Ilse Will Say

Oh, what an incredible time with Jake Myers! He’s doing the thing that all of us Chicago folks in the film industry want to do: he created a proof of concept that led to a feature film that’s now streaming. Incredible.

Watch Kombucha now, streaming free on Tubi.

We get into his film Kombucha and all the things that led up to it: some issues with the monster, his pinky problems and privileges, and a whole bunch of other fun stuff. I had no idea we were going to go down that rabbit hole, but I’m so glad we did. Really fun, really great. If you’re in Chicago, please hit him up. He’s great. And he’s not done yet, so please keep an eye out for him. He’s doing amazing things, and he’s very funny, very kind, and very nice. And that’s saying a lot.

In this episode:

• 00:42 Welcome to My Brain
• 01:35 The pinky question
• 02:12 Jake’s log line and Kombucha
• 03:00 Kombucha on tap and office perks
• 03:54 Growing up outside Chicago
• 04:16 UIC and working the film cage
• 05:35 The pinky story: volleyball, a backward reset, and a very hairy doctor
• 09:40 Chest hair talk
• 11:06 My swimming shoulder story
• 12:46 The monster that never showed up
• 16:43 Hot Cakes
• 19:15 Simulations and conspiracy theories
• 21:02 Working on The Telepathy Tapes
• 24:37 Where to watch Kombucha and his next film, Sheila

Follow Jake: @johnjacobmyers
 Follow the pod: @ilsewillsay

Send us Fan Mail

Love the show? Follow, rate, and share Ilse Will Say. It helps us more than you know. New episodes every Wednesday.

🎧 All the links: beacons.ai/ilsewillsay
📸 Follow the show on Instagram & Tiktok: @ilsewillsay & @ilsezacharias

Ilse Will Say is an Intrepida Entertainment podcast, hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Produced and edited by Jacob Cagle. Music by Eric Backus. Photography by Joel Maisonet.

The views and opinions expressed on Ilse Will Say are entirely those of the host and guests, and do not reflect the views of any employers, sponsors, or innocent bystanders. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing said here is professional advice. We're here for the laughs, y'all.

Barbara Howlin is on the pod, and I completely lost track of time. We cover everything from The NeverEnding Story (which I had somehow never seen) to luck dragons to whether you can Reiki a ghost, with real tears of laughter along the way.

Barbara’s new book, Can It Be That Easy?, is on the way. Sign up at thehowlinghive.org/book for book news and giveaways.

Barbara is an actor, writer, director, producer, Reiki Master, Human Design specialist, and the founder of The Howling Hive. She tells me how she went from Northern Virginia to LA, how chasing a capital P “Purpose” nearly drained the joy out of acting, and how The Artist’s Way opened everything back up. Full disclosure: I took her Artist’s Way class, and I was mad for the first few weeks. Then my life took off. We get into using envy as a compass, why productivity guilt drowns out your intuition, being a screen instead of a sponge, and the lizards, hummingbirds, and one very bold hawk that show up while she writes her morning pages. And yes, the title of her book made me angry the first time I heard it. But I believe it now. My life has gone from creating hardship to an ease and a pace I’m really loving.

In this episode:

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:00 What a luck dragon is, and how I’ve never seen The NeverEnding Story
• 04:20 From Northern Virginia to LA
• 05:45 Capital P Purpose and how The Artist’s Way changed everything
• 10:00 The ant farm theory of your creative path
• 11:53 Artist dates and my toy store era
• 13:10 Play-Doh, flow, and “can it be that easy?”
• 15:00 Envy as a compass (thanks, Brené Brown)
• 17:37 Hot Cakes
• 19:36 Getting weird: tarot, crystals, omnism, and morning pages with the animals
• 22:27 Religious upbringings, Reiki boundaries, and being a screen, not a sponge
• 25:09 How to be a decently happy adult right now
• 28:01 Can It Be That Easy? The book

Find Barbara on Instagram at @thehowlinghive and at thehowlinghive.org. Sign up for her book at thehowlinghive.org/book.

