Alexandra Simpson Explores Small-Town Tension in ‘No Sleep Till’: ‘There’s Such a Power in Their Own Isolation’

Alexandra Simpson makes her feature directing and writing debut with Venice Critics Week entry “No Sleep Till,” a dreamy, visually striking look at locals in a small Florida beach town under the threat of a hurricane. Shot by Sylvain Froidevaux, the humidity drips off the screen as teenagers party and skateboard, and a girl mans the register at a souvenir shop that barely attract any customers. There’s an aspiring comic and his buddy, who can’t quite make the leap to the bigger-time clubs up north, a Zen-like storm chaser and public pool caretakers. All the characters also live under the threat of gentrification, which could price them out of their town.

Simpson herself was born in Paris and grew up there but spent summers in the Atlantic coastal town of Neptune Beach, Fla., where the bulk of the film was shot, capturing a portrait of life that is slowly disappearing in the state.

“When it came to specifically showing these places, I was very observant in the sense that they were chosen because they are kind of the last remains of the old Florida. … each time I go back, everything is more and more different. And it’s bigger; it’s more polished,” she says. “And the intention, also with setting this down during a pending hurricane, was to show the fragility of the old, the remaining, last wooden homes. So, there was this tension.”

But her specificity leads to a universal feeling.

“I would say that I took on this project with kind of like alien eyes and European eyes, even though I know this town like the back of my hand, but it was still from an outsider’s point of view as well,” she says.
Simpson says that when she started writing the script, she wasn’t going for a linear narrative. “It was never about telling a story that evolves, but more about witnessing just specific behavior and specific poetry to vulnerability. And having an ensemble cast did allow me to go deep into that, yet still allow myself to really work on tone and atmosphere and the place, and not be so set on a sort of suspenseful storyline,” she says, adding that she felt a lot of compassion and tenderness for her characters.

“But there’s such a power in their own isolation, in the sense that they somehow have their sense of belonging to this town that is so specific and that therefore gives them, I don’t know, a certain grace,” she says.

The film comes out of the Omnes Film collective, which saw two of its features, Tyler Taormina’s “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” and Carson Lund’s “Eephus,” screen in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. Taormina is a producer on “No Sleep Till.”

Simpson by chance saw a poster for Taormina’s film “Ham on Rye” and was intrigued. She loved the film and was taken by the “freedom of how he made his film, just a completely surprising film. It really got to me. And I reached out to him, and we eventually met, and he came onto the film as a producer, and it was an amazing collaboration.”

The crew for “No Sleep Till” are all her friends from film school in Geneva. The teaching was practical but “it was still like a very experimental approach, because it was all about having different filmmakers come and doing workshops with them and just exploring different ways of having a vision.”

As for her next film, she envisions a more traditional narrative, set in a small town in rural America. “I want to show the relationship between two young sisters and their ill father,” who live near a fair, which adds a certain tint to the proceedings. “It’s going to be different layers, but definitely a more linear storytelling style, because I want to challenge myself in that type of writing as well.”