Ep. 57: Close Up With Blind Film Director, Sheridan O’Donnell

Alex and Lee chat with Sheridan O’Donnell, a legally blind film director. In our conversation, Sheridan discusses his feature film “Little Brother” and his documentary “Rising Phoenix”, as well as chronicling his journey as a disabled creative.

Check out Sheridan’s website here: https://www.sheridanodonnell.com

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Transcript

Lee Pugsley
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Dark Room, where two blind cinephiles illuminate the sighted. I'm Lee Pugsley.

Alex Howard
I'm Alex Howard.

Lee Pugsley
And this is a podcast hosted by two legally blind guys for film lovers of all abilities. And today, we are very excited because we have an awesome special guest with us. We have Sheridan O'Donnell, who is a legally blind director and filmmaker. Sheridan, thank you so much for being on the show, and welcome.

Sheridan O'Donnell
Thank you for having me. Excited to talk.

Lee Pugsley
Yeah, we're excited to just dive into the facets of who you are and what you do. And to start off with, one of the questions that we always like to ask our guests is, what has your journey been like with blindness and low vision?

Sheridan O'Donnell
Yeah, my journey began at 30. I had been directing movies since I was 19 years old. And in January of 2020, I was two weeks back from my first time at the Sundance Film Festival. I was just there, not with a film, but just to watch movies. I had just moved to Los Angeles from New Mexico, where I'm from. In New Mexico, I had seen an optometrist because I needed glasses, and they had done some field of view tests and just your basic vision tests. And afterwards, they had left I left a note on my outpatient sheet that said, "Might have rod cone dystrophy." And the doctor referred me to an ophthalmologist. And I went back in, because she didn't even tell me. She just left it in my notes. And I said, "What is rod cone dystrophy? What's going on?" And she said, "Look, this is something that's not going to affect you for years. And you can wait till you're in Los Angeles," because we were moving at the time. And seeing an ophthalmologist when you get to LA.

So yeah, cut to, I'm in LA and I go to see this ophthalmologist, and they diagnose me with retinitis pigmentosa, which is a degenerative eye disease. It's a genetic condition. I was diagnosed with 10 degrees of central vision because the disease had been actively moving forward throughout my entire life. And the doctor told me that I can't drive a car, and he also told me that there was a 50% chance that my children would inherit this condition. And so at the time, it was a very destabilizing thing for me to experience, in part because I was a filmmaker and a visual artist, and in part because I had just moved to LA, which is a great place to have a car, and in part because I didn't really understand what blindness was. And so to know that I could maybe pass this on to my children was something that was very fearful. And so, yeah, I just walked out of that appointment pretty devastated. I grieved my vision loss for a couple of months. I couldn't even watch films. It was too painful for me to watch something that one day I might lose. All I was doing was really reading poetry and, like, you know, very emotional, not going out much. Maybe you guys can relate to that part of the journey of blindness, the grief journey, which is a valid part of the journey. I think people talk about that. It's a necessary thing to grieve it because the way I put it is that whether it's right or not, we have an expectation that we are going to be cited for the rest of our lives. So you are grieving this version of your life that you thought you were going to have, and then you aren't going to have that life anymore.

I'm jumping around a little bit, but the thing that I've learned since is that you shouldn't really have an expectation of anything in your life. And it's like a Western mindset to say, "Well, I'm guaranteed this, or this is what the next 20 years of my life is going to be." It's more about living in the moment and accepting everything that comes your way and understanding that that's part of it. So after those couple of months of being very depressed, it was the first time I had felt really immense depression in my life, sleeping a lot and closing the curtains of my house. And I got into therapy. And I think that was probably the first thing that started to turn things around for me.

And a therapist said, "When Einstein would have a problem, he would spend 99% of the time thinking about the question, not the answer." And so I applied that to my situation, and I thought, "Okay, what is the question in my situation?" Well, the question I'd been asking myself for the last couple of months was, "God, why did you let this happen to me?" And as I pondered that question, I realized I've had this condition since I was born, and it's been in my DNA, and nothing 'happened' to me. You know? This was always a part of me. And it wasn't necessarily that suddenly this train had slammed into my life. It was just I became aware of a truth that was concealed to me for a time. And so that really shifted my mindset on blindness. The big epiphany was this, which I think I've subconsciously thought about for the last five years, or actually six years now that I've been blind, is: I'm not being stolen away from the life I was supposed to have. I'm becoming the person I was meant to be. And that is a completely life-changing way to perceive your blindness. Because if you have a degenerative condition like I do, you can wake up every day and feel like you're being pulled from something that you want to hold on to. Whereas if you learn to look towards blindness and not to fear it and to talk to other blind people like we're doing right now, which I did in that first year, it's like, what if you are becoming blind, not going blind?

