Introducing Sasha Lebedeva
Sasha Lebedeva lives with me in a tidy two bedroom apartment settled in the crease between Thai Town and Los Feliz. I haven’t even known her for two years, but it feels like a lifetime, and I can tell that this is where she belongs. There’s a certain type of mise-en-scène that lights up Los Angeles, and it runs in Sasha’s blood. She’ll sometimes perform a vertical split as she walks into a room, simply because she can. She’s the kind of girl that, if you happened by her at the pond in Silverlake, would say no to drinks but yes to tacos, and if you passed her a cigarette, she’d handle it like a Hollywood starlet.
Sasha is always busy—her work has premiered on NoBudge, CineYouth and Girls In Film, and she has been featured in countless creative publications. She is currently working on a screenplay tackling a blood-drinking Hollywood cult as well as a mockumentary short about a friend who bought a Porsche they couldn’t afford, which is definitely not about me.
Beyond the occasional job on music video sets or BTS photography work, Sasha’s been meeting with a shit ton of people. She’ll emerge into our living room with sunnies and her Agnès Varda bag to announce she’s going to lunch with an actor from a show we watch, whom she’ll say she knows from her time volunteering at the Aero Theater.
With her, everyone is interconnected somehow. She always knows something you don’t, but she never tries to keep it a secret. In a city as large and deafening as Los Angeles, Sasha Lebedeva makes it feel comfortably smaller.
Her recent short film, Hex & Rage, starring Clara McGregor and Riel Macklem, finished post-production earlier this year and is currently in festival circuit. Today, she’s brought me to a cute little French bistro on busy Vermont Ave called Figaro, where outdoor dining entails tables-for-two on the clustered sidewalk, people-watching for hours, and the feeling, somewhat, of actually being in Paris.
SASHA LEBEDEVA: Yeah, I love this street. My favorite organization—the American Cinematheque—is moving to this street too, just up there. I’m really excited to go to screenings and get drinks after at Figaro with my friends. It’s gonna be the best. The best.
The waiter introduces himself and brings over a tin of sliced bread with raspberry preserves on the side. We each take a slice and slather.
SARAH CASEY: I think you should talk a little about when, and how, you first got here.
SL: When I came to LA, back in 2017, I didn’t know anybody. There was one girl, who was a friend of a friend, who I was able to live with. But I only met her once I moved in.
SC: You essentially started from scratch.
SL: The industry is all about knowing people. Almost all work opportunities, especially in film, come from knowing people. As someone who didn’t speak English really well, who didn’t have a car, who hadn’t gone to high school with anybody… That was near impossible.
SC: So what did you do?
SL: I was on Instagram a lot, reaching out to creatives and trying to meet people, trying to go on photoshoots, something, anything. Through all of that, I gained connections, but I also developed a skill. Like now, as soon as I like somebody’s work, especially if I see that we have mutual friends or people we both know, I reach out and try to introduce myself or establish some kind of relationship, even if it’s very brief, because I’ve found it’s been beneficial over the years. It’s led to a lot of great opportunities and relationships.
A still from Hex & Rage
SC: Well, dude, congrats on graduating.
SL: Finally.
SC: How did you know this was the right life path for you?
SL: I just knew. I always wanted to grow up on set, and be a set child, but unfortunately, neither of my parents were in the industry. I had to find my own way, and I tried to do that by becoming a child actor.
SC: Which you were moderately successful at in Russia.
SL: No, because I started when I was like 6, and then it took me 8 more years to land my first part, which is honestly really, really late. I was constantly around girls at auditions who had had like 28 roles by the age of 8, so I felt very self-conscious about my small achievements. But I guess compared to the people I went to high school with, it was pretty cool, because they didn’t have any parts. And I had some.
SC: Well you also are, somewhat recognizable, in certain situations.
SL: No, I’m not.
SC: Well, just the other month—
SL: No. Our friend Vasi was just telling me that something reminded her of this show, and I was like “I was in this show." And then she was like “no fucking way”. I was like “let me prove it to you”. And then I showed it to her.
