‘Debaters’ director Alex Heller and stars Sripadh Puligilla and Bernadette Santos Schwegel talk school courtroom styled drama

We sat down with director Alex Heller and cast members Sripadh Puligilla and Bernadette Santos Schwegel to talk about their Sundance debut for their short film Debaters.

Debaters is described as a courtroom drama-styled recreation in a school setting through the context of debate teams.

You can watch the full interview here:

[Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.]

Zak Ahmed: Congratulations on having the film [The Debaters] at Sundance. That must be a special feeling. Could you talk about how you’re feeling right now?

Alex Heller: This is my first film at Sundance and I’m so excited to be here. I’ve been here as a volunteer nine years ago and it’s incredibly awesome to be here with this project. We had nine of our cast members at the premiere yesterday, which was amazing. So as you know, the film [The Debaters] is about a debate and I was really excited to see that play out in a theater full of people, cause I knew that energy from an audience was going to really play a part in watching the debate unfold. So that was awesome.

Sripadh Puligilla: It’s entirely surreal. We’ve been here the past two days. It’s just the euphoria in the air, just the love for our film and for the art itself, and meeting other filmmakers, meeting other actors from all over the world too, it’s been surreal.

Bernadette Santos Schwegel: It’s been insane to experience Sundance for the first time while being in a film with all of my peers here as well. We get to watch the film for the first time and then talk to people who saw the film. It’s just like, wow, you saw our faces. You watched something that Alex made in 2023. This is all happening. So yeah, it was fun.

Zak: The film is a recreation of a court drama, but in a classroom. Could you explain the process behind making the film, starting from the script and how you were drawn to Bernadette and Sripadh as actors?

Alex: So I worked as a debate judge for four years. I thought the environment was, it’s funny you say courtroom drama, because that’s exactly what I would compare it to. It felt very high stakes, very life or death, scary, exciting. I just loved the world so much. I really wanted to create art about this space and share it with other people. So my first feature The Year Between came out on the day of the writer’s strike in May of 2023. So it was a tough time in this industry and for my career.

Eugene, one of the producers of The Year Between and a close collaborator of mine, Eugene Sun Park, he and I came up with this idea because I’d been talking about making a debate team movie or something for years. He was like, why don’t we make a short that’s a proof of concept because we can get a waiver from SAG and make this happen in December. I was like, let’s do it. I wasn’t expecting to make another short after my first feature, right away or whatever. I had nothing against it. I just didn’t know that was what was going to happen, but I never know what is going to happen. I’m always saying yes to things. I think that has served me pretty well. So we jumped in, let’s make this short. Let’s make it 10 pages. Let’s shoot it in 2 days. We had a team come together really quickly.

One of those people was our producer, Brittani Ward, who works largely as a casting director. She lives in Chicago and had a really great sense of young talent in Chicago. So she put together this group of people to read for me, to audition for me, to tape for the roles. It was an excellent pool of young actors. It is not easy to play or be a young actor or play a high school kid or whatever. People have this idea of what a kid does or a teenager and it’s often way too much. That was just not going to work for this project. Cause we have cameras in everyone’s faces and they need to be very still. If they do something, it should be very small, very subtle. So to have actors who were so young and understand that that’s how on-camera acting works. That’s how this piece is going to do well and succeed was great.

In terms of these two specifically, so first of all, I’ll speak on Sripadh. So he had this in his audition, this very arresting, he was so charming and seemed so shy and so fearful. I say it in a good way, he had these amazing eyes, really wide and he seemed a little terrified, because he’s a great actor. I was like, wow, that is someone who people will root for while watching this. We will have sympathy, empathy, and excitement for that actor watching him play this role and seeing him from being fearful in his mom’s car to crushing it at the end of the short. He was amazing and that’s how he was cast.

Then with Bernadette, she was the first tape I watched for that role. I was like, okay, that’s her. I watched so many tapes. That was the first one. I just knew, which I’ve never told you that, I didn’t remember it until now. It was in the archives, but I watched the tape and I was afraid. That was what I knew I needed to feel from this character. The way that she was, it’s funny, she wasn’t a debater, but the way that she was reading the sides, it was just like Debaters. It was some people, it’s hard to describe. Some people were reading the sides like actors reading a monologue. I can’t describe it, but she just got it. She was doing this very intense speech in this way that was savage and so familiar to me as someone who has watched a lot of debates. I was just like, oh, it’s absolutely her. It’s so funny that I showed my husband right away and he’s like, she’s amazing. We were both just like, yep, okay, that role’s cast.

Zak: Both of your characters are trying to impress the judges (J. Smith Cameron and Kenneth Lonergan), how do you deal with someone who has that reputation and presence? Is there fear that you want to impress them as well from an acting perspective?