I talked to this really amazing guy. I don't know if you guys know him. His name is Will Butler. He works at Apple now, and he used to be... I'm trying to think of all the places he's worked, but he's just this amazing blind guy in California, and I talked to him, and he wrote this essay where he's like, "People say the term going blind, and it almost... The connotation is like, you're going AWOL or you're going crazy, and it's scary. But it's like, what if you're becoming blind? You're not going blind. It's not a departure, it's an arrival." So I think in a weird, different way, that's what I had come to through this therapy. So yeah, that's when everything changed for me.

Lee Pugsley
There's so many beautiful things about what you said and just about that perspective of not thinking about it as I'm being stolen away from my life or from who I'm supposed to be, but I'm actually becoming who I'm supposed to be and thinking of it as an arrival place. I think that that mindset that you have goes a long way. With the work that you're doing, it's very evident that you've adopted that mindset and it's really affected you in a positive way and really given you the strength and the willpower and the determination and just the perspective, I guess, is the best word to say, to move forward in a way where you can still hold your head high and not in a way of shame. And obviously that comes over time and that comes with a lot of grief. Like you were saying, I can definitely relate to the grief. I lost a significant part of my vision right after I graduated college. I was directing theater at the time and doing production management, and both of those are also very visual fields. So I definitely had to go through that grieving process, and it took me years to come to a place of acceptance and embracing the blindness rather I've been running from it and trying to pretend like it wasn't there.

Sheridan O'Donnell
Yeah. And I still, I'll qualify it that I still am... Because I have nine degrees of central vision, basically, quickly, the way my RP, retinitis pigmentosa, works is you start slowly losing your peripheral vision and your central vision is shrinking. It's like you're looking through a tunnel. And so I still have nine degrees of central vision, which is very clear. This little orb of vision I have is 20/20, actually. Actually, I remember going to an optometrist, and she was like, "You have better central vision than I do." So, I'm in this strange, liminal in-between. But because of that, I still have to deal with the shame. I still have to deal with the transition. I still have to deal with these micro-doses of grief and these moments where it's like, "Okay, now I can't read print anymore." Then you get to another level where you're like, "Now I can't see a movie in the way that I used to or something." And so, there are these jumps in vision loss that are challenging, but you really have to foster this sense of pride, and you have to be feeding that pride.

For me, it's like, if I'm having a bad day, I'll put on another podcast. I don't know if this is heresy to mention another blind podcast while I'm on a blind podcast, but the Four Bad Eyes podcast, which is with two blind guys I really like. Anthony Ferraro and Dan Mancina. And all they really do is just cut it up and talk. I mean, sometimes they talk about blindness, but a lot of times they're just talking about their life. And the singular thing I get from it, which sounds so simple, but is why representation matters, is like, they're just laughing. They're just joking around. They're talking about their everyday life. One of them is a father. Actually, they're both fathers. And when I listen to that, I go, "Okay, both of these guys are severely visually impaired, or however you want to put it. They have very little vision, and they're happy, and they're able to be fathers, and they're able to do the things they love." And so I say a little mantra or a little prayer to myself. It's like, "Don't think that this change that's happening to you is going to mean that you're not going to be happy anymore, or you're not going to be able to laugh anymore, or you're not going to be able to express yourself."

And since I've become blind, I've directed two feature films, and I've done my best work as a filmmaker after becoming blind. So what does that mean? A couple of years I'd probably have to reconcile that in my mind to be like, "That doesn't make sense. How could a blind filmmaker make a really good movie?" I'm less even interested in reconciling it now because I'm like, "No, I just think that we haven't given blind people opportunities and put them in positions to be able to do these things." It shouldn't be surprising that a blind person can make a movie, and a good one at that, which I believe my films are.

Alex Howard
I definitely resonate with that, especially when you're saying each, "Oh, now I can't read print." Even for me, I can't read billboards, or I can't see license plates, or noticing the things that you used to be able to do that you can't anymore. There are those grief steps. But then, yeah, I really like that you turned it around the way you did, and you've been phrasing it really well. But Sheridan, I wanted to ask you, what are your two films about that you've directed since you went blind?

