Interview: Sketch producer Steve Taylor on music, movies, and helping a friend make a family-friendly fantasy on a tight budget
The Grammy-nominated-Christian-rock-star-turned-independent-filmmaker also talks about how the movie was made with a lot of support from Christian filmmakers but is not, itself, a faith-based film.
Steve Taylor has been going back and forth between music and film, and sometimes combining the two, for over 40 years. The Grammy-nominated Christian rock star and occasional independent filmmaker studied both subjects at university, and his bio touts the fact that he is “the only artist to twice win Billboard Music Video Awards for self-directed music videos.”
Taylor has also spent the bulk of his career navigating the blurry line between niche Christian fare and mainstream entertainment.
He dropped out of the Christian music scene after just a few years to start Chagall Guevara, a critically-acclaimed band that released its first song on the soundtrack for 1990’s Pump Up the Volume. He then returned to the Christian music scene where, among other things, he produced Sixpence None the Richer’s self-titled album—including their hit single ‘Kiss Me’, which was prominently featured on the soundtracks for Dawson’s Creek and 1999’s She’s All That.
Taylor then went on to direct two feature films—2006’s The Second Chance and 2012’s Blue Like Jazz—before going back to playing with a band or two while he helped Lipscomb University in Nashville set up its film program.
And then he got involved in a couple of films as a producer.
The first, Sun Moon, was a romantic drama directed by a grad assistant named Sydney Tooley and released on the Sony-owned Pure Flix platform in 2023.
And the second, Sketch, is a highly imaginative family film—written and directed by Seth Worley, who has done short films and second-unit work for Taylor—about a ten-year-old girl who, while dealing with her grief over the death of her mother, draws some monsters in a sketchbook and is then caught off-guard when the monsters come to life, still looking very much like the children’s drawings they started out as.
The film, which stars Tony Hale (Veep, Arrested Development) as the girl’s dad and D’Arcy Carden (The Good Place) as the girl’s aunt, got great reviews when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and it was eventually picked up by Angel Studios, which released it in theatres across the country this week.
I’ve had the good fortune to meet and/or interview Taylor multiple times over the past 40 years—going back to when he autographed my cassette copies of I Want to Be a Clone and On the Fritz after a concert in 1985. (“Congratulations!” he wrote, when I told him he was signing them on the third anniversary of my baptism.)
I first interviewed him as a journalist in 1994, when he played at a Canadian music festival, and we spoke again a few times over the next dozen years, talking about the blurry line between Christian and secular media among other things. The last time I interviewed him, he had just finished directing The Second Chance, in 2006.
I had a chance to catch up with him again while he was on the promotional tour for Sketch. We talked about what he’s been up to over the past decade-plus, how he got to know Sketch writer-director Worley—it started when Taylor was looking for a megachurch that would let him film a scene in The Second Chance in which an actor says a mildly bad word—how they relied on fellow Christians to get the movie made even though the film itself isn’t a “faith-based” movie, and how they navigated language issues again when the film got picked up by Angel Studios. (The distributor launched a new feature—the “Angel Guild Recommended Age” advisory—as part of the movie’s roll-out, to give parents a heads-up about issues like that.)
What follows is a transcript of our chat, edited for length and clarity.
PTC: So, I have to make a confession right off the bat. I used to be a huge music buff and these days I’m not. I know you’ve had a number of other music projects going on, but I haven’t really— I just don’t listen to new music. It’s really sad. When I’m working now, I find it easier just to listen to movie soundtracks and instrumental stuff, and so that’s just sort of my thing now.
ST: Right.
PTC: So if anything I say reflects any ignorance of what you’ve been up to musically for the last decade, please forgive me.
ST: (laughs) No worries.
PTC: I was looking at your IMDb page just to see if I’d missed anything on the film side. And there’s kind of like a decade-long gap almost. Like, you did Blue Like Jazz [in 2012] and that’s the last thing you directed—
ST: Right.
PTC: —and you produced a movie called Sun Moon about two years ago—
ST: Right, yes.
PTC: —and in between there isn’t a whole lot.
ST: Right.
PTC: Now, is that because you were just working on music during that time?