I hope you love this one. Like, subscribe, leave a review, and do all that good stuff. Thank you so much!

Send us Fan Mail

Love the show? Follow, rate, and share Ilse Will Say. It helps us more than you know. New episodes every Wednesday.

🎧 All the links: beacons.ai/ilsewillsay
📸 Follow the show on Instagram & Tiktok: @ilsewillsay & @ilsezacharias

Ilse Will Say is an Intrepida Entertainment podcast, hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Produced and edited by Jacob Cagle. Music by Eric Backus. Photography by Joel Maisonet.

The views and opinions expressed on Ilse Will Say are entirely those of the host and guests, and do not reflect the views of any employers, sponsors, or innocent bystanders. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing said here is professional advice. We're here for the laughs, y'all.

Sean's one-take horror short Intruder premieres on The Longest Take YouTube channel this Halloween!

Filmmaker and fellow podcast host Sean Slimak joins me to talk about his love of one-take films, making six shorts while working a full-time day job, and why joy is his secret weapon.

Sean grew up in Lombard, Illinois, making movies on an Intel Play movie maker. He skipped film school, went into factory work, and is now an environmental health and safety specialist at a chemical facility, all while writing and directing short films. We get into how he overspent on festival submissions with Connection at the End of the World (Sundance? sure, why not), how he shot the whole film as one walking take through downtown Lombard, and why he leans over in movie theaters to whisper "the camera hasn't cut." Then things get philosophical. Sean opens up about what he calls "defensive joy," gives some great advice on asking for feedback, and walks me through Camus, Sisyphus, and why he identifies as an absurdist (the optimistic cousin of a nihilist, apparently). Plus a kaiju first date in Hot Cakes. Of course.

In this episode

• 00:00 Catching up: two shorts in three days and a book trailer
• 03:35 From Lombard to a chemical plant to filmmaking
• 05:48 Getting trigger happy with festival submissions
• 08:12 Going from idea to set, and finding his composer
• 11:45 Why one takes?
• 14:41 Rehearsing a one take: the dry run and the bench that moved
• 18:20 Defensive joy
• 20:14 Advice: learn from anyone, be patient, take the note not the rewrite
• 24:59 Hot Cakes
• 28:02 Absurdism, Camus, and imagining Sisyphus happy
• 33:13 Where to find Sean

Find Sean

• Instagram: @the_longest_take_podcast
• The Longest Take Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube
• Watch Connection at the End of the World on The Longest Take YouTube channel, and Intruder there this Halloween

Send us Fan Mail

Love the show? Follow, rate, and share Ilse Will Say. It helps us more than you know. New episodes every Wednesday.

🎧 All the links: beacons.ai/ilsewillsay
📸 Follow the show on Instagram & Tiktok: @ilsewillsay & @ilsezacharias

Ilse Will Say is an Intrepida Entertainment podcast, hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Produced and edited by Jacob Cagle. Music by Eric Backus. Photography by Joel Maisonet.

The views and opinions expressed on Ilse Will Say are entirely those of the host and guests, and do not reflect the views of any employers, sponsors, or innocent bystanders. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing said here is professional advice. We're here for the laughs, y'all.

Tommy Martin is a Chicago based actor, filmmaker, and musician who has basically worked every job on a set at some point, and honestly it kind of exhausted me just hearing about it. We start with an unreasonable amount of hair talk (his, not mine) before getting into how a random DIY filmmaker workshop years ago quietly kicked off both our careers, his very unexpected path from a music business degree to Second City to booking his first web series, and what it's like acting in a scene while also being the AD on the same movie (he did this on Haunt Season, insane).

Then Hot Cakes happens, and things get weird fast. We're talking two genuinely unsettling ghost stories, a tarot reading that predicted an actual job loss, and a very serious conversation about whether Bigfoot is real (yes). Tommy also gives updates on Grilled Cheese, the horror comedy short he co-directed that's currently making the festival rounds.