Sheridan O'Donnell
My debut feature is called Little Brother, and it is a narrative film. The quick pitch on it is, it's about two brothers who, they go on this road trip from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Seattle, Washington, right after the older brother has attempted suicide. The younger brother has been recruited by his overbearing father, who's played by JK Simmons, to go pick up his older brother and drive him across the country and bring him home for a family intervention. And that was inspired by when I was 24, one of my very good friends died by suicide. And he had been perpetually suicidal his whole life. From about 15 to 32, he was attempting multiple times. And after he passed away, his dad had shared some of his journals online, and the language in the journals was very clear-headed, and it was very like, "I don't really want to be alive. And one day, all my safety hatches that I have to catch me from killing myself are going to fail." And it was just a lot of clear-headed thoughts about it. And I had never seen suicide talked about in that way. To me, I'd only learned about suicide probably through movies, where it was just this rash, impulsive reaction to a major traumatic event in your life, like somebody gets a divorce or gets fired from their job or yada, yada, yada.

And I didn't even know as his friend that he had quietly been struggling struggling all these years because he was jovial, because he was funny, because of all these things. So I really was grieving him. And it was a couple of years later that a family member of mine attempted suicide as well and was diagnosed bipolar, that I was like, "Okay, I go to movies, not necessarily for answers, but to process my emotions" because the greatest movies don't really provide answers. And I couldn't think of a film that really represented their experiences accurately. So it was just like, "Well, I really want to write a film that explores these things in a really frank and honest way and not undercut it with fantasy or not have it be like an overt dark comedy or something. Just have it be a pretty direct film about mental health and family. Yeah, that's my first film, and I was in the middle of development on it when I got diagnosed with my condition. And so for a brief time, I had to pause on it and was like, "Oh, what am I going to do now? I don't know if I can make this movie."

And then another shout out I want to make on this podcast is when I was like, "Okay", that epiphany after therapy of being like, "I am blind and I own it now." I then began to think, "Okay, well, maybe I can be a blind filmmaker." And so I opened up the Internet, I typed in 'blind filmmaker,' and the first name that popped was Rodney Evans, who is a filmmaker with RP who lives in Harlem. And he was diagnosed at 30 in the late '90s in the middle of his first feature. And he had, without basically without precedent said, "I'm going to keep making this movie," or at least that's what I think, because he did finish that movie. And it went to Sundance, and it got a special jury prize. And he's been making movies low vision, legally blind for the last 20 years. And so as soon as I had Rodney's story, it was pretty quick that I was like, "Okay, I'm going to make Little Brother, which is the name of my debut feature, and I'm going to keep making movies because once I knew it was possible, then I was like, "Great, that's all I need to know."

Because then it just becomes a matter of work ethic, and I've never, ever had a problem with work ethic. At the time, before I found Rodney's story, I thought, "Well, maybe it isn't possible. It's not possible possible to be a visually impaired visual artist." And then once I had Rodney's story, I was like, "Oh, it absolutely is." And then that started the journey for me. And I got back on the horse and made that movie.

Lee Pugsley
It's funny that you mentioned Rodney because I had a film playing at the Middlebury Film Festival last year, and Rodney was there, and I actually saw a recent film that he had done. And it was really cool to be able to talk to him and connect with him. And I agree with you, talking to you and Rodney and all these other people gives me confidence in my own ability. I might be directing my first feature film this year, but for a long time, I was like, "There's no way that as a visually impaired, legally blind filmmaker, that I could direct." But hearing your story and Rodney's story and actually seeing the work played out, it definitely has given me more confidence that, "Yes, this is very possible." And just because there's a, quote unquote, physical change happening, doesn't mean that the work has to stop.

Sheridan O'Donnell
Yeah. If there's anyone visually impaired listening to this podcast or even maybe with a disability, I think, or a degenerative disability, because I think Alex, yours is progressive, right? Is that right?

Alex Howard
Yeah, it's very gradual, but yeah, it's progressive. I used to be able to read books in college and all that, and I can't do that anymore.

Sheridan O'Donnell
It's going to sound obvious, but when you're experiencing it, it feels quite intense to lose vision. But you have to distinguish that just because my sight is changing, it doesn't mean that my ability and my talent is changing, and my work ethic is changing, my artistic vision, my mind's eye is changing. And that's why Little Brother, even though I made it after becoming blind, is the best thing I've ever made because it's not correlative. I don't know if that's a word, but it doesn't correlate to that. Just because you have less vision, that doesn't mean you have less talent. Your talent can be increasing even as your vision goes down. And that's a really important thing to remember and learn. That took me a while to get a hold of. And now that I've got it, I really try to remind myself that.