SC: And then she called her dad because she and her dad were both fans of the show, and they had watched the whole series together.
SL: Yes. But she didn’t recognize me until she rewatched the episode. But it wasn’t like—
SC: Sasha. It’s a show that people know. I mean, Vasi was super excited about it when she called me—
SL: Okay, yes.
Photo: Sabrina Miller (@shotbysaabbb)
Sasha looks over at the table next to us, through a plexiglass screen, and sees a group of girls in their twenties who are dressed in LA street style, slaying. In front of each of them sits a magenta-colored drink in a stemmed glass. Not finding the drink on the menu, Sasha announces she’ll have what they’re having, and through the screen, the girls smile and lift their glasses. Several minutes later, the waiter brings out a custom-made fresh berry margarita and places it in front of Sasha. She curls it in her hand, hot-pink fingernails matching the drink inside. She takes a sip.
SC: So let’s talk a little about Hex & Rage.
SL: Yes. Which you worked on.
SC: We shot it in three days, we had a lot of long nights, everyone put in 110%.
SL: We’re currently waiting to hear back from festivals, but also, the bottom line is just the hope that it can be used as a great portfolio piece for the cast and crew. I was very ambitious with my vision, and everyone, as you said, put in their best work and their 110%. I think everyone on the team can be proud of it, and show it, and use it to move to their next level.
SC: It’s been a long journey.
SL: It’s been a little over a year! I feel sometimes it takes a while to figure out the story and get the script, and then even longer to actually get into production. But even though it took a while, I feel we moved at a really fast pace, and now it’s all up to the festivals to see when it can be released. We’re aiming for sometime in the fall—we’ll see!
SC: You started preproduction on Hex right when the pandemic was in full swing. What was the push for you and Riel to make this film during it?
SL: Well, I’m from Russia. I’m legally not allowed to work in the country. Once the pandemic hit, I needed to very quickly come up with a solution to upgrade my portfolio so in the future I might qualify for a talent visa. I was waking up every day, anxious about not being able to live in the place I want to be in. There was some point in the summer that the cases spiked, and Riel wanted to push it to shoot for the winter, but I knew I couldn’t do it, because I didn’t even know if I was still going to be here. And I knew once I left, I wouldn’t be able to come back. It just wasn’t an option for me.
SC: And a lot of Americans don’t understand how hard it is, the process it takes to even be able to stay here if you’re from outside the U.S., no matter how much you contribute to the job market, the U.S. economy, etc.
SL: Yeah, it's really hard.
SC: You don’t know when you’ll be pushed back. It must be terrifying.
SL: I don’t have any support system to fall back on. That’s the bottom line. And going back is not an option. So… onward.
She takes a sip of her margarita. I take a sip of my latte.
A still from Hex & Rage
“Even as a child I was pretty obsessed with movies, and always idolized film directors, and
tried to be an actress, and would go to auditions. Every time I saw an established filmmaker I
would freeze because I thought they were a god. I always had an unhealthy obsession with
cinema, not just in front of the camera but behind it as well.”
SC: Now that you have the finished product of Hex, which you obviously have seen, what are you most proud of?
SL: The fact that I was able to get frog legs three days before the shoot, and I got them from Amazon, and they came shipped on ice. No one wanted to touch them, but I made Shari, the set designer, touch it. (Laughs) I loved this. I loved this. But also the casting.
SC: You have a lot of diverse music and scoring in the soundtrack. How did you go about that? Was anything planned from the beginning, or did it all fall together?
SL: The idea of choosing music was mysterious to me— film is an audio-visual medium; I'm good at story and knowing the visuals, but music… I’m inept. I wasn’t sure how to go about it, but gradually I was figuring it out. I realized for the end credits, I wanted to use a female-led punk rock song, but we also had a strip club to figure out.
SC: There’s so many different scenes and emotions in the film to have to match a soundtrack to.
SL: I was really worried about how it was all going to blend together. I didn’t have any money left to license anything, and I didn’t want to use shitty royalty free music. So we worked with composers whom Riel knew—her best friend Eva who lives in Berlin, and her collaborator Villi from Iceland. Meanwhile, I’m from Russia, and I was like, ‘wow, this is so international.’