Follow Tommy at @actortommymartin.

In this episode:

• 00:00 – An unreasonable amount of hair talk
• 02:45 – How we actually met (a DIY filmmaker workshop, years ago)
• 06:03 – Music business major to filmmaker, a whole journey
• 12:10 – Acting in a scene and being the AD on the same movie, at the same time
• 13:05 – Hot Cakes
• 15:06 – Ghost story #1, the haunted house by our high school
• 17:22 – Ghost story #2, the crouched thing in the corner
• 21:15 – The tarot reading that actually came true
• 23:29 – Bigfoot, aliens, and my skinwalker era
• 26:02 – What's next: Grilled Cheese, Morning Moon, Haunt Season, and The Knot Job

Mentioned in this episode:

Thank you to our sponsor, Joel Maisonet Photography: maisonetphotography.com

Send us Fan Mail

Love the show? Follow, rate, and share Ilse Will Say. It helps us more than you know. New episodes every Wednesday.

🎧 All the links: beacons.ai/ilsewillsay
📸 Follow the show on Instagram & Tiktok: @ilsewillsay & @ilsezacharias

Ilse Will Say is an Intrepida Entertainment podcast, hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Produced and edited by Jacob Cagle. Music by Eric Backus. Photography by Joel Maisonet.

The views and opinions expressed on Ilse Will Say are entirely those of the host and guests, and do not reflect the views of any employers, sponsors, or innocent bystanders. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing said here is professional advice. We're here for the laughs, y'all.

This week, Ilse sits down with John David Wolfe, a DGA member and Chicago based producer whose two decade career as a location scout and manager put him behind the scenes on Spider-Man 2, High Fidelity, Proof, and Rhythm + Flow before he made the leap to producing his own work.

John talks through his path from West Des Moines, Iowa to Chicago, landing High Fidelity as his very first studio credit, and what he'd tell someone trying to break into the industry today. The conversation gets delightfully weird during Hot Cakes, including a real ghost sighting at the Uptown Theatre and a detour into Mandela effect conspiracy theories. Then John shares the real story behind Candy House Productions, the company he co-founded with Chloe Koegel, including the surprisingly literal Hansel and Gretel connection behind the name. He also gives an update on Big Spooky House, Candy House's upcoming feature from filmmaker Jerry S. Gonzalez, which is currently in pre-production with a crowdfunding campaign launching this fall.

Time sensitive: Big Spooky House is heading into a GoFundMe style campaign launching in early fall 2026, so keep an eye on Candy House's Instagram for updates.

In this episode:

• 03:02 From Iowa to Chicago
• 04:05 Landing High Fidelity as his first credit
• 06:06 Is the PA route still the way into the industry?
• 09:53 Getting your creative work seen today
• 13:34 Hot Cakes
• 17:35 The haunted Uptown Theatre
• 19:05 A Mandela effect rabbit hole
• 22:49 How Candy House Productions came together
• 26:36 Why "Candy House"? The Hansel and Gretel story
• 28:14 Big Spooky House and working with Jerry S. Gonzalez

Follow Candy House Productions on Instagram: @candyhouseproductions @wolfejohndavid

Hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Say hi / follow along here: @ilsezacharias

Mentioned in this episode:

Thank you to our sponsor, Joel Maisonet Photography: maisonetphotography.com

Send us Fan Mail

Love the show? Follow, rate, and share Ilse Will Say. It helps us more than you know. New episodes every Wednesday.

🎧 All the links: beacons.ai/ilsewillsay
📸 Follow the show on Instagram & Tiktok: @ilsewillsay & @ilsezacharias

Ilse Will Say is an Intrepida Entertainment podcast, hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Produced and edited by Jacob Cagle. Music by Eric Backus. Photography by Joel Maisonet.