Alex Howard
That's really great advice. Little Brother, did you take it to festivals and stuff, or what were the results of that?

Sheridan O'Donnell
Yeah. So we premiered at the Atlanta, the 47th Atlanta Film Festival, and we played made very, very well there, and we won the Audience Award, and then it bounced around and went to a lot of great other festivals. And we had our Midwest premiere and our West Coast premiere and stuff, and we won some awards. And basically, one of the big things that came out of it beyond just being such a gratifying artistic experience for me is, Vince Gilligan actually got to see it and really, really liked it. And it was through him liking the movie is how basically I got my agents at CAA. And so I now have representation. And looking back on it, it's like I was coming from New Mexico, so I didn't even know what was possible and what wasn't possible. But I made that movie for a million dollars with no representation, which is pretty unheard of a lot of the time, especially considering JK Simmons is in it. So I'm really proud of the movie. And every filmmaker's dream is for it to go to the Sundance and stuff, and it didn't do that, but it did everything that I wanted it to do and more.

And most of all, it connected with people who have experienced mental health issues, whether it's a family member or whether it's the person themselves. In Atlanta, there was such a swell of emotion from the audience, and a lot of them came up and spoke to me and were moved to tears just talking about how it made them feel seen.

Lee Pugsley
That's awesome. And what I love about that is it wasn't so much that the people that came up and talked to you were like, "Oh, you're visually impaired or you're legally blind." That's the thing that they're stuck on. But it's like, "No, you're just a filmmaker who made a film in a very human way that connected with us." And I think that that's the most beautiful thing about all of that, too.

Sheridan O'Donnell
Yeah, I have a quick anecdote about that. So when I talk to Will Butler, I'll shout him out again. He told me so many me incredible things about blindness. And one of the things he told me was like, "Just because you're blind and disabled now doesn't mean you have to make films about disability and blindness." He said, "What films do you want to make?" I said, "Well, I have this one called Little Brother, and I have this--." He's like, "Then keep making those films." And so it's important to understand that people don't realize this, but it's like, I'm extremely proud of being blind, and it's a culture. It's not just a disability. But it's also one of the smallest things about my identity. I'm half Korean, I'm from the Southwest. I'm from a working class family. There's so many aspects to my personality that have nothing to do with blindness. The types of movies I like, what I read. I'm not reading books about blindness all day. I'm reading plays and things that are different. And in Atlanta, when I came up and introduced the film, I made sure to not mention my blindness because I knew, Lee, it was going to be what you said, that people would go, "Wow, amazing. Blind people can make movies." Which detracts from the conversation I wanted them to be having, which is about mental health and about the story, not the filmmaker. And afterwards, at the after-party, I made a little speech to everyone, and a lot of the audience followed us to the bar and stuff. I included at that point, I had gone on quite a five-year journey, which included becoming disabled and becoming blind in the process of it. And after that, a bunch of film students ran up to my DP, and my DP later told me this. I wasn't around him, but he said, "Yeah, a bunch of film students came up to me and they said, 'How is it working with Sheridan? What does it like to work with a blind director? How does he even make movies? And what does he...'" And then Connor, God love Conor Murphy, such a great DP, but he just said, "You know, Sheridan's blindness is the least interesting thing about him." And he didn't want to talk about that. And to me, that in a lot of ways represents how I feel about this. Yes, I'm proud to be blind, and I'm outspoken about it because we need representation. Rodney's story changed my life. And so if I'm outspoken, who am I influencing by being out and about about it? But other than that, there's so much I want to say that has nothing to do with disability.

Lee Pugsley
It's really interesting that you mentioned all of these things because I think sometimes, and meant with the utmost level of respect and love to the blind and low vision community and to the disabled community at large. It's interesting because sometimes, and maybe this is only self-imposed pressure, I'll feel that, "What disabled stories do I want to tell?" And once again, I think that comes because representation absolutely matters, and there's not enough of it on all fronts in the entertainment industry that does need to change. But sometimes I feel like I can limit myself by thinking, "I can only tell disabled stories." And so more so lately, I've just been like, "What stories do I want to tell?" Whether or not they deal with something disability related or not, just what human stories do I want to tell? And I found that opened up a lot more possibilities for places I could go with the stories that I write or the things that I look into producing now. But once again, emphasizing representation absolutely matters, and it is so important, too. I think it can be tricky knowing what that balance looks like sometimes because it's like wanting to have pride as an artist, wanting to put your stamp of identity on that, also wanting to, sometimes you get in that people-pleasing mentality and wanting to please the community as well, and just wanting to please everyone, yourself and everyone around you, too. And it can be that tricky thing of, "How do I navigate this?"