ST: So, after Blue Like Jazz, I thought the signal seemed to be pointing to it being much more commercially successful than it ended up being. And so, after that, I started thinking, you know, all my learning about filmmaking has been mostly through book reading and maybe going to an occasional seminar and trial-and-error, because the program that I went to in college— I was a music major and a film minor, the equivalent of a film minor. It was a budding program in Colorado University in Boulder, but it was all avant-garde filmmaking. And you weren’t actually allowed to tell stories in this program. And so, of course, the first project that I did was a satire on avant-garde filmmakers, but I didn’t learn anything about narrative filmmaking. I learned how to use a camera and how to, you know, edit and use sound and how to scratch on film and things like that. But I just didn’t learn anything about eyeline match or, you know, master-scene technique or anything like that. And so everything I’d learned after that was just trial-and-error and figuring it out.
So I thought now would be a good time to go and see if I could get into a proper grad program for film. And there wasn’t anything in my region and I had a family, so I didn’t wanna, you know, move to New York or Chicago or LA or something like that to do it. So a university in Nashville, Lipscomb University, it turned out that they were looking to start a film program but they didn’t have anything going at that point. They didn’t even have an undergrad program. So they pitched me the idea of me starting a grad film program, hiring the professors, and then I would get my grad degree while I was putting the program together. And it turns out that’s also a really good way to get good grades in grad school is if you hire the professors who are going to be grading you. And so I did that. And while I was doing that, we also put out an album under the moniker, Steve Taylor & the Perfect Foil.
PTC: Right.
ST: And [we] toured that album and then did another album with Daniel Smith from Danielson that we did with Steve Albini. And so there was more music happening during that stretch of those 10 years.
But I had some ideas for different film projects, but nothing that was ready to go. And then the project I’d been working on for most of that time, a political comedy, it looked like it was gonna go possibly with Viola Davis’s production company and then Covid hit. And so of course that changed everything as well. And the Sun Moon project I just produced, but it was done out of the university’s sort of auspices. And it was my grad assistant who directed and co-wrote the movie and we shot that in Taiwan for six weeks during the height of Covid.
And it wasn’t until right before I left for that trip to Taiwan that I got with Seth Worley, because I knew he’d moved back to Nashville after a stint in probably four years maybe in Los Angeles where he was trying to get this movie of his made that I was very familiar with because he’d sent me, man, like, eight years ago he sent me the first draft of the first act and it was really good. So I kept abreast of what he was doing with that but we worked on a bunch of other projects in the meantime as well, short films and some promos and things like that. And I said, “What are you doing? What’s going on with Sketch?” And he said, “It’s dead.” And I was like, “No way, it’s too good to be dead.” He said, “No, nobody wants to make it.” I said, “Well, give me the latest version of the script. I’ll read it in Taiwan.” And I did.
And when I got back, I said, “Hey, I can make this movie.” Because he had tried to get it made in LA through studios. And at two different points, he had two really high profile Hollywood producers who wanted to do it and took it out to the studios and none of the studios were interested. But I said, “We gotta do it scrappy, right? We gotta do it as an independent feature instead of waiting for permission to do it with a studio.” And he was like, “If you can find the money, sure.” And I’m terrible at raising money. So I had two different parties who wanted to fund it. So that was kind of how Sketch came to be.
And that kind of fills you in on that gap between Blue Like Jazz and Sun Moon.
PTC: Okay. How did you know Seth before that?
ST: Yeah, so the first movie that I made was the movie with Michael W. Smith called The Second Chance.
PTC: Right.
ST: And in that story, I needed a location of a megachurch filled with people and they allow the pastor of their sister church, a downtown urban predominantly black church, to come up and say a few words. And in the scene, the pastor can just tell nobody’s into it. And so he starts to make the pitch and then just gets kind of disgusted with the lack of any kind of reaction he’s getting from the audience. And so he takes the pledge card and flips it into the audience and says, “You know what, just keep your damn money.”
PTC: I remember.
ST: Yes. (laughs) So I needed to find a megachurch that would allow an actor to say a mild curse word from the platform. And so I went to the biggest church in the Nashville area, Brentwood Baptist, and I knew who the music pastor was. And it turns out he was a big fan of Michael W. Smith. And so I made the pitch to him and he said, “I think I can get this approved,” which he did. So we were able to shoot that scene at Brentwood Baptist with a full sanctuary full of extras. There must’ve been, I don’t know, a thousand extras there in the congregation. And it went great.