The views and opinions expressed on Ilse Will Say are entirely those of the host and guests, and do not reflect the views of any employers, sponsors, or innocent bystanders. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing said here is professional advice. We're here for the laughs, y'all.

Connar Brown Sprenger is an actor, puppeteer, voice actor, and award winning filmmaker who somehow makes all four look easy. She joins Ilse to talk growing up between Tokyo, London, and Atlanta, playing all seven brothers in one production of Grimm, and the practical, gross, wonderfully weird world of her short film Grilled Cheese.

Catch Grilled Cheese on the festival circuit:

TromaDance Film Festival (New York), September 4-6. Delaware Horror Film Festival, September 24-27. Massacre Horror Movie Marathon at the Pickwick Theater in Park Ridge, IL, October 10.

Connar and Ilse get into the wild logistics of growing up multilingual across three countries, what it's actually like to be a stage understudy who finds out she's on three hours before curtain, and the delicate art of writing a feature film with a friend without losing the friendship. Connar also shares the very specific, very gross inspiration behind Grilled Cheese, the practical effects work from her "goo gang," and a genuinely unsettling haunted house story from her childhood in London.

In this episode:

• 03:08 - Chicago to Tokyo to London to Atlanta and back: the elevator pitch
• 03:56 - Juggling Japanese, Spanish, and English in one brain
• 06:04 - Knowing this was the job since a school production of Snow White in Tokyo
• 09:02 - Understudying Ride the Cyclone and the reality of being on-call
• 11:00 - Writing Grilled Cheese and a feature script with writing partner Tommy Martin
• 11:54 - What she learned producing her first multi-location shoot
• 14:27 - Bribes, threats, and the business brain vs the artist brain
• 20:22 - Hot Cakes: sour patch kids, deep dish, chicken nugget puppet wings, and more
• 23:20 - Ghosts, aliens, and a haunted house in London
• 28:27 - Where to catch Grilled Cheese on the festival circuit

Follow Connar on Instagram @jgcbrown97 for more.

Hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Say hi / follow along here: @ilsezacharias

Mentioned in this episode:

Thank you to our sponsor, Joel Maisonet Photography: maisonetphotography.com

Send us Fan Mail

Love the show? Follow, rate, and share Ilse Will Say. It helps us more than you know. New episodes every Wednesday.

🎧 All the links: beacons.ai/ilsewillsay
📸 Follow the show on Instagram & Tiktok: @ilsewillsay & @ilsezacharias

Ilse Will Say is an Intrepida Entertainment podcast, hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Produced and edited by Jacob Cagle. Music by Eric Backus. Photography by Joel Maisonet.

The views and opinions expressed on Ilse Will Say are entirely those of the host and guests, and do not reflect the views of any employers, sponsors, or innocent bystanders. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing said here is professional advice. We're here for the laughs, y'all.

Veronica Miles has spent over 25 years inside the business of film exhibition, running festivals, theaters, and now the American launch of a ticketing platform. On this episode of Ilse Will Say, she and Ilse get into film festival strategy, the reality of building a career in independent cinema, and why New Orleans might be running its own kind of energy audit on everyone who moves there.

Veronica walks through how a scholarship to a film camp in Tuscany as a teenager shaped her, and the surprisingly emotional layers underneath a trip she took back to that same small town decades later. She and Ilse dig into the unglamorous side of submitting to film festivals, how to actually pick which ones are worth your money, and what she's learned helping select mentees for Cinema Femme. Veronica also opens up about the short film she made about her grandmother, shot entirely on her phone during Mardi Gras, and gets into the specific kind of energy she thinks New Orleans holds onto. Find her on Instagram at @veronicalm.

