With an ensemble cast led by ex-Disney star Bella Thorne and Helena Howard (I Saw the TV Glow) and directed by first-time filmmaker Izabel Pakzad, Find Your Friends is one of the most auspicious directorial debuts of the year. Following a group of friends whose party trip in the desert goes awry after they encounter a group of locals with sinister intentions, the film starts with an incredibly fun tone before reaching its insane conclusion.
At the film’s US premiere, we got to speak with Find Your Friends writer-director Izabel Pakzad and cast members Helena Howard, Chloe Cherry, Zión Moreno, and Sophia Alvey about the pulse-pounding thriller and Pakzad’s unique approach to her characters. Check out the full interview here:
Find Your Friends Interview
FandomWire: I think part of what makes Find Your Friends work so well is that it’s exaggerated at times, but it’s always based in this authentic emotion and catharsis. Why do you think this emotional through-line was important for the film?
Izabel Pakzad: I went to a really crazy party school and kind of got lost in the sauce a little. And there is a really emotional experience about what Amber’s character goes through specifically, which is not being able to find her voice and talk about what she’s feeling. And I think that happens a lot in the environment I was in, where women are just taught to suppress their feelings for the sake of not ruffling feathers. I really wanted to evoke that state of being in that sense of danger. So for me, I think that emotional core does carry it through, and it’s not just this wild, fun time.
Helena Howard: With Amber, it’s this build up where she’s suppressing so much, especially with her voice and just going along with this party scene and her friend group, so she’s starting to realize that what she is experiencing, what she is sensing and seeing, is not just psychological, but it is real. Then, she experiences this transformation. Yeah, it is cathartic.
FandomWire: And while the film does have these deep, emotional themes, it also has a lot of influence from fun, exploitation films. Could you talk about some of the visual influences for the movie?
Pakzad: Yeah, so Spring Breakers was a huge reference for me. I mean, when I first saw that movie, I was kind of blown away because I felt like it really mirrored my college experience and American party culture while also satirizing it, but making the party almost feel spiritual in this dark way. That was a huge reference for me.
And Nocturnal Animals was a really big one. Because the story was loosely inspired by this crazy car chase that happened to me and my friends in Joshua Tree on our first trip. So when the real thing was happening to me, the thing that was going through my mind was, “Oh my God, it’s like the scene in Nocturnal Animals in real life.” So with all the desert stuff, I felt like I really pulled from that movie a lot too. And then Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge
FandomWire: The characters in Find Your Friends are flawed. They make bad choices. Sometimes they’re really annoying. But they’re also really endearing. Why did you think this was important to the story?
Pakzad: Yeah, I love genre movies so much, but the one thing that I don’t like is really this “final girl” trope where all the women have to be sweet and well-behaved and nice to survive in the end. And I think with this movie, this group of girls is vulgar. They talk about sex. They’re messy. And I think that is an authentic representation of young women. And I also feel like we don’t often get to see young women in films act however they want without them having to suffer consequences for it. So to me, that’s really important and reinventing what the final girl is.
Zión Moreno: No person is one-dimensional. I think it’s important to have that representation of what it means to be a human, whether you’re a woman or not. Men get to do that all the time, so why not us?
Chloe Cherry: And I think it’s also, especially in this movie, the way that our characters act is because we’re around our best friends. We don’t just act that crazy. Like, the whole idea behind this movie is that we’re best friends all going to have a party trip together, so we’re getting as crazy as we can. I feel like it was an accurate portrayal of when you’re just with your bestie, it’s partying. You act completely different when you’re like at work.
FandomWire: Well, a movie like this falls apart if there isn’t chemistry, and thankfully you all have that in spades. How did you build this rapport?
Cherry: I mean, Izabel, when we first started the process, really wanted all of us actors to meet each other before we started filming, and she set up some times when we all met up to hang out. And I feel like that was a good thing for us all to know each other before we were filming. We had interacted a little. But once we started filming, though, because we were all just excited about the movie, we all clicked pretty fast.
Moreno: I think the environment was just conducive to being a safe space for us to explore our connections and party culture. And we were all just really excited to dive into this project. And we’re all young women who have had these experiences partying, so we were able to pull from that as well.
Howard: Izabel did a really good job of creating this space for us and even beforehand, setting it up for us to go into. But we as actors have our own process, right? So even if we’re not together, we have to create it for ourselves. That’s part of the process.
Sophia Alvey: I mean, just like what everyone said, having our own relationships, it then sort of becomes like a raw interaction.
FandomWire: So we’ve talked a lot about the great women characters in Find Your Friends, but I think another great type of representation we see in the film is LGBTQ representation because, Ms. Moreno, you’re playing a character who is not expressly LGBTQ. And these days, a lot of LGBTQ performers are still pigeonholed into playing LGBTQ roles. Could you talk about the importance of this representation?
Moreno: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think that it was a thing that was spoken about or even considered. Izabel just picked me for me, and Zosia was never meant to be anything other than Zosia. She’s a cis woman, and I think it is really important for trans women to be able to portray any kind of character because we’re just like any other actor — we should have the ability to portray whoever we see fit and whatever is appropriate for us to represent. But yeah, I hope it builds momentum for a lot more trans actors to be able to do the same. Being pigeonholed is no fun.
FandomWire: Given that the story of Find Your Friends is so closely tied to music, the soundtrack is obviously fantastic. How did you decide on the film’s soundtrack?
Pakzad: Well, I always knew when I was making this movie that music was almost like another character in the movie. It’s the subtext for the girls’ energy, and it’s their subconscious in a way. So I knew that it had to sort of reflect when we were having fun and when we were in danger, and then when things were kind of just spiraling out of control.
I wanted the music and the score to reflect all of that. I worked really hard on finding music that was super stimulating and showing how fun it could all be but at the same time to show how the music can also turn on you in a way and make it start to feel like a nightmare.
Find Your Friends screened at the 2025 edition of Fantastic Fest, which runs September 18-25 in Austin, TX.
