Sabrina Greco
Sabrina Greco
“I didn’t grow up watching movies,” says writer, director and editor Sabrina Greco, explaining her plan to pursue a career in TV writing after completing Boston University’s undergraduate film and television program. More interested in complex characters and messy interactions, she believed that contemporary filmmaking was excessively driven by narrative and the need to hit formulaic plot points; television, she thought, was where interesting, flawed characters lived. But her preconceptions were transformed when she studied with film professor Ray Carney, who screened films by John Cassavetes, Tom Noonan and Elaine May. Watching these films, with their anxious, emotionally turbulent protagonists, Greco thought, “Oh, this is actually what I want to do—this feels so much more personal and exciting than working in a writer’s room.”
Carney also screened various mumblecore films (Mary Bronstein’s Yeast became a “big influence”), and the mid-aughts independent film movement became a sneaky, allusive inspiration for Greco’s hilarious pinball machine of a first feature, Lockjaw, which premiered at the 2025 Slamdance Film Festival before stops at Atlanta, Oak Cliff and Sidewalk. In the L.A.-set microbudget picture, Rayna (Blu Hunt) has her broken jaw wired shut after a drunk driving accident. Six weeks later, Rayna is not yet healed but ready for a night out with pals, including the boyfriend (Colin Burgess) she connected with the night of the accident. During the long, chaotic evening, the couple attend a mentalist’s show, where Rayna is singled out in the audience for emotionally invasive mind-reading; then, they wind up at the home he shares with his performance artist wife, where things go truly awry. Rayna literally mumbles her way through the movie, with Greco’s acerbic dialogue often buried beneath the character’s temporary speech impediment. (For a crucial monologue scene, Rayna types her words into her iPhone and uses its text-to-speech feature.)
“Blu was game to have the prosthetic done,” Greco recalls, “but there definitely was a shocking moment when Blu fit it into her mouth for the first time. She was even less understandable than I thought she was going to be. How was this going to work?” Driving home together after the appointment, the two “spitballed ideas,” says Greco. “We introduced the idea of having a lot of [actors] repeating her lines, so if they’re important, you hear them back more clearly.” She calls Blu’s forced verbal restrictions “a blessing in disguise. It allowed us to lean into the prop, and the purpose of the movie, even more.” Indeed, in addition to being a clever metaphor for the film’s themes of embarrassment and emotional withholding, the device also creates a journey of recognition for the audience. Says Greco, “I like the idea that as the movie goes on, you actually learn how to understand her better, just like everyone in the movie has kind of [learned] to [hear] her better.”
Sourcing the film’s expensive-looking locations from Gigster and Peerspace, Greco made Lockjaw with a group of her BU friends as well as producer Abbie Jones, whom she met in early development and who “helped us understand the scale we should be working at.” But it’s not, technically, Greco’s first feature. Co-directed with those BU friends is the truly underground (as in no IMDb page), Video Expert 1, a no-budget “combination of sketches and shorts” made during COVID lockdowns just after Greco moved to Los Angeles. When the city opened up, the filmmakers hosted L.A. and New York DIY screenings of the film in spots ranging from church basements to backyards. The movie was also online, password-protected, “but anyone could ask for the password, and we’d give them the link. That created a little underground buzz, like, ‘Oh, there’s a secret movie you can watch.’”
In addition to directing, Greco works as an editor, most recently on Eugene Kotlyarenko’s pandemic-themed relationship comedy, The Code, which employed as many as 70 cameras. “As a filmmaker, I have certain instincts and inclinations I fall into when I’m writing,” says Greco. “When I edit for someone else who is interested in different kinds of stories or formal ideas, I get to expand my way of thinking and use these tools I’ve learned in my own work. I’m forced to think of scenes and sequences differently than I [would normally] and learn how to make them work from the inside out.” She says Kotlyarenko’s rehearsal style, where he’ll rehearse with actors in the real world while in character, influenced her rehearsal approach to Lockjaw, which included taking Hunt and Burgess to House of Pies on an awkward “date” while Hunt, wearing her prosthetic, was unable to eat.
With Patrick Reid, Greco is currently co-writing Neal Wynne’s found footage horror film I’m Sorry Lily Torrence, and she is also editing Jacob Pincus’s Romania-set personal documentary I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Here. And she’s beginning writing her next movie. “A lot about it is not figured out yet,” she says, “but it’s kind of influenced by D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod and Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan.” —Scott Macaulay/Image: Neil Wynne
