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Open House: Callie Hernandez’s Berskhire Home and Temporary Film Studio
Callie Hernandez in Appliance In 2023, Callie Hernandez turned her temporary home into a DIY movie studio. The actress, writer and producer had gone through major professional and personal upheaval when COVID upended her studio acting career and, shortly after, she lost her father. She kept working any way she could by collaborating on microbudget projects, such as Pete Ohs’s 2022 comedic ghost story Jethica, produced for less than $10,000 in a New Mexico Airbnb with just a handful of actors and Ohs taking on every behind-camera role himself. So, when a friend, dancer Brittany Bailey, asked whether Hernandez wanted to share an old farmhouse in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Bailey was renting for a year, Hernandez said yes—as long as she could make movies in it. Through her newly created production company, Neurotika Haus, they’ve collaborated on two features and two shorts—all microbudget pictures that Hernandez co-starred in and produced.
Hernandez didn’t begin her career thinking she’d be in front of the camera. A cellist and guitarist, she played in punk bands throughout her teens and early 20s, imagining that one day she’d become a film composer. It wasn’t until her friend, Terrence Malick’s music supervisor Lauren Mikus, encouraged her to read for what would become Song to Song that Hernandez thought acting could be her path. Walking on set as “this little punk from Austin” and having the quintessential Malick experience of watching the director pause production to run outside and film a butterfly, she had an “I’m home” moment.
Throughout the 2010s, Hernandez acted in films by Robert Rodriguez, Damien Chazelle, Adam Wingard, Ti West, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead and Ridley Scott. But, frustrated by the parts she was offered and the limited range they required, Hernandez eventually decided that she “wasn’t done with [acting]” but was “done with just doing [it like] this.” That’s when Bailey, an old friend and coworker from their mutual stint at NYC’s The Smile restaurant, told Hernandez about the Berkshire rental.
Neurotika Haus’s original artistic mission was to make a collection of psychosexual dramas, but, jokes Hernandez, “None of the films ended up being psychosexual dramas.” Unfamiliar with the area and feeling like she had to get up to filmmaking speed, Hernandez began her mini-studio experiment by inviting longtime friend and collaborator Andrea Nguyen, with whom she’d previously shot music videos and short films, to make something of a test movie. Armed with a Sony FDR-AX700 4K HDR camcorder, they moved from the house into the town of Great Barrington to shoot Before Noon, a Curb Your Enthusiasm–like short about some trivial morning tribulations.
Then, Hernandez and her various collaborators got to work on a rapid-fire whirlwind of filmmaking. First up was Ohs’s feature, The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, a tight microbudget thriller in which a tick bite plunges a vacationing quartet into a psychological fever dream. It’s a collaboration with playwright and actor Jeremy O. Harris’s new production company, bb2; the film’s co-writers (also its four leads), Zoë Chao, James Cusati-Moyer, Harris and Hernandez would write their scenes with Ohs in a shared Notes document the night or morning before shooting. Everything about the production was guided by the Berkshire home’s limitations and revelations. Ohs describes this production style—allowing the availability of what is on hand to drive the creative direction—with a metaphor: “The film is a table made of bubbles.” In other words, bubbles are fragile; don’t put anything on them they can’t support.
Belying the minimalism of the approach, the Berkshire house provided the filmmakers plenty to play with. For example, a witch window on the second floor tilts to match the angle of roof rather than be parallel with the ground. A more common quirk is contemporary to when the house was built in 1890—holes in the upper floorboards that allowed heat to ventilate upwards. Those cut-outs gave Ohs inventive options for placing the jailbroken Canon EOS 5D Mark III he has been using to shoot all of his “table of bubbles” movies. About his shooting style, Ohs says, “What I realized is that if the shots are good the edit is easier. If you just put five nice shots together—it doesn’t matter what they’re of—those cuts will feel good.”
