Nick Verdi is a Massachusetts-based independent filmmaker. His three feature films, produced with modest budgets in the realm of four figures, are intensely insular, focused on modern modes of alienation. Verdi often works on his films as writer, director, editor and lead actor. He makes his movies alongside a small crew of friends, featuring mostly non-professional actors. His first two films Cockazoid (2021) and Sweet Relief (2023) also notably saw the involvement of cult horror author B.R. Yeager (Negative Space).
Verdi’s most recent film Don’t Let It Bring You Down (2026) recently premiered at the Easthampton Film Festival. The film follows Ben (played by Verdi) as he navigates the collapse of his long-term relationship and descends into self-destruction. A departure from the trappings of horror that characterized his first two films, the slow drama of Don’t Let It Bring You Down sees Verdi branching into new modes of expression while continuing to refine a familiar uncomfortable edge.
DM: You were posting some pictures on Instagram this week of you with an axe in your chest. What was that for?
NV: There's this guy, Geno McGahee – who lives out here in western Massachusetts, who is probably in his early 50s – making these 80s throwback slasher horror movies. I met him last year, sort of incidentally, and I told him I'm so down to be involved whenever. This one is a recut of his movie [Rise of the Scarecrows (2009)] and he’s adding new scenes, before he makes another movie in this series. So I did a scene for this movie I've already seen, that's now going to be at the start of the movie.
DM: It's like one of those Puppet Master clip-show sequels.
NV: Yes, truly. I'm rewatching the older Godzilla movies that I used to love, and so much is just footage from the other movies. It'll be funny. It's this opening campfire monologue scene – we're talking Friday the 13th Part Two and about how these scarecrows killed my grandfather when I was 12 years old. It was fun. I don't get to act that much. But I love it, so any chance that I get to jump into something.
DM: How does acting for somebody else differ from acting in your own stuff?
NV: There's a world of difference really. When I'm acting for myself, when you write your own dialogue, that's a huge thing. It's easier to remember and fuck with your own writing.
Although Geno is pretty open to letting me fuck with the dialogue. They're like not married to the writing, which is always great for me, cause I don't know how good of an actor I am to be getting the poetry of the words perfect. Like Paul Thomas Anderson would say, when you write the dialogue, make sure that's how you want it, because William H. Macy will say it exactly the way you write it. And I think there's an art [to] how you really interpret the text. And the better the writing, the easier it is to jump into that.
But I've very seldom been in that situation. I'm always just hoping I'm doing what the director wants. I'd seen the movie I was acting in already, so I was aware of the tone, which is a little more over the top, more heightened and sillier. Whereas I get really serious and intense. Though Cockazoid is very heightened.
I was mainly trying to be at the right level for what the movie was and not stand out. I haven't seen the footage yet, so I have no idea. I literally black out when I'm shooting something and then I don't know what happened till I look back at it, and it's this feeling of “when did that happen?”
DM: I want to talk a little bit about the new movie Don’t Let It Bring You Down. Your previous two were horror, and this one takes a turn towards Cassavetes-inspired drama. How did the process differ there?
NV: There's something cozier about it in terms of the understood context and family of films you're joining when making something more intentionally in the horror genre. I think most people that make horror movies love the genre and have watched them since they were kids – I certainly did – so I connect it in a deep way to this tradition that's very clear, even if horror is such a wide spectrum. And the stuff I'm making is more artsy fartsy, that European kind of thing.
But that feeling of tradition clued me in more to what I was doing than doing something you might call “Cassavetes-inspired,” which is more a philosophy of filmmaking, but doesn't say a lot about the content. It's a family drama. It's pretty open. It was scarier to try to make a movie like this. I feel more assured making horror. In a low budget horror movie, the acting could be a little over the place and it's sort of forgiven. It almost adds to the charm of it. Where if you're making a Cassavetes independent low budget movie, if the acting is not working, you’re dead. It's less to hide behind.
It's almost like a different kind of thing, but I felt like there's a little bit more growing up to do. And there's no kill scenes to give you a boost of excitement where I know all that stuff was boring, but there he's killing the guy. It's more nerve-wracking.
And especially, I think Don't Let It Bring You Down is – I went through a lot of changes, but it's more aggressively arthouse to me in terms of how slow and unrewarding it is. There's no resolution really, nothing really happens at a certain point, and I was really chasing away the idea that he does something violent: beats someone up, the cops show up, he gets arrested. It's like all these things you'd see with a drunken man movie. And I've never done that. I've been miserable and had all these bad things happen. And I want to get away from the movie stuff and try to challenge myself with doing this kind of thing.