And of course I owed him a big favour, but he wasn’t the kind of person to call it in. But he did say at the end of it all, “Hey, my son is a filmmaker. Would you be up for looking at his DVD?” And as you can imagine, I’ve gotten a lot of demos over the years and typically nothing happens from them, but I owed this guy, Dennis Worley, a big favour. So I watched the DVD and to my shock, it was really good. It was his son, Seth. Seth was 19 years old at the time. I think he had gone to Baylor for film school for like a semester and then dropped out and went back to Nashville. And frankly, he didn’t need film school. He was already— He’d been making short films since years earlier and would use his family in them and would shoot them himself and would come up with the visual effects himself and mix them. And he was just a really interesting all around filmmaker, even at that young age.
So I hired him to do second unit on the Second Chance movie. And then I hired him again to do second unit on Blue Like Jazz. And then he would have me act in some of his short films and I hired him to do a music video and some promos. There was a promo that I did for a Kickstarter project for the Steve Taylor & the Perfect Foil where I am going to the Department of Music Veterans to get my license to rock back. And he directed that and that was a pretty big hit.
And, so, yeah, we just had worked together on a bunch of stuff over the years and I just admired him as— I mean, I tell people he’s the best filmmaker I know because he could do just about everything. He’s a great writer, great director. He’s great with visual effects, he can mix the score, he can edit the films together. He’s a really good filmmaker.
PTC: Okay, at what point did Angel Studios come into the picture? Did they acquire it after [the] Toronto [International Film Festival]?
ST: Yes.
PTC: Because apparently according to your IMDB page, you have at least a little bit of an association with them because you did a voice on Wingfeather Saga or something like that.
ST: (laughs) Yes, yes. Yeah, that was way before Wingfeather got involved with Angel. But I did a— It was kind of like a pilot episode of a thing that was funded by Kickstarter. And then they ended up making the series and did it with Angel. But no, I had no association with Angel at all.
We got accepted into Toronto, which was the festival we all wanted to be in because it’s renowned for having great audiences. And the movie, as you probably know, isn’t really like a Sundance movie. It’s more of a big crowd pleaser, and Toronto seems to be fine with that. And so it played great at Toronto and our sales reps from UTA agency were really excited. They told us we were gonna have a deal before we checked out of our hotel, which I wish they wouldn’t have said. But it looked like it was going to be a movie that was gonna get acquired quickly based on the reaction. And then the process just kept dragging on and on and on.
And to defend the studios that acted like they wanted to pick it up but ended up not picking it up, I think their hesitations were twofold. Number one, it was original. It wasn’t based on existing IP, which is really hard to get anything off the ground these days without it. And number two, there just wasn’t a ready comp or parallel movie that they could point to and say, “Oh yeah, it’s gonna do business like this movie did business.” I think the last live action family movie that wasn’t based on existing IP to break big— I mean, I don’t know. You might have to go back as far as Home Alone or something like that. It’s just been a long time.
PTC: And the last movie about a guy whose drawings came to life was Harold and the Purple Crayon, which maybe nobody wanted to mention.
ST: Yes, that’s right. Yeah, we hope people don’t draw the parallel with that one because I never saw it, but evidently that wasn’t the greatest movie.
PTC: Oh, well, I’m not even commenting on the quality of it. Just from a box office, from a marketing point of view, that movie didn’t sell, basically.
ST: Definitely wasn’t a hit. No, that’s true. So it got to Christmas time and I was getting really antsy and feeling like we were getting into kind of perilous territory. And I went through my emails and found that during Toronto, the head of acquisitions at Angel had asked if he could see a screener. And because, you know, nothing against Angel, but I was pretty sure the movie is a family movie, but it’s not a faith-based movie, even though a lot of the people involved in its making are fellow Christians. I was pretty sure that that would not be anybody’s first choice.
But I contacted Angel’s head of acquisitions. I said, “You want to see a screener?” And he was familiar with my work and said, “Yeah, absolutely, I’d love to.” And a couple of days later, he got back to me and said, “Man, not only do I love this movie, but I went ahead and showed it to our executive team. They all love this movie. We would love to be the distributor for Sketch.” And so it took a little bit of time and it took a little bit of convincing, particularly with our director, that this was a good idea.