The house also provided a multitude of options from idiosyncratic renovations that happened over its 130-year lifespan. While Before Noon opens with a shot through one bathroom’s modern textured shower glass door, contemporary stylings were less appealing to Ohs. For a bathroom scene in his film, he shot in one with a more aesthetically consistent bathtub. And, “You don’t see the refrigerator,” Ohs says of the way he shot the Berkshires house’s kitchen, because he didn’t “like the way it’s positioned—the design of the refrigerator is not what I want to film, so we’re not using that.”
While Ohs was immediately turned off by the odd placement of the fridge, for Olivia Erlanger that same kitchen was serendipitous. The multimedia artist was working on an adaptation of her play developed at Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Humour in the Water Coolant, which featured anthropomorphic appliances soliloquizing about their loss of usefulness. Erlanger wanted to take the concept and turn it into a short horror film, Appliance, where appliances are seemingly trying to kill the resident of a house. She had funding but just needed a location and an actress; Hernandez provided both.
When she laid eyes on the property, Erlanger was immediately smitten. “It becomes a palette that everyone gets to paint with,” she says of the house. “Places really do hold memories, and I think that that house has a lot of memory in it. It’s a very psychological space. There are a lot of very narrow hallways leading to little rooms, and almost of the corridors have one tilted window—nothing about it is perfect.” Erlanger argues that the “latent psychology of the space” is reflected in not just her film: “You get the sense that whatever was emanating from the place starts to seep into what was happening in all the films.”
The final film shot at the Berkshires house, Invention, explicitly concerns itself with radiant energy. Directed by Courtney Stephens and co-written by Hernandez, the feature follows a fictionalized version of the actress, Carrie, as she navigates grief and conspiracy in the wake of her real father’s passing. (Hernandez’s father also appears in archival material interjected into the narrative). In Invention, the town of Great Barrington becomes a personally grandiose web of connection and revelation, and the home—which Hernandez was actually moving out of at the time—comes hauntingly to life as Carrie’s father’s old, secret-filled place.
Next to Before Noon, Invention is the Berkshires house film that wears its scrappiness most on its sleeve, and it’s certainly the most personal for its makers. With a supporting cast of DIY filmmakers—James N. Kienitz Wilkins plays the estate executor, Joe Swanberg is an off-puttingly religious manufacturer and Caveh Zahedi is a prim medical investor—Invention was shot on wonderfully textured 16mm by Rafael Palacio Illingworth, an old friend of Stephens from the AFI. “I wouldn’t have been comfortable if we had any more structure than what we had,” Illingworth says. “It was super liberating for me: Hey, we’re just friends doing something, and if we fail that is OK.” “There’s a feeling of light being a photosynthetic and sensitive medium when you’re shooting film, and that idea of being a registration instrument for light and energy differentiates it from digital,” Stephens says about the choice of shooting format. “It appropriately plays into Invention’s emphasis on energy having a genuine affect.”
As with the other Berkshires house movies (with the exception of Appliance, which budgeted lodging in a second house for the crew), the cast and crew lived on site, cramming together wherever they could—Hernandez slept in a closet with her dog (and Before Noon co-star) Cherry, while directors Ohs and Stephens got to sleep on “the pad” in the office. The crew was as minimal as possible, mostly consisting of Illingworth behind the camera while recording sound with a directional zoom and Hernandez helping the actors get their lavaliers on.
Appliance is now in post, The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick premiered at 2025’s SXSW Film Festival and Invention premiered at Locarno 2024, where Hernandez won a Best Performance prize. After screening at 2025’s New Directors/New Films, the picture had a short run at New York’s Metrograph before being picked up by MUBI for streaming in North America. And while Invention’s scope is the most expansive of the Berkshire house films, operating as something of a culmination of all the previous works, it is both the most personal and the one most able to exploit all the formal possibilities of the home’s tight limitations. Hernandez has since departed the Berkshires, but she’s taking the lessons taught by shooting three very different films in a single location with her. “The house was a steadfast vessel for making whatever we wanted,” Hernandez says. “It was like a parent or teacher in this way—some type of psychological stand-in for a missing father figure. It was also a very mercurial house; it looked and felt different with each film. It was definitely an evolutionary and humbling year, particularly as a filmmaker—so many brilliant people, so much support, endless grunt work and hard lessons.”
