Oklahoma filmmaker plays 'Hailey's Game' to create award-winning supernatural LGBTQ movie

Katie Hightower blames the television show "Dawson's Creek," James Van Der Beek's titular character and the teen drama series' creator, Kevin Williamson, for her fledgling filmmaking career.

"It's not the best show in the world, but I remember watching it. I watched Dawson, and he wanted to make films. And I wanted to be Dawson. I wanted to make films, too. So, I told my dad, 'I'm gonna go to NYU.' And he was like, 'No, you're not,'" Hightower recalled. "So, I did not end up going there. But I ended up finding my way to film anyway, which I feel is sort of kismet."

An Oklahoma queer moviemaker, Hightower made her feature film directorial debut with "Hailey’s Game," a supernatural LGBTQIA romance filmed entirely with Oklahoma City locations, cast and crew. Based on her web series of the same name, she made the independent film on a microbudget of $20,000 over nine days with a crew of just nine people.

What is the OKC indie film 'Hailey's Game' about?

"Hailey's Game" follows Carter McDowell (Abby Bryan) as she searches for a way to overcome her grief over the death of her best friend, Hailey (Kayleigh Adams). With the help of Hailey's ex-boyfriend Tanner (Christian Stroup), a zany bookstore clerk named Billy (David Greyson) and some supernatural intervention by Hailey herself, Carter embarks on a journey of love, loss and healing.

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The indie drama had its world premiere in June at OKC's 24th Annual deadCenter Film Festival, where it was named Best Pride Feature.

And the LGBTQ ghost story is receiving another home-state award, for Best Narrative Feature, from Tulsa's Circle Cinema Film Festival. A celebration of new films made in Oklahoma by and featuring Oklahomans, the Tulsa fest is set for July 11-15 at the nonprofit Circle Cinema movie theater, with "Hailey's Game" showing at 6:30 p.m. July 14, followed a post-screening Q&A with Hightower and members of her cast and crew.

"I talked to my producing partner (Michael Johnson) about it, and we both agree that it's so important to show at any Oklahoma festival that wants to accept us, just because we had so many Oklahoma hands creating this piece," Hightower told The Oklahoman. "We want to honor our hometown festivals. We want to bring the film to places that maybe wouldn't necessarily see it."

During the deadCenter Film Festival, Hightower talked with The Oklahoman about "Hailey's Game":

Q: How did you decide that this was the right time and right story to make your feature film directorial debut?

I started out as a novelist, and then I wrote this novel and I had a little bit of interest from other people wanting to adapt it. And it turns out that you shouldn't trust everyone you talk to, because not everyone actually wants to make your movie. They just want to film it on an iPhone, which is fine; I learned that lesson, and it was hard. But then I'm sitting there thinking, 'Well, I'm a writer; I can learn how to write a screenplay. That's not a thing that I can't do; with the internet, it's amazing what things we can learn how to do.' So, I ended up learning how to write a screenplay, and then we wrote a prequel web series to my novel using those characters. ...

We made the first web series, and we crowd-funded the second one. The second season, we actually haven't released that yet. But we shot both of those things, and then we were done. But we had done so much production in so little time, and we were fully addicted to the dopamine hits of being on set and telling stories through a visual medium. So, I was like, 'Let's do it again.' ... Through that, I realized that I could tell stories in the medium that I'd always wanted to tell them.

I feel like being a novelist was second best for me. ... This feels like something that I was meant to do, and on any scale. I think I understand how to scale projects, and I'm happy just making something in my back yard. I don't have to make a huge film, as long as I'm making something, and someone else is saying, 'Hey, that was cool.'

Q: What goal did you have for the feature film of 'Hailey's Game?'

The one thing that I wanted out of telling this story is to explore grief. It's a universal feeling. ... At one point or another, we're all going to lose someone. For me, last year, I lost my grandmother, and we were very close. I was working through my own grief, and thinking about, 'What it would feel like to just have two days to just sit and talk?'

And it became that exploration through the characters — through Carter's eyes and through Tanner's eyes — thinking, 'These two lost this person, and now they have her back for a limited amount of time. But still, how monumental would it be to have a chance to just sit with someone that you miss so much? And how would that affect the grieving process? Would it hurt? Would it help?'

Q: Can you talk about creating your own mythology for the supernatural story?

I didn't want to have to explain too much. ... We wanted to have a rule system, but we wanted it to feel more like you could explore that rule system. You could make your own assumptions about the rules.

So, our only rule was that if you want to stay alive, you have to make the sacrifice. ... I really enjoyed creating and world-building that, because it felt really freeing to not have the typical Hollywood archetype of the supernatural.

We have this element of pulling people through to the other side, and then we have this element of 'we can't just make life unbalanced.' So, those two things combined create this world where we can suspend our disbelief.

Q: What approach did you take to telling a LGBTQ love story?

When I was growing up in the stone ages in 2002, 2003 ... there was no (LGBTQ) content that wasn't violent, that wasn't depressing. I remember reading books about LGBTQ characters, and they would die or they would be alone forever. And it was so grim and so dismal, and I remember thinking, '(Expletive), I'm going to be unhappy forever.' In small-town Texas, I grew up in a super religious household that was not OK with me being gay. And all I've wanted to do in my adult life is to look at kids that grew up like me and say ... 'You will be fine, and you will be happy.' ...

Obviously, it's a little tragic, but it never questions the fact that they're both women. ... I want queer characters to be represented on the screen just living, just eating Taco Bell a Thursday night and being happy and having their struggles be internal and not about their queerness.

It's hard to be queer. Yeah, it is. I agree. I don't think we always need to see it on screen. I think that sometimes it is important to represent that. ... But it's not the kind of story that I want to tell.

Q: What were the challenges of making a movie on a micro budget and in a very limited time frame?

It was really fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants filmmaking. When we initially wrote the script, we knew we were going to have a 10-day shoot. So, we scheduled for weekends, because my producing partner and I were both working a full-time job, Monday through Friday.

Then, our second weekend, our camera crew got COVID, and we had to shut down. So, we lost a weekend. And in the middle of all of that, we were like, 'How the heck are we going to make up this 24 hours of filming?' ... So, we shot every single night for one week and picked up different scenes.

We pulled our stars and all of their scenes together ... and we got a special kind of magic that week. We all became like this massive family during that week, and so we call it 'summer camp week,' because that's what it felt like. ...

At the time, it was probably our scariest hurdle. But something really beautiful came out of having to overcome that hurdle.

Q: How has that experience changed how you plan to make future films?

It's really nice to meet people that are so creatively collaborative and who make you better. I constantly talk about them and how they challenged me and how they asked me to become a better filmmaker and a better writer and asked me to consider things that I would have never considered prior. Their viewpoints have made the film beautiful. And I think that I will always approach filmmaking in this way now.

TULSA'S CIRCLE CINEMA FILM FESTIVAL

• When: July 11-15.
• Where: Circle Cinema, 10 S Lewis Ave., Tulsa.
• Information: https://www.circlecinema.org.