In this episode:

• 00:00 What brought Veronica to New Orleans
• 03:16 How a public school film class turned into a career in film exhibition
• 05:43 Splitting the film industry into art and business
• 09:03 The hats Veronica's wearing right now, from arthouse cinema to Ferve
• 12:30 How to actually get audiences into theater seats
• 13:25 A real strategy for picking which film festivals to submit to
• 17:20 Hot Cakes
• 18:48 The Tuscany film camp story, and what it cost her
• 21:43 The photo of her grandmother that led to a short film
• 23:22 New Orleans, energy, and the city's "internal council"
• 27:04 Her upcoming solo travel film trilogy
• 28:13 Where to find Veronica

Mentioned in this episode:

Thank you to our sponsor, Joel Maisonet Photography: maisonetphotography.com

Send us Fan Mail

Love the show? Follow, rate, and share Ilse Will Say. It helps us more than you know. New episodes every Wednesday.

🎧 All the links: beacons.ai/ilsewillsay
📸 Follow the show on Instagram & Tiktok: @ilsewillsay & @ilsezacharias

Ilse Will Say is an Intrepida Entertainment podcast, hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Produced and edited by Jacob Cagle. Music by Eric Backus. Photography by Joel Maisonet.

The views and opinions expressed on Ilse Will Say are entirely those of the host and guests, and do not reflect the views of any employers, sponsors, or innocent bystanders. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing said here is professional advice. We're here for the laughs, y'all.

Tony Scott-Green spent years as a corporate consultant with an entire soundtrack playing in his head before he finally let it out of the speakers. This episode is about what happens when you actually listen to the thing that makes you different.

Tony walks Ilse through his path from a bedroom guitarist in Scotland too anxious to play live, through decades in tech consulting, to composing scores for feature films and building sonic branding for major companies out of his Chicago and LA studio. He gets into the exercise that changed everything, a literal hour by hour map of a Thursday ten years in the future that his wife made him write out, and how that became his real roadmap off the consulting track. The conversation also wanders into Scottish folklore, banshees, the muse, and a fully formed conspiracy theory about grapefruit juice. Follow Tony at @tonyscottgreen on Instagram.

Tony's documentary First Feature recently screened at the Chattanooga Film Festival. Find it linked in his Instagram bio.

In this episode:

• 00:00 – Tony's reformed chronic lateness
• 01:28 – Cold open and intro
• 03:42 – Growing up in Scotland, bedroom guitarist to engineering school
• 05:40 – The Thursday ten years from now exercise
• 09:59 – Why networking is really just being a good hang
• 10:22 – Music for Imaginary Films, the demo reel that got him his first score
• 13:05 – Hot Cakes
• 15:38 – How Tony learned to actually take a hard director's note
• 16:56 – Scottish folklore and getting woo woo
• 19:30 – The Rachel Dratch line: if you believe in magic, you'll see more of it
• 21:22 – The grapefruit juice conspiracy theory
• 22:44 – Tony's documentary, First Feature

Mentioned in this episode:

Thank you to our sponsor, Joel Maisonet Photography: maisonetphotography.com

Send us Fan Mail

Love the show? Follow, rate, and share Ilse Will Say. It helps us more than you know. New episodes every Wednesday.

🎧 All the links: beacons.ai/ilsewillsay
📸 Follow the show on Instagram & Tiktok: @ilsewillsay & @ilsezacharias

Ilse Will Say is an Intrepida Entertainment podcast, hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Produced and edited by Jacob Cagle. Music by Eric Backus. Photography by Joel Maisonet.

The views and opinions expressed on Ilse Will Say are entirely those of the host and guests, and do not reflect the views of any employers, sponsors, or innocent bystanders. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing said here is professional advice. We're here for the laughs, y'all.

Chicago based comedian, writer, actor, and filmmaker Miguel Lepe Jr joins Ilse for a conversation that starts with a defunct pandemic podcast and somehow ends up covering pick-me culture, immigrant parent one liners, a haunted house, and the correct way to sleep in a marriage.

