If I Tell You Dir. Tessa Blake on Family Drama, Grounded Storytelling

Posted in: Exclusive, Interview, Movies | Tagged: If I Tell You, Suncatcher Productions, Tessa Blake

If I Tell You Dir. Tessa Blake on Family Drama, Grounded Storytelling

Director Tessa Blake (Matlock) spoke to us about the coming-of-age indie drama, If I Tell You, casting, capturing Minnesota, and more.

Published Sun, 30 Aug 2026 19:48:09 -0500
by Tom Chang
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Article Summary

• If I Tell You director Tessa Blake explains why Lisa O'Donnell's Closed Doors was ideal for a deeply personal film adaptation.
• Tessa Blake reveals how If I Tell You centers Michael's point of view to explore family trauma, resilience, and hope.
• If I Tell You casting came together around Etienne Kellici, with Blake praising his nuanced performance and screen presence.
• Blake discusses filming If I Tell You in Northern Minnesota, using its beauty and economic reality to ground the story.

Director Tessa Blake has built much of her 25+ year career directing TV biggest cult favorites and reboots like ABC's Once Upon a Time, CBS's MacGyver, Matlock, and NCIS franchise, the CW's Dynasty, iZombie, Charmed, Veronica Mars, Riverdale, Walker, and The 4400, FX's American Horror Story and American Horror Stories, Fox/ABC's 9-1-1 franchise, the upcoming Baywatch reboot, and more. While promoting her indie drama in Suncatcher's If I Tell You, Blake spoke to Bleeding Cool about what inspired her to take on Lisa O'Donnell's Closed Doors and adapt it for the screen, penning the script with Jennifer Manocherian, what her time on TV did to help her experience in returning to film, and assembling her cast around young star Etienne Kellici. The film follows a 12-year-old boy, Michael (Kellici), who has to try to solve a mystery he's too young to understand as the adults in his life keep secrets, not aware of the impact their decisions have on their children and the wider community.

If I Tell You Director Tessa Blake on Telling a Complicated Family Drama Through Young Eyes

BC: What intrigued you about If I Tell You and Lisa's book, 'Closed Doors,' and what made you want to adapt it for the screen?

Blake: I was motivated by the incredible novel that Lisa O'Donnell wrote called 'Closed Doors,' and when I read it, I was really interested in focusing very specifically on a 12-year-old's point of view of looking at adult experience, adult trauma, and what it means for a family together to go through something really hard and come out the other side.

What does it look like working with Jennifer creatively on the script?

Jennifer Manocherian is an incredible producer and a lovely writer. She wrote a brilliant bunch of drafts that are adaptations of the book, and then I took the script from there and really narrowed the perspective to Michael.

Was it a challenge to make a film like this after doing so much TV for so long?

TV and film are radically different mediums in many ways. We're all storytellers, but you come into a television show with a vision that's been created by the showrunner, pilot director, the actors, who've been there so long before you arrive and will be there long after you leave, so you're there to really collaborate on a vision, right? To take the vision that exists before you and bring this particular story to life with the kind of tools available to you. That's a great challenge; it's a lot of fun, and you get to work with really interesting, different styles of storytelling, so you become very experienced in how to tell a story in different ways, which is such a great thing to bring in as a filmmaker, right?

A lot of experience, a lot of different lenses, a lot of different ways to do things, makes you a really strong creative problem solver, and then you have your own material, and you think what serves this story best, right? What is the language, the visual language, the tonal language, the actors- who and how do I serve this story the best? You get to start with that kind of blank slate, which is such a gift, and develop it from there.

How did the cast come together, and what made Etienne ideal to play Michael?

Etienne is an extraordinary young actor who's going to have a giant career; his performance is so nuanced, beautiful, believable, thoughtful, original, specific, not to mention, he's extraordinary. I found him through our great casting directors (Lisa London and Catherine Stroud), and worked with him a lot over Zoom because he was Toronto-based at the time and I was LA-based. That's how it is in the industry; it depends on where you're based. We got to know each other over Zoom as well as by seeing his auditions and working with him as an actor.

For me, he embodied the perfect perspective of a boy who is just trying to figure out what it means to flirt with girls and stand up to the bully.
When something comes into his life and changes it, he has this ability to have openness that allows us to let our hearts break for him. So, he was my perfect…I can't imagine anyone else playing this role, and then the adult cast is extraordinary. I had ended up with…I've worked with a few people previously; Allison Miller, I worked with on 'A Million Little Things,' and she was always in my head as I was writing these drafts.

Bill Heck, we found through a reading at New York Stage and Film, and he read the script. We were just there to develop the material. Writers need a lot of development readings to make the work better, and Bill read [Brian] for us. He absolutely was that character for me. Christopher Jackson is a friend, and I've worked with him on 'Bull.' I called him and said, "It's not an enormous role, but it's a really important role, and you stand up for a perspective that I really want heard in the film. Would you come to the very tippy top of Northern Minnesota and make this with me?" Chris said, "Yes." I'm so lucky. Carol Kane was just a dream. I had never met her before. She's an incredible icon and a brilliant, nuanced actor of tremendous depth, and I can't believe she said yes to me. I'm so grateful.

Was there anything during making If I Tell You that you did that you wouldn't normally be able to do in your other work?

For me, If I Tell You was an opportunity to go really deep with character. In television, we have a very limited time in any one episode or even a two-episode block, so the opportunity to spend time with the family and with these characters..I mean, listen, I owe a debt of gratitude to my predecessors with 'Ladybird' (2017), 'CODA' (2021), and 'Stand By Me' (1986), which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this week, which I thought was auspicious. Those films that have come before me where we really get a young person's perspective on the adult world, and they're really about resilience, family, love, and hope.

What would you say was the most difficult scene, or is there an aspect of the story that was probably most difficult to process?

There is only one scene in the movie where we don't have Michael. Every other scene has him, but I felt like it was important when I was writing it that we see the two women come together. That scene, I wouldn't say was difficult. I had Carmela Zumbato, who's an incredible actor, with Alison Miller, extraordinary. These are people who have been estranged from each other, and Carmela's character, Luisa, is furious, we think, with Allison's character, Rosemary, but they come together because Rosemary delivers Luisa's baby. Their tenderness in that moment of vulnerability for both of them; there was not a dry eye in the house. We all sat there watching those two incredible actors playing. The difficult, complicated truth of those moments, and I will never forget that experience.

What went into picking the locations, and what made it ideal to decide, "Oh, this will be a perfect place to capture the setting and everything?"

The novel is set in Scotland, which is a place I know well. I spent part of my childhood there; we all knew we wanted to set it in America, and that there was a lot of translation. The economic hardships of the story and the novel take place all over America, and many of my relatives have experienced jobs that used to be good, thriving jobs that were left behind by progress. We wanted a place where that was part of the economic story, because that's part of a family story. We also wanted a place where the natural world was a big part of everyone's life, and boy, could we not have done better with Northern Minnesota. It's an incredible place.

I didn't know it before I went up there, but it's always very important to me when I'm making a story someplace to get to know it. I spent a lot of time with historians, podcasters, locals, and different perspectives, so that we could be true to the experience of a Minnesota family, and I feel really grateful that we were able to shoot that natural beauty and community that was so generous to us. I hope the kind of kindness and authenticity that they offered us back.

If I Tell You, which also stars Kennedi Butler, McKenzie Hays, Tiegen Fryberger, and Zelalem Oestreich, is in select theaters.

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