So I think everybody went into it a little, I don’t know, just a little nervous, I guess. And, you know, you could argue that I would have to say this anyway, but I’m not saying it because I have to: Angel has been incredible. They have gone so far above and beyond in every regard of supporting the movie and, you know, opening it wide next week, in the inventiveness of how they’ve marketed it and promoted it and putting an app together to help promote it. And the premiere was just a total blast. So I just can’t say enough good things about the way Angel has supported this movie. And I just don’t think we would have gotten that anywhere else.
PTC: Well, I don’t necessarily think of Angel as, like— Obviously they do a lot of faith-based stuff, but, I mean, I don’t consider Sound of Freedom a faith-based film, really.
ST: Right, yup.
PTC: And they also had a movie recently called Rule Breakers, which was all about a girls’ robotics team. And there was nothing faith-based about that.
ST: Right.
PTC: So I don’t think that has to be an association. However, they do have this sort of, you know, small-c conservative, family-friendly kind of vibe.
ST: Right.
PTC: And I do wonder, like, did you get any pushback on, like, there’s one or two points in the film where people are cut off in mid-swear.
ST: Right. (chuckles)
PTC: So, to hark back to that Second Chance experience, like, was there any pushback on the language in the film? Did you have to tweak, edit, whatever, things like that?
ST: Seth had final cut. So that was one of the sort of ground rules when I went out to find money, is that I said, “Look, I know this is his first movie, but it’s not an expensive movie to make. And if you wanna do it, you’re gonna have to give the director final cut.” And the people that funded it agreed.
So when Angel acquired the movie, they were a little bit nervous about a few things like that that were pretty mild, but still, you know, they were concerned. And Seth thought that some of those requests were reasonable and that, you know, there was nothing gratuitous, but even something like “oh my God” in a movie rubs people the wrong way. It kind of rubs me the wrong way, anyway.
And so Seth agreed to make some tweaks to the movie that in my mind made it probably better and certainly more, kind of, even more family friendly. I mean, we described the movie, pretty accurately I think, as a cross between Inside Out and Jurassic Park, but it still maintained everything about the movie that we loved and also probably helped broaden the audience even a little further.
PTC: Okay. Now, it’s not a faith-based movie, but I’m just curious as to how you’d answer or respond to this: Is it a message movie? Does it have a message?
ST: Well, the theme of the movie is— Since it has to do with children processing grief, I think, in that regard, it’s a deeper movie than let’s say The Goonies or something like that. It’s got more of a reason for existing than just a fun ride. Although I think it is a really fun ride.
And one of the things that Tony Hale, who plays the dad in the movie, I think pushed Seth on— Because they really collaborated very closely. In fact, Tony saw a really early version of the script as well, not too long after I saw it, and had met Seth when he first moved to LA, and Seth was thinking about him for the part but didn’t want to actually spell it out. So Tony gave him some notes about how as a dad, he might respond to these things. And of course, Seth is the father of three kids as well. And Tony just wanted the movie to feel grounded. And there were times when the scene would have a joke for a button and Tony would argue, “This doesn’t need that joke. It will play better without, you know, finishing the scene with the joke.” He just wanted to make sure that the dad in particular was really well-grounded and believable.
And I think too, because Tony had played some very broad characters between Buster in Arrested Development and Gary in Veep, this is a different kind of role than he’s known for. And it’s his first starring role in a movie. And he wanted something that felt real within this kind of imaginary world.
PTC: Right. Okay. I’ve interviewed you a few times and very often it’s been about things that you were very directly involved in: your music, the films you directed. This is the first time I’ve interviewed you [in your role] as a producer. And you appear to be definitely doing the whole PR thing. And maybe this isn’t that new to you because you’ve had to do it as a music producer, but how does it feel with this? As the spokesperson for a project that was kind of somebody else’s, how is that different?
ST: Well, since I know the project so well, I feel like I’m able to be a stand-in for situations where Seth or Tony can’t do it. But it is different. Producing a movie is very different from producing a music album. I describe it as filmmaking minus all the fun parts. But it’s been for the most part worth it just because I love this script so much and I love Seth so much. And it felt like he’s been ready to make a movie for the last decade. And so the fact that he finally gets the chance to make his passion project has been really rewarding. And it’s been a blast working with Tony as well.
And yeah, so, it’s not that the project went totally smoothly. The VFX took way longer than I thought they were going to. And so it’s had some challenges, but it’s all worth it now that it’s done. And then we’ve got a distributor who cares.