Sheridan O'Donnell
Yeah, I have so many thoughts about this stuff. It's interesting because you actually just made me think of something, too. At this point, I'm pretty raw and honest about disability in film and what it's going to take for films to break through. Because I'm frustrated, if I'm honest. Last night was the Golden Globes. There wasn't a visibly disabled person anywhere, not in any of the films, and in my view, not even in the room.

Alex Howard
In fact, Kate Hudson played someone with a disability, right? And she doesn't have one. Was she nominated, Lee?

Sheridan O'Donnell
She was. She was, yeah. I didn't realize she was playing someone with a disability. There's a constant conversation about, "How do we break through? How do we break through? How do we break through?" and stuff. My only answer would be just everyone's answer needs to be their own in terms of what feels right to them. For some people, it might be telling stories involving disabled characters. For others, it may not involve them at all. But I will say on the representation front, Lee, it's like if you made a movie and it was about something else other than disability, you making that as a blind artist is representation. You're already changing the narrative by making that movie. Same goes for all of us. And in some ways, it's like we definitely shouldn't tell ourselves that we're not allowed to do that because at the end of the day, too, when you get to the upper echelons of film, it is about star power. It is about the economics of a movie. And so you can get a movie made with a star. And that's what's difficult right now about disabled film, too, is we need those stars. We need those people that are bankable. It doesn't mean that we can't make those films, but it probably limits, in my opinion, the way those movies look. You'd be hard-pressed to make a movie with a ginormous budget.

But then the strange thing I'll just add quickly is I wrote that film, and then I made a documentary feature called Rising Phoenix that we can chat about if you guys want. But the thing I'm writing right now involves blindness. It came to me in a very organic way. I wasn't sitting and like, "Okay, I got to write a film for the community because it's time." It was just like, at that point, I had been three, four years blind and it was a bigger part of my identity. It happened to intersect with themes that I'm very passionate about, which are like, under scenes, stories and these veins of history that have never been opened and exploring genre in an interesting way. And so I started to conceive this film that was involving a blind teenager, and it intersects the untold story of the institutionalization period of disability in the '60s and '70s. I was like, "Oh, disability is like, now I'm ready to talk about it in an organic way." But the next thing I write after may not be disabled at all, but it's interesting.

Alex Howard
No, that's all really interesting. And going back a little bit when you were talking about disclosing, it's really interesting how when someone knows, it's like they're treating you so differently sometimes. It's like sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it's a bad thing. It's funny because I think all three of us could pass for sighted in some respect. I usually have my cane with me, so people know. Just because I have sometimes little interactions where, oh, if they don't I'm blind, it's like, "Oh, is this guy drunk? What's going on?" I was working at Warner Brothers over the winter dealing with customers, and I don't have my cane out because I'm sitting. So, there were sometimes I felt the need to be like, "Hey, sorry, I'm visually impaired. My friend next to me is going to help you in a minute." Then it'd be a complete change from just a regular customer. I had one lady be like, "I'm so sorry, you're doing a great job." It's like, "I don't need that. I don't need you to pander to me. I'm just telling you why I can't help you with this right now."

But yeah, it's weird how once people find out, there's a major switch in their brain.

Sheridan O'Donnell
Well, to thread it back to what we were talking, Alex, it's like, that's why representation matters.

Alex Howard
Yeah.

Sheridan O'Donnell
That's why on-screen representation matters because--

Alex Howard
Yeah, you're right. Because if they saw it more, it wouldn't be so weird, right?

Sheridan O'Donnell
That and what have they seen? Have they seen the scent of a woman where Al Pacino says he wants to kill himself because he's blind? Have they seen a movie where a blind person is always guided by someone and always walked around like they're a child? That's why representation... That's what lights the fire in my gut that makes me want to make this movie is I want to do a radical depiction of blindness that shows how independent and capable blind people are. Because I'm not even... Like you said, Alex, I could pass for sighted, and I also can get around without a cane. It's like, no, at this point, I've met people who are guide dog users and who are cane users and have to have the cane. It's extraordinary how much they can do and all the things that they're incredible at, and even some of the special skills they have in terms of being able to listen to a screen reader at 300 words per minute. So I started thinking, "Oh, whoa, what if I pour some of this stuff off into a character, and that character uses those skills as a way to solve a case."