DM: Production for Don’t Let It Bring You Down was two years. How did the project evolve during that process?
NV: It was a year of shooting on and off. We shot for ten days in March 2024, six days in October 2024, and then we shot for like another six days in March 2025. It was the first time in a long time I wrote a regular script. And we shot that script in 10 days.
But Sweet Relief was shot in six days straight, and it had to be very intentionally planned out and structured thing where I knew what line I'd cut on in each scene, so you don't have to do the full scene from each angle. We did a lot of rehearsing beforehand. We showed up at each location and rehearsed. I hadn't shot a movie in a straight stretch of days before, and it was a complicated movie, so I was just like, boom, boom, boom. And it worked out well.
But for this, we had 10 days to shoot this more fleshed-out script. And there's a lot of things that happen, but after the fact, I was just not happy with that kind of movie being shot that kind of way. I wrote this script and I imagined whatever this ends up being will be great, but that script is not what I want to do. And I went about shooting it in too strict a way. And I was left with a pretty butchered version of the script because as you're shooting, you drop things as you go for time.
And then I started going through a breakup. I had a long relationship start ending after making that movie. And it's almost like I wasn't done with that subject yet, because in the original script and what we shot, the relationship doesn't really end; he leaves for the middle of the movie and lives with his mom and does some other stuff. Then he comes back to the house and there's this whole birthday party at the end and stuff like this. This bigger thing happens. It's almost like you imagine they're going to break it at some point, but you don't see it. Slowly over time I wanted it to whittle my focus down.
I remember seeing this video interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum about Sátántangó, this giant magnum opus, and all these things it's about. And Rosenbaum says something along the lines of, “I think this movie is kind of about the difference between being alone and being with other people.”
I wanted the movie to become very simply about the disruption of this guy's life, where you get this setup of the structure and rhythm of his life and the power dynamic he's got with this mother and kid. And I was thinking a lot about how his identity is contingent on them confirming this idea of a family man that he's grown up with and feels good about it. He isn't really doing it very well, but at least he can sit with the fantasy. And when that’s interrupted, how that same energy has nowhere to go but bounce around in him or at whoever else is his victim currently. And then the movie kind of derails and you're left with not a lot. You're left with him alone. I don't know if I would have started with that idea because it sounds so strictly unfun or something.
I'd like to just simply sit and focus on these few elements and move through these spaces with this guy at that point. No music, not a lot of story and certainly no plot. And not a lot of flashy other stuff and just sit with that feeling. And I would just hope that the audience catches that thread deep enough at the start and follows it through, you'll feel moved through all these spaces with this guy.
DM: How has the festival run for this been so far?
NV: We played a local festival, Easthampton Film Festival – which is half an hour away from here [Amherst, Massachusetts], out here in the valley. I think this was its fifth year. I acted for some other people's movies out here that are connected to the festival, and they told the festival director, Chris Ferry, about the movie. He contacted me asking if I'd submit it, and he responded very well. I was nervous to show this movie, but it was a nice screening. A lot of people responded just to the level of authenticity to the subject.
But it's always anticlimactic. I'm still waiting to hear back for some. But it comes down to festival submission fees. You got to choose wisely. I did submit to the Locarno Film Festival for the third year in a row, which I don't expect to get in, but I'm always going to try. I don't know why my sights [are] so set on them, but you hear about so many filmmakers having a first important moment at that festival. At least in terms of your Cannes and Venice and your other big festivals, that's a big one that talks about finding new talent. And so that's always felt like an exciting one to try to get into.
But I'm slowly moving. And I've talked to some other friends, I've got a friend that still programs for Spectacle Theater in New York City, so I'm hoping she can maybe help me out again with this one, if it goes over well. It's not like I'm expecting to get a theatrical distribution for this movie or anything, but I am wondering where it should live at some point. And that's just an overall big question too, about what we expect as independent filmmakers to happen with our movies at this point.
DM: Does budget ever come up when you're presenting it to festivals or distributors?
NV: Mostly people are impressed with the results. I don't know about this last one. No one's really brought that up yet. With Sweet Relief and Cockazoid, people generally say “it looks really good for that budget,” or “what is this bottom of the barrel piece of shit?” [laughs] It's like one or the other.
