time, we probably would've gotten a bigger scope of it, but I still think all the stuff on stage looks exactly like I wanted it to, and it wouldn't have looked any different. His performance is really good. The lighting, the color, it looks hot, it looks cool. That's what I want any time I'm shooting a band, I'm like, I just want you guys to look the coolest and the sexiest version of yourselves."

The Art of the Perfect Needle Drop 

"We found a lot of them in the edit. Kat Weber, who I've been editing with for years. Her and I used to work together on music videos. So we've had 10 years of collaborating in this capacity. I think we share similar tastes in certain things too.

So often with [our sound cues], it was sort of subverting what was expected of the goal with those moments too. The movie wants to keep you on its toes a little bit, so we're building in one direction to then turn hard in the other, or juxtapose music. There's a heavy withdrawal montage in the movie, and we have an original cover of a Juice World song, and the lyrics are like, "These hoes won't irk me. The drugs won't hurt me."

Both of those things are happening, and it's a very serious rendition, but the lyrics are so silly in contrast. We tried that montage to a bunch of different songs and we're like, "Okay, if we play this entirely seriously, it doesn't totally play, because it loses the humor." Finding something that had both things happening at once was really where it started to click, and that was in the edit actually. The tone was really defined by that contrast, I think."

Emma Higgins Advice to Aspiring Filmmakers 

"You should go and make your movie.

I think that's the advice. The best advice I ever got was just to make cool shit and then go make more, do it again, and again. I think that there's something that's, you just have to go and make stuff, that's it—in whatever capacity you can, and then do it again, and then do it again, and then do it again. It doesn't matter what the format is even, but through that process, you find collaborators.

I found Blitz//Berlin 15 years ago making a music video with them. I found my editor 10 years ago, we made a bro-country video together—something that couldn't be further from our personal tastes. It's like guys in trucks barbecuing and stuff, but it brought us together.

Continue to create, that's the best advice I can give to anyone. I will hopefully show up and make stuff, too."