But the concealing thing, I will say, even though I can pass for sighted, I've just now dipped into, I don't know where you guys are with this. I've just now dipped into, I want to have the cane out at all times because it's pretty stressful to not have it out. I'm dodging things and not trying to hit my head and trip on things. And for me, I've learned I don't like to go into a room and then be under pressure to decide, "When is the right time? When does enough fear build up that I should pull this cane out?" My new strategy is before I go into the room, I just pull it out. And the first way that people experience me is as a blind person, because you know what? I am a blind person, and I don't want to be ashamed of that anymore. I want them to meet me as a blind person because if I end up making a movie with them, I'm going to be blind on set. I'm going to have adaptations in how I approach the work. I'm going I don't...

And that really has to do a lot with just my personality. I'm the type of person that wears his heart on his sleeve and wants to be vulnerable and is like, "This is all of me, good, bad, and ugly. This is who I am. Take it or leave it." And blindness has now become a part of that. But I've always been very vulnerable in everything I do. And I think if it's right for a blind person, anyone listening, I really recommend that they just get vulnerable about it because you can... I have had moments, like you said, Alex, where someone can act a little weird. But I would say for me, the overwhelming majority is people are chill. People don't really make a big deal out of it.

Alex Howard
Especially using the cane around people move out of your way. It's so much easier. I've definitely found I used to want, a few years ago, want to blend in, and now I'm more like, "No." I think it's way better going in where people know, which is why it was so weird at Warner Brothers, because all of a sudden I'm dealing with all these people coming up to the counter and they don't know. When I can't do something, then I feel the need to explain. It's like, I almost wanted to buy a pin I could wear to just be like, "Hey, just so you know, I'm visually impaired, and that's what's up here." But I totally agree with you. Most of the time, it's very positive.

Lee Pugsley
And one of the things that I always say, or at least my philosophy for myself, and I try to encourage other people within the community as well, is: Showing up as half of the battle. We think about visibility on screen, which will make a huge impact. But just having visibility for ourselves in the spaces that we're a part of, whether that's film festivals, whether that's a studio lot, whether that's the grocery store, whether that's any of those spaces, just being there and allowing people to see, "Hey, this is who we are. We carry ourselves with confidence. We're proud of who we are. We're not apologizing for being in the space, but we're here." I think that goes a long way as well. And I think the more that people are used to the more that people can just accept it as normalized. Then to your point, too, about going into a room and just introducing yourself as, "Hey, I'm here and I'm blind." What I've noticed for myself about that in different networking events or things is maybe that's something that people are aware of or interested in right off the bat. But by the end of the night or by the end of our conversation, that's the least of what we're talking about. That's the least of what they're thinking about. And I think that just... I don't know. I think it just helps in a lot of ways to just own it and just to give ourselves that visibility because people aren't going to fixate on that forever, even if they do for a moment or two. And a lot of people don't, too. They're just like, "Cool."

Sheridan O'Donnell
Yeah, I totally agree with you, Lee, about showing up. And I will say there was definitely a couple of years in LA where I was averse to socializing because my blindness. I was like, I'd get dread when thinking about going to a dark, loud bar for a networking event, being like, "Oh, this is going to suck." But I've tried to make a point to just put myself out there more. Because like you said, it's like that one-to-one education or whatever it is, where as soon as they meet you and they go, "Oh, blind people can do this or that, or they're cool or whatever," they walk away changed. It's why I'm grateful to you guys and grateful to anybody in the film industry who's blind, because it's like you guys are maybe talking to people that I'll run into at a later date, and I won't have to go through that or whatever. If you can imagine looking at Los Angeles from a map view and it's seeing all the red dots turn to blue, it's like we're slowly, one by one, meeting by meeting, getting people to have a different perception of blindness. And what I wanted to tell Alex when we're talking about what I've found now, just starting basically in the last couple of months is, "Okay, I was afraid that people have a misperception about what a blind filmmaker can do." So I was always scared to bring my cane out because I was like, "If I bring it out, they're going to go like, 'Well, this guy can't direct television. This guy can't direct the movie that he wants X million dollars for or whatever.'" And now I've realized that, "Okay, that may be true. They might have that perception. I can't help it." You know, representation hasn't caught up enough for them to know that. But guess what? I can change that perception. So I was at a premiere party for something, and I was standing next to a guy, and I've got my cane out, and we start talking, and he's an older guy, and he's like, "Oh, yeah. I'm a TV director. I've directed all this TV." And then I I think he just looks at me and thinks, "Oh, he must be some person's family member." Sheridan just got brought along. And I'm like, "Oh, yeah. I just shadowed on the Mariah Murphy initiative, and I've directed two features, and I'm going to be directing TV soon." And I watched his face like, go, "Oh." I just watched it switch, where he's like, "Wow, I didn't--" You know? And that's the thing. It's like, yeah, it's a little uncomfortable. It's not great to walk into spaces where people misperceive you, but I'm starting to get like, "Okay, let me get a little..." You got to be pretty fiery about it.