Sripadh: Before we shot the film, I was a massive fan of Succession. So I was very nervous before. Out of nervousness I asked J. a whole lot of random questions. I think at one point I asked her what’s your feeling about Almond Joy? She’s wonderful. Kenneth Lonergan, they were very welcoming, they’re very encouraging people. They talk to each of us, they’re saying how great of a job that we were doing while we were on the set. It’s only before we get into the shoot, once we’re in the shoot, they’re very giving people, very giving actors. So it’s just about taking what they give and running along with it, then trying to impress them in any way.

Bernadette: I actually didn’t know that they were going to be in the film until they showed up in the room. Just the year before, a couple of months before I’d written a paper for school on Manchester by the Sea. So when Kenneth walked in, I was like, I was supposed to play a scary debater. I’m here and feeling nerves but just seeing them act was so cool. They kind of brought this grounding kind of thing to the film when we were filming it. Because I was like, wow, they’re acting like normal people, even though they’re really cool. Then Alex took this really great picture of when I asked him to sign my script that I had annotated. It’s in my favourites and I’m really trying not to make it my wallpaper. But yeah, that was so weird.

Zak: The drama of the film is set in one specific location, when it’s a minimal setting, like a bottle episode in a TV Show, how does that affect how you perform and stage a scene?

Alex: I have done a number of one location shorts often because with the constraints of making a short film financially and timing wise, it’s more efficient to have one or two, or just a limited amount of locations. I mean, the meat of this story is a tournament and the tournament takes place in a chamber. That’s our location. That’s where our story is taking place. A way that we create a drama visually is we shot the film with two cameras and we have a lot of different perspectives of all the different characters. The idea is to create this sense of the feeling of being within the chamber.

Seeing a character from a bunch of different angles should evoke the feeling that you are one of the debaters, you are sitting in that room with them and you could be any of them. You’re not a camera in the corner of the room. You’re in it. You’re in the action. That should bring the feeling of suspense and immersion that we really want. So we compare it to a courtroom, I talked about a courtroom when designing the set, which mimics the debate room. But it’s interesting because you have this clump of people, the people in the back of a of the trial, and then usually the speakers and the judge are in front and everyone’s looking forward the whole time. But in debate, your judges are behind you and the speakers are in front of you, which creates this interesting structure of people looking back and forth and looking all around at all times. It’s terrifying. So the escalation of how we showed the perspective of people speaking.

Zak: As actors, how do you deal with minimal settings?

Sripadh: We had a lot of time in that room. spent a lot of time with each other. it gave us a chance to get to know each other well and then bond with each other, the whole cast, along with the crew too. So it was nice. was like a classroom again. was like we shot in a school too. So it just felt like a classroom.

Bernadette: It was really great in letting us be able to live in the space because we returned to a place that we were in for hours at a time. We saw the books that were on the library shelves. We found gum underneath the desk at one point and we had notebooks that we just scribbled in while we were waiting. It became an environment and we got to, at least for me, it was easier to just step into the space and bring the story to life.

Zak: You mentioned it was a two-day shoot. What was the funniest memory on set?

Alex: Funniest, to be honest, I was pretty lasered in a lot of the time. I don’t know how much realistically I was laughing. I think this is so random, but there was one time where the DP, Dagmar Weaver-Madsen, who’s amazing. So first of all, I haven’t worked with a female DP before which is crazy and not by choice. It’s just how it’s happened so far. So anyway, I was very excited to work with Dagmar because she’s talented. She showed up day one wearing this black gothic dress with this cloak that had a hood. She really was dressed like a witch. She was riding around on like a dolly with a camera. I was just like, yeah, that’s cool and it’s really different. She’s amazing and she did such a great job. But I would say seeing Dagmar’s outfit was a funny moment for me.

Zak: After Sundance ends, where do you intend to take this film [The Debaters]? Do you have any plans or is that something you haven’t talked about yet?

Alex: It’s still in the works, but I would love to expand this world into a larger piece. Debaters is meant to be a proof of concept, an introduction to a world and what it could be. I have a lot of stories that I want to tell linked to this space and this team. so I have stuff I’m developing. I have a feature script in the works. Nothing is set yet or is in the works yet, rather nothing is in motion yet, but I’m writing longer pieces based on this. After Sundance, we’re gonna play in some more film festivals, which we’re really excited about. I think the very next one might be Cinequest and then playing at Aspen Shorts Fest. So, got a lot at Los Angeles, then go over to Aspen and perhaps others this year. We’re just really excited about the short. Whatever happens after, don’t know yet, but all I know is right now, really proud of the short and very excited about it.

Debaters premiered at Sundance on January 23rd

Thanks for reading our interview with Debaters director Alex Heller and stars Sripadh Puligilla and Bernadette Santos Schwegel. For more interviews, stay tuned here at Feature First.