Miguel opens up about learning improv at Second City almost by accident, building his sketch duo Supremo with Rich Alfonso, and starting his own production company, Leafcutter Productions, named after a bee species (despite popular belief, it has nothing to do with lawn care). He gets into his real, lifelong fear of bees and the time Jon Seda saved him from one on the set of Chicago PD, his wife's uncanny ability to pause and resume her dreams, and his family's immigration story, the subject of his new documentary American Dreams.

Catch American Dreams screening around Chicago:

Saturday, August 15 in Pilsen at Indigo Mercado. Friday, August 21 in Humboldt Park at the Kimball Arts Center. Friday, August 28 in Aurora at the Aurora Prisco Community Center. All screenings at 7:30 PM. Follow @lepetv for details.

In this episode:

• [01:03] Intro
• [03:18] Pick-me culture and the pressure of immigrant kid overachieving
• [06:31] Visiting his dad's hometown deep in the mountains of Mexico
• [07:45] Finding Second City by accident and falling in love with improv
• [09:00] Where his sense of humor really comes from
• [10:44] Building his sketch duo, Supremo
• [11:14] Where he gets his ideas, doom scrolling included
• [12:44] Hot Cakes
• [14:31] His haunted house and his wife's wild recurring dreams
• [18:26] Starting Leafcutter Productions and why it's named after a bee
• [20:49] His documentary, American Dreams, and his family's story
• [23:19] Kankakee, immigrant journeys, and the world's best conspiracy theory about aliens

Hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Say hi / follow along here: @ilsezacharias

Send us Fan Mail

Love the show? Follow, rate, and share Ilse Will Say. It helps us more than you know. New episodes every Wednesday.

🎧 All the links: beacons.ai/ilsewillsay
📸 Follow the show on Instagram & Tiktok: @ilsewillsay & @ilsezacharias

Ilse Will Say is an Intrepida Entertainment podcast, hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Produced and edited by Jacob Cagle. Music by Eric Backus. Photography by Joel Maisonet.

The views and opinions expressed on Ilse Will Say are entirely those of the host and guests, and do not reflect the views of any employers, sponsors, or innocent bystanders. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing said here is professional advice. We're here for the laughs, y'all.

Juan Luis Garcia has designed key art for Netflix, HBO, and A24, and was the art director and photographer behind Narcos: Mexico. He also built a sports media company that hit 300 million YouTube views before walking away to go back to making posters, because apparently one impressive career wasn't enough for him.

In this episode, Juan and Ilse get into:

• Growing up in North Long Beach and the early Guadalajara years
• Buying his first camera with leftover scholarship money and just deciding he was a photographer
• The difference between designing a poster for a filmmaker's wall versus a poster built to sell tickets
• What it actually means to run a company with 24 employees with zero plan for how
• Advice to his younger self: do it and enjoy every second, the good and the bad
• Hot Cakes: best movie poster of all time, the worst studio note he's ever gotten, Weird Al being cooler than expected, and what's chasing him in his dreams
• Why he actively wants to need an exorcism (yes, really)

Follow Juan on Instagram at @iamjuanluisgarcia, and check out his site to see the work for yourself.

Hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Say hi / follow along here: @ilsezacharias

Mentioned in this episode:

Thank you to our sponsor, Joel Maisonet Photography: maisonetphotography.com

Send us Fan Mail

Love the show? Follow, rate, and share Ilse Will Say. It helps us more than you know. New episodes every Wednesday.

🎧 All the links: beacons.ai/ilsewillsay
📸 Follow the show on Instagram & Tiktok: @ilsewillsay & @ilsezacharias

Ilse Will Say is an Intrepida Entertainment podcast, hosted by Ilse Zacharias Rivera. Produced and edited by Jacob Cagle. Music by Eric Backus. Photography by Joel Maisonet.

The views and opinions expressed on Ilse Will Say are entirely those of the host and guests, and do not reflect the views of any employers, sponsors, or innocent bystanders. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing said here is professional advice. We're here for the laughs, y'all.