I will say this, too, because I think about us, and we're all visible, and we're all in the film business. But the people that I'm really concerned about, actually, when it comes to the blind community, is the people in Middle America, the mom with three kids who is losing her vision and she doesn't want to leave the house anymore, and she's moved from doing her nursing job because she doesn't think she can do it to living on disability. And something I think about the blind community is we struggle, and maybe that's too harsh a word, but one of the challenges for our community is because of inaccessibility, because of these societal perceptions, we can't congregate in the the same way that other communities can. And so we're isolated and we're individualized in this way. And I think a lot of it still has to do with... When I was on my RP Facebook group and I listen to the chatter on it, a lot of it is people afraid to go out. It's afraid of that perception. It's less to do with what they can and can't do. It's more like, "I don't want to go out into the world because it's too hard."

And I don't blame them for having that feeling because I know that, and that's what ableism is. But it's like, "Okay, well, if I'm positioned in this life to be able to make these movies and to advocate for those people, those kinds of blind people, and take the confidence and the tenacity I have and put that to use, then that would be worth it." And hopefully, through those movies existing, like the one that I'm trying to write, what if that came out? What if people go, "Oh, wow, look at this. It's a strong depiction of a blind person." You know? Or suddenly everyone in the world, because they see it, or everyone in America because they see it, goes like, "Well, now I have a bit more understanding of blind people." And maybe that encourages more people to open the door and step outside and engage with life again, because that's how the change is going to happen. You know what I mean? It's like this weird combination of the interplay between representation and then also real life society, then mirroring it, and then it goes back and forth and back and forth.

Lee Pugsley
Yeah, I think that all of that is so well articulated. And I think that for any of us that are in the spaces that we're in, hopefully, we can help -- just by being present in the spaces and having those conversations -- we can help people within our community and remind ourselves that we have power over our narrative and not just the creative narratives that we, as filmmakers or storytellers want to tell and put out in the world, but just as human beings, that we still have power over our own narratives, over the stories that we write for our daily lives, for those daily moments in life. I think that once I came to that point of realizing, "Okay, there's still a level of control I have, even though it feels like so many things are out of my control." But I can control my perspective. I can control a lot of things still. And choosing for myself, I'm going to rewrite this narrative. I think that that was very empowering to me. And hopefully, as a filmmaker, if I can give that to or help encourage that with anyone, whether in the space or out of the space in our community, then let's go.

Alex Howard
Yeah. No, I totally agree with both of you. And I think it's funny that you're talking about we're dispelling the stereotype as we meet people as we go through LA with our canes and stuff. And I've definitely seen, yeah, like you said, that switch with people, even just simply going to the movies. I've had people come up to me, impressed that I'm out and about. You know what I mean?

Lee Pugsley
Sheridan, this has been such a great conversation. And we will definitely be having you on again because there is so much more that we can talk about. I feel like we barely scratched the surface. But I guess I'll just ask you this as we go. Do you have any advice for blind or low vision creatives that are wanting to get into the film space?

Sheridan O'Donnell
Let's see. I think that my advice is: "Connect with people in the blind community who have positive attitudes." Because you can connect with people who have a really despairing attitude about blindness. You can bring that into your circle, and then you can have a despairing attitude about blindness. And I was very, very fortunate that the first two blind people I connected with were Andrew Leland, who is a Pulitzer Prize nominated writer and just a very strong-willed, confident, proud blind person, and Will Butler, who I've mentioned before. And they gave me the feeling that I could do anything, and that even though they weren't filmmakers themselves, they made me feel like what they told me, literally, "You can still make movies." And I think the reality is there's next to nothing besides maybe flying an airplane that a blind person can't do. Remember that if you feel weird and you feel this pressure that it's not possible, remember that you're up against hundreds of years of ableism and what I call indoctrination, which is, we haven't been allowed in these spaces. And so we're not on TV, and there aren't books written about us, and we're not leading these things.

