At SXSW 2024, the panel “Mental Health in Film & TV: Safe Sets, Heroic Stories” brought together a director, a mental health coach and Mam Smith, a former stunt performer and intimacy coordinator on Euphoria and Westworld. Their question: how can film sets protect the emotional safety of everyone who works on them?
Telling recovery honestly
The panel’s host, a director whose film Bite draws on her own life with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, wants stories that show people coming out the other side, not only suffering. Mental health coach Dane Ensley adds that recovery is about getting better, staying better and then going beyond the experience, and that it can even become joyful.
What happens on set
Long days, 4 a.m. calls and night shoots wear everyone down. Mam Smith recalls a first assistant director on Euphoria who regularly sent the crew outside for ten genuinely free minutes, to breathe or call their children, and how much that helped. She explains the two pillars of her work: informed consent, prepared in advance, and transparency throughout filming, since an actor can withdraw consent at any time. She describes closed-set protocols for intimate scenes, a 48-hour period for actors to consider any request, and the support she offers by phone after difficult days. She once helped a costume assistant who had been triggered by a rushed nude scene.
Ensley compares a long shoot to deployment: the deep work has to happen before and after, not in the middle of battle. As one example, he suggests that people need about ten minutes for themselves every three hours.
Proposals for the unions
The speakers want to take their ideas to the actors’, directors’ and producers’ guilds: training and awareness for everyone, from actors to drivers, and a mental health professional available before, during and after production. Cost is the usual objection, but they argue that healthy teams work better and stay on budget. Their final message: “If you have a voice, use it.”