But if anyone brings it up, they're generally just astonished that there's basically no budget. It's terrible because no one's getting paid. If anything, it's the sound guy Jack [Straton] and the cinematographer Joey [Ogden], who are getting paid something measly. But all the actors are people that are just doing it for the love of the game and not getting paid shit. And most of the money goes to buying all the pizza and burritos and bagels and coffee, wherever the hell you're feeding people, and then the few other things that you got to buy. And then usually I've got no money by the time it's festival submission time, and it's my own burger flipping money I got leftover to make that happen.
For Cockazoid, we completely paid for that movie with the unemployment I was getting during COVID. $3000 or so from unemployment that went towards that movie, which I wouldn't have had to spend on it if I [wasn’t] in that situation.
DM: You've spoken before about how you've started to approach filmmaking as like community theater. Could you could you talk some more about that?
NV: I know some older theater people out here in Western Mass that have helped me with my filmmaking stuff. And they'll do things like meet once a week and workshop their scene they're working on, and sometimes I'd come and just film. It's a weekly practice, and that's the aspect that I like about it. Filmmaking generally doesn't feel like a practice. It's like a big trip you're trying to fund. And then you do the trip in a big spurt. And then the trip's over. It's a sad thing to me where it's like just waiting all year to go on vacation and then it's over.
When you're the writer, director and editor, your practice changes. You're a writer for a while. And then you're like planning a siege, and then you do it. And then after the fact, you kind of crash and sit with the editing of it.
And in that sense, it would be great to be with a bunch of people making movies, doing something else for someone else's movie at a different time. Everyone's timelines going different ways. And you can all help each other in different ways. I love that. That's the kind of thing I'd love as opposed to this giant business feeling of what I imagine regular studio industry filmmaking is.
Apart from the budgetary aspect of theaters, no one does it for money. I'd like to get to a point where I can pay everybody and have everyone be able to quit their day jobs and make movies with me. But until that happens, community theater is that model that seems achievable.
DM: When I first heard about you via Twitter in 2023, I had to email you to watch the films. Since then you’ve acquired some distribution for Sweet Relief and Cockazoid, what was the process for that?
NV: So Elliot Gibson of Art Brut Films contacted me in early 2024 about Sweet Relief, and Cockazoid came with the package of me giving that over to him. But he's someone that's figuring this out on his own. He's an entertainment copyright lawyer in Los Angeles. And Sweet Relief was his first feature he tried to get distributed under the Art Brut Films thing. And he was like, this is fucking impossible and hard.
It was about a year ago now, he got it played once a day for a week at one of the Laemmle theaters in Encino, California. And it's available to rent or purchase on Vimeo and Eventive – which all I know, is that [Vimeo’s] like generally where you watch, where you stream a film [from a] festival. But it doesn't seem like something a lot of people would naturally come by to watch a film. So I'd like to just get the damn thing on Tubi and stuff soon.
I mostly just want the movie to be easily streamable, as opposed to “don't worry, if you want to see it, hit me up, I'll send you a link.” I shouldn't say anything concrete, but Cockazoid will be put out on physical media this year if all goes according to plan. Hopefully with special features. That would be really exciting.
DM: What's next for you?
NV: It's a really good question. I was in the Don't Let It Bring You Down zone for so long. I was editing it after that final stint of shooting for nine months and sitting in that movie for a long time, coming from a very important chapter of my life that is still ending. I'm slowly leaving the world of that movie, but I'm writing.
At this point I'm looking at the world around me. Do I want to try to raise a little bit of money and upgrade to some degree with the equipment and really try to make a bigger movie? But then I turn over there and I read, “Radu Jude shoots new movie in 10 days on an iPhone,” and that's the fucking rockstar. Should I just go out with my iPhone right now? Am I a dinosaur for trying to do the other thing? Am I being out of touch with the times? Is it cooler to go anti-capitalist and shoot it on my phone?
I feel a little splintered and fractured about it, but I'm generally trying not to jump the gun. I've got a few different things playing around. I've got a lot of emotional needs. I'd like to act again. I know a lot of people I want to work with. So I'm not sure. All these things are up in the air, but I'm ready to get going… [to] make something potentially, if not straight horror, an aggressive film. But hopefully I get something moving later this year. That's the hope.
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Devin Morgan (@fedafter12am) is the self-proclaimed resident film critic of Michigan City. His upcoming condensed feature Chongqing Pink is currently awaiting responses from festivals.