PTC: Yeah. Can you say what the budget was on this film?
ST: So, I’m not supposed to get specific on that, but it’s way lower than you would ever imagine. How’s that?
PTC: Okay.
ST: It’s so shockingly low that that’s why we’re not talking about it, is because people might make assumptions about the scope of the movie based on the budget. And I gotta say, I’m really good at stretching a dollar. And that was one of my main contributions to this movie, is the producers that had taken it out in Hollywood were looking at pretty substantial budgets. And the thought that we pulled it off for what we did would be surprising to most people.
And I will say one more thing: a lot of that is also because of Tony Hale. I mean, I produced the movie for no fee upfront because I know we couldn’t afford it. And Tony, as a fellow producer on the project, took no fee for producing and took a very, very minimal fee as an actor. He just wanted to see it done. And so we were still able to do it.
Obviously it’s a SAG-AFTRA movie and we worked with the unions and all that stuff, but we shot it all in Nashville. And Seth was able to work with a lot of the crew that he’d worked with when he made his short films and commercials. And so there were just a lot of people that wanted to see this movie made that gave heart and soul to get it across the finish line.
PTC: In the credits for Sketch, I noticed that there were quite a few other Christian filmmakers listed as producers.
ST: Yes, so many producers. You know, Peter, it’s not too late. If you’ve got a chequebook, we could probably get you a producer credit. So…
PTC: Okay!
ST: So, it was [House of David creator] Jon Erwin, who— It looked like the funding was going to come from a different source in Nashville. We were in kind of medium to advanced talks. And then I was meeting with Jon Erwin, having breakfast with him on another project. He said, “What else are you working on?” I said, “Well, I got this other movie that I’m producing.” And I mentioned Seth’s name and he said, “Wait, is that the guy who did—?” And I think it was called Dino Wars, like a little short animated thing that he had just seen. [It was actually called Dino Feast. — ed.]
I said, “Yeah, that’s him.” He said, “Oh man, I love that short film he just did.” He said, “Is there any chance I could see the script?” And I said, “I mean, yeah, if you want to take a look at the script.” And 48 hours later, he was like, “Man, you got to let me fund this.” And so I said, “Well, you know, he’s got to have final cut.”
And then Seth really didn’t want any confusion about this being a faith-based movie, I think partly because Seth actually used to work for Lifeway, doing media for Lifeway in his 20s and early 30s. So he’s a fellow Christian, but he just didn’t want it to be lumped in as a faith-based movie. And so he also, you know, he didn’t want Jon’s company name on the project or anything like that. But yes, a number of the people from Jon and Andy Erwin’s company also worked on it and they were fantastic to work with. And I think part of the reason why we’re able to pull it off on such a tight budget is because they were so sharp and efficient and gave a lot.
PTC: Well, that’s what I noticed. Jon and Andy and Kevin Downes were in the credits, but their names weren’t together. So it didn’t seem like it was a Kingdom Story thing or whatever, but they were in there.
ST: Yes, that’s right. Like, Kingdom did a fair bit of the back office stuff. And yeah, it just made for a really great environment and a huge help for me as producer.
PTC: So, you’ve produced a few [movies] now. Do you have plans or ambitions to get back to directing? Like, you mentioned this political comedy and I have to say, I was just thinking about all the changes in the world over the last five years, let alone ten years. I can’t imagine what a political comedy developed in the 2010s, how that would even play nowadays because so much is different. And you talk about how long it takes to get a movie made—
ST: Yes.
PTC: I don’t know how topical your movie was going to be, but how can you even make a topical movie, given that the topics keep changing so quickly? You know what I mean?
ST: Right. Yes. So it’s a great question, and I won’t go into too much detail on this one, but Seth and I co-wrote it, and I love the script so much, and weirdly, it’s not lost any potency. Arguably, it’s only gained potency. So that’s the next one I’m focusing on, and I want to direct it. I’m good with not producing anything for a while. I mean, every movie that I’ve directed, I’ve also been a producer on, but just solely producing, I’m good to not do that for a while.
PTC: Okay. And is there, like, any faith-based element to it, or is it more of a purely political—?
ST: I think it’s just, yeah, it’s a general interest movie. It’s the right thing to do.
Sketch is now playing in theatres across North America. Click here for more info.