Director of Sloppy Jones Season 1- Emily Cohn
The three creators (Jamie, Jonathan and Sophie) and producer Susan met Emily at a TIFF event in Toronto in early February 2020, just before COVID hit. Emily’s award-winning film CRSHD was featured at TIFF NextWave and Sophie and Emily were judges for the Battle of the Scores competition and really connected.
Hop To It Productions is pleased to announce that Season 1 of the Sloppy Jones camp slasher comedy series directed by the incredibly talented Emily Cohn is currently in post-production.
We stayed in touch virtually and discussed ways we could collaborate all through COVID. In mid September 2021, things started opening up a little in Toronto and at the the border. Emily came up from NYC to visit and we reviewed opportunities. She loved the Sloppy Jones project and the new Season 1 scripts and the creators felt she would be the perfect partner to bring the scripts to life. Their sensibilities and visions aligned.
A window opened when COVID numbers dropped, vaccine passports launched and all the actors, locations and crew were briefly available September 25th to 28th and so we went ahead and filmed our first 5 short episodes at a the Villager Lodge in Niagara and the Dakota Tavern in Toronto.
See below Emily’s interview with creator Jamie Hart.
Emily Cohn Interview
Hi, I’m Emily Cohn and I am the director of season 1 of Sloppy Jones.
I met the three creators at TIFF: Next Wave. We all clicked so instantaneously and I just feel like in creative endeavours there’s nothing like that. It’s like falling in love, you know? There’s this adrenaline.
I was instantly interested in this project since it’s such a specific tone of comedy/horror/thriller/satire like Scream.
I think people of our generation just want to see characters our age being kind of idiotic. That’s how I feel most of the time. A lot of my work over the last three years has been focused on that.
My Recent Work
My feature film CRSHED is available on Hulu in the US and on Tubi in Canada. So definitely check that out. You can get a little taste of my style.
Getting the Right Look
We found an incredible hotel in Niagara Falls area that had a heart shaped tub. We had a lot of fun set decorating that hotel room and also the bar that we used in Toronto for Sloppy Jones Grill. Dale Hildebrand, the DP, and I were using the phrase “neon noir” a lot to describe the overall desired aesthetic.
A favorite moment from set that I remember specifically was at one point, we were filming the girls in the bathtub and I looked over and Dale all of a sudden got halfway in the full bath in order to get this one shot. I was like “What is happening?” Everyone was going above and beyond, especially Dale. I was so appreciative. We needed to get this shot and he had the tripod hovering over this heart shaped bath tub as he climbed into the water.
What She’s Excited For
Directing Colin Mochrie from Whose Line is it Anyway? was really exciting for me. I grew up watching Whose Line is it Anyway?. It was the show I watched with my Dad and my older brother. It was very surreal. Very, very surreal.
I am the most excited for episode four. The way that we planned it and fillmed it, and the way that it was written and it was performed, is really like a play. It’s the most heightened moment of Season 1. The actors, Dale the DP and Michael our boom operator did an incredible job. They were all in the confined space and it happened pretty much in one shot every time we filmed it. It’s very frenetic and exciting.
You kind of have to think about “What would I be doing in this situation?” and these characters I think are really hilarious and so fun to watch handling a very heightened moment in their lives.
Fun Facts About Emily
Emily Cohn is a New York City-based filmmaker. Starting at a young age, her short films have played, and won awards, at a number of festivals. Her high school documentary web series was featured in the NYTimes and her first short film, Pierced, was funded by the Tribeca Film Institute and won Best Drama at the 2012 All American High School Film Festival. Emily studied Creative Writing at Oberlin College and Fiction Filmmaking at the Prague Film School where her diploma film, Czechlist, won the Audience Award for the end-of-year screenings.
CRSHD, Emily’s debut feature film, had its World Premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and Emily was listed as one of NYTimes’ 9 filmmakers to have on your radar. CRSHD is about identity in the digital age, but the underlying emotions of insecurity and self-perception are ones that every gender and generation can relate to. Part of what makes CRSHD unique is how social media is portrayed––instead of filming phone screens the audience is transported into surreal spaces where key props and lighting (like a physical Instagram scroll lit in magenta) are used to represent the digital world.
Emily’s great grandfather was Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist (and adjective!) known for making any task unnecessarily complex. George George, her grandfather (who changed his last name from “Goldberg” to avoid the wrath of anti-semetic hate mail that Rube attracted during WWII), produced “My Dinner with Andre” and he and her grandmother, Judith Ross, were writing partners in the early days of TV on shows like “Bonanza” and “The Rifleman”. Her lovely talented Mom, Jennifer George, is a fashion designer and funny small world story but Producer Susan Nation met her at a mutual friend’s place in New York several years ago. Her dad is Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Marc Cohn (best known for writing and performing “Walking in Memphis”). As Emily says “The prospect of being a professional artist was always met with support and encouragement, whereas if I’d said I’d wanted to be a doctor or lawyer I think my family would’ve thought I was crazy…”
Follow Emily on Instagram here:
Toronto, Ontario Giveaway- now Closed
Leave a Reply