SC: But the soundtrack wasn’t all international…
SL: For the strip club scenes, as you know, I asked our AD’s brother Michael to do a track. For the second scene, I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but you said you had a song from your high school band that you could make an instrumental version of.
SC: Haha. Which I did.
SL: And then we tried it, and it worked really well for the scene of Jacaranda’s entrance.
SC: It is a pretty badass scene.
SL: It works so perfectly. And you could tell that it wasn’t some random royalty free music. It’s a well-composed piece that someone put care into. Then, also, we have this one part where one of the witches is in the car smoking a joint…
SC: Right before the big climax.
SL: …It was originally going to be silent, and we tried the original score on it, but it had a different tone and wasn’t working. The purpose of it really was to juxtapose with the other more suspenseful scene, so I wanted to have lighter music for it. I talked about it with my sound mixer, Louis, and he said I could use his band’s song, which was very pop-y, and it worked perfectly as a contrast.
SC: It really did.
SL: Should I get soup?
The waiter comes over.
SL: Can I get a menu? Thanks…
We both watch him leave.
SC: He’s cute.
SL: And he speaks French. Anyways, I was then left with finding the last track, our end credits song. At the end, I felt I needed to really enhance the feeling, the tone—the energy of the main characters, what they did, and what had happened. I asked Louis if he knew any bands that had female punk rock vocals, and he sent me a few ideas. The first I looked up had Iggy Pop on the cover of the music video.
SC: Just sitting there, eating a hamburger.
SL: And I loved Iggy Pop my whole life. I always wanted to be like him, even when I was a child. He was an icon to me. So anyways, there he was in this music video, and I was like, ‘no fucking way these people are going to give me their song with Iggy Pop on the cover.’ And Louis said, ‘you wouldn’t be risking anything by asking.’
SC: Go Louis.
SL: So the band is called “Death Valley Girls", and this song was, “Disaster Is What We’re After”. It talks about the supernatural, and clearly it talks about disaster, and it was just so perfect.
SC: So you did reach out.
SL: I found the band on Instagram and I reached out and asked them about it, and I said I could email them the film before they made a decision, and they got back to me really quickly. I sent them a whole piece about who I was, why I didn’t have any money, etc. But they loved the film and actually gave me the song for free.
SC: Amazing.
SL: I’m so proud I pulled it all off. Especially for that last song—I wanted to try to get the audience to stay for the credits, because I didn’t want people to just skip over everyone who worked on it. And on top of the song, the credits were really well-done by our friend Vasi, very visually appealing. So I really think we succeeded at getting people to stay.
Photo: Annabelle Sadler (@annabelle.sadler)
SC: I want to ask you, because you are such a driven young aspiring filmmaker, who has a lot at stake, and who has risked a lot to get here—I want to open it up a little bit to anything that you have to say to other people who want to make it here, but have a lot to risk in order to do so. It’s not always an easy ride, but it is it worth it?
SL: It’s too early to tell.
SC: What advice do you have for 12 year old Sasha?
SL: God. I would just say learn English. And actually read more classic literature, because this is the only thing people are going to like about you. I’m just saying, it’s not like Spanish or French, where your language happens to be an advantage in America—
Just then, someone walking behind me catches her eye.
SL: Wait. This is the head programmer at the cinematheque.
SC: No way. We were just talking about her.
Sasha and I had been walking through our neighborhood, below Griffith Park, when she told me about Gwen Deglise, the programmer she worked alongside at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. Together, they would personally welcome the likes of Morgan Freeman, John Krasinski, Jim Jarmusch, and Laura Dern—Sasha taking their photographs, and Gwen leading them onstage. On this same walk in the neighborhood, Sasha explained to me her plans to make a short documentary about Gwen, since Sasha’s idol, Agnés Varda, has done the same. I turn my head to catch Gwen. She is walking from the direction of the new American Cinematheque, dressed to the nines, large handbag draped tightly at her side.
SC: Well. There you have it.
SL: Right. Anyways, where were we…?
Fin.