But that's my feeling about movies is just because we haven't participated really in a meaningful way in cinema for the last 110 years doesn't mean that we don't belong there. Because what I've learned in my journey is that it's not an oxymoron to say "blind filmmaker," because blind people are visual. They have vision. They have ideas. They watch television. They watch movies. They use audio description, they have inner sight. And just because we haven't been allowed in that space, we're at a very interesting tipping point in culture where I think that there's at least going to be enough open-mindedness to give us a shot. Just make sure you just feed that confidence, build a good community, and understand that just because maybe you're the only one or it hasn't been done, it's possible. And that's another thing I like to say to a lot of, when I get to do these talks to disabled people, including blind people, and I say, "Okay, you can view your situation as like, 'Wow, this sucks. I'm the only one.' There's only four blind filmmakers in the world. This sucks. I wish there were more of us because I feel very alone." 

I've learned in the last year or two is I flip that now and I say, "This is exciting. I'm a pioneer. I'm a forerunner of a movement of cinema that has never happened. We are ground-breaking artists, and we are going to be doing things that have never been done." And that's really exciting. We get to write the first pages of this chapter in cinema. What an incredible honor that is. And then I said it earlier, but I just want to reiterate it because I learned this just in the fall, shadowing through the Ryan Murphy HALF Initiative is. I kept telling myself, "This is impossible." Because shadowing on a TV show was pretty intense. I wasn't taking my cane out. I was afraid to because I was the only visibly disabled person out of 150 people. Then eventually, I took the cane out. What I learned, because the cane changed everything, is, "Okay, why did I... I kept telling myself, 'Wow, this is impossible. You're crazy. You're the only person on the Disney lot who's blind. You're crazy, you're crazy. This is impossible.'" Then I realized, "Just because something hasn't been done doesn't mean it's impossible. Just means it hasn't been done yet."

So, Lee, when you said, "I'm not sure I can make a feature because I've never made a feature, and I don't know a lot of blind people that haven't made features." It's like, that doesn't mean it's impossible. Just hasn't been done yet. So whatever blind people want to do, and to me, it doesn't matter. I know I'm low vision, and so maybe there's a bias towards me because I am partially sighted, but I actually firmly believe because one day I could lose all my sight with this disease. One day I could be, basically have little to no light perception. In order to move forward, I have to believe that I can make movies even totally blind. And that's what I believe. I believe with adaptation and audio description and all these things that are going to happen, that you can be a totally blind filmmaker and make movies. And if anything, I see it from an artistic point of view that says, "I'm excited related to see a totally blind filmmaker's film because I'm drawing on a lot of convention to make my movie. But what does someone who's been blind since birth, what is their visual imagination? If they don't have an understanding of color, how will they communicate? What would those movies look like?" As audience members or as a lover of film myself, I want to watch that movie, and I believe that other people do, too. It's just about believe in yourself, and that takes time. So I want to be the first person to say, "I believe in you."

Lee Pugsley
That's awesome and really wise words and well put. And then, Sheridan, where can people find you online if they want to connect or get in touch at all?

Sheridan O'Donnell
I have a website with my work, and there's a little way to email me. And it's just www dot S-h-e-r-i-d-a-n-o-d-o-n-n-e-l-l dot com. It's my name. I don't know if you guys can put a link in or something. But yeah, feel free to contact me. I'm always happy to talk to aspiring filmmakers because a lot of experienced filmmakers have mentored me and changed the trajectory of my career. So I'm happy to talk to people.

Alex Howard
We'll definitely put that in the description and link to your website.

Lee Pugsley
And if you want to get in touch with me and Alex or want to reflect on anything that we've talked about today, please email us at DarkRoomFilmCast@gmail.com. Once again, that's DarkRoomFilmCast@gmail.com. And you can also follow us on Instagram @DarkRoomFilmCast and subscribe to our YouTube channel @DarkRoomFilmCast.

Alex Howard
Yeah. And as always, we'd like to thank Matt Lauterbach and All Senses Go for helping me make captions of this episode possible, as well as BlindCAN that helped with editing. We'd like to thank Sheridan for being on the podcast as well. This is so much fun.

Sheridan O'Donnell
Thank you, Alex and Lee. It was such a pleasure. I'm excited to come back because, like you said, we could talk forever.

Lee Pugsley
Absolutely. Can't wait. And thank you out there for listening. We'll see you here next time on The Dark Room.

Alex Howard
Take care, guys.