Charlie Leversha

Short story long

When I was six, I watched Batman and the Joker’s final confrontation being filmed at the bottom of Trump Tower in Chicago, for a film that would soon be known as “The Dark Knight”.

I grew up with a love for telling stories, but living in Chicago, I didn’t know many people who made them. So in 2019, I moved to Los Angeles to study screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University, with plans to become a writer-director and learn how to tell stories at scale.

COVID had other plans for me, however, and my campus shut down in March 2020. With the choice of either going back to my mom’s in Chicago or to my dad’s in Melbourne, I chose the latter, assuming I’d only be there for a few weeks. As Australia started to put nationwide lockdowns in place while I was there, prohibiting me from leaving the country, I realized that I might be in for an indefinite stay.

Short Films

One night in October 2020, between my 3am and 4am classes (due to the 18-hour time difference between LA and Melbourne), I decided I would write a short film script just for the sake of it. I was fed up with COVID, and I realized that nobody was going to build my film career for me. So I grabbed my nearest notebook and just wrote a two-scene, silent short film. And while the quality certainly reflected the circumstances within which it was written, in five minutes I had the script for my first short film, “Blood.”

Melbourne had lots of talented crew, people with decades more experience than me (e.g. by having worked on the big Hollywood movies that shot there in the early aughts like Moulin Rouge, Mission: Impossible, Star Wars II, etc.). But they were also stuck in lockdown and just wanted to work, which meant they were somewhat receptive to my cold emails, inviting them to shoot my short film with me. With a lot of luck, I went into the shoot with a team of fifteen people, all of whom I learned from in ways that LMU never could have taught me. After we wrapped the 2-day shoot of “Blood” in January 2021, I realized I had essentially built my own film school.

A few months later, I spun up another short film, “Speech”, about racism in schools, and took most of the same team with me to make it. Working with a dozen child actors, a shoestring budget, and shifting COVID restrictions was not the easiest hand to play with. But we endured every challenge and completed the 3-day shoot by the end of 2021.

Fast-forward to May 2022, and “Speech” was selected as a top-10 finalist at Sydney Film Festival, the most prestigious festival in the country. I was the youngest-nominated director in my category.

I Fall to Pieces — My First Feature Film

Sydney Film Festival left me with two new beliefs: that what I’d been learning in the Australian film industry was more valuable than my studies at LMU, and that I now had a real chance to make my first feature (read: full length) film.

The idea for the feature had been forming for a while. During lockdown, several of my family friends in Melbourne had gotten divorced, and I’d found myself strangely affected by their isolation despite not at all sharing their experience. I was also taking a French class at the Alliance Française, where the teachers, mostly middle-aged French women, described moving to Australia as a profoundly lonely experience, hitting a cultural divide that would never really close. I had nothing obvious in common with either group, but I think by ending up in Melbourne during COVID, cut off from most people my age and any signs of my life from even a few years prior, I felt like I understood both of them. So I started writing a rom-com about a French woman who suddenly gets divorced at 60, using her story to explore the social isolation facing people in Australia in later life.

After SFF, I took a leave of absence from university, started my own production company, chased meetings with producers and distributors, and received a long education in rejection. After the umpteenth “no”, I gave myself an ultimatum. I didn’t wait for anyone else when I made “Blood” or “Speech”; my ability to organize and lead was what got me over the line. Was I really going to wait for the next one?

So, taking that attitude, I decided I would bootstrap it. I would use a combination of savings, work wages, and “begging, borrowing, and stealing” to write, produce, and direct my first feature film. I wasn’t going to be stopped.

And sure enough, I managed to make it happen. By June 2024, after nearly 2 years of writing and prep, I had assembled a six-figure budget, a team of nearly 40, and was going into production for 19 days on my first feature film. The title was “I Fall to Pieces.” I was 23.

Reckoning

Making “Pieces” was like falling down a tree and hitting every branch. I had an actor who misrepresented their experience, which made numerous scenes far more difficult to direct and created unanticipated tension within the crew. What’s more, the production went over budget. Which means “I” went over budget, and the financial gap was mine to close. From August 2024 to January 2025, I was working 60-hour weeks in hospitality jobs (typically mornings in a cafe and evenings in a restaurant) to pay it off.

On January 2, 2025, I was laid off from the restaurant, for reasons you’d probably expect: “You’re showing up to work exhausted. You’re not moving as fast as the other crew. We’re just not seeing enough improvement.” And so I had my salary cut in half during the quietest hiring period of the year.

I had called myself a filmmaker for years, but I had no obvious path to pay for post-production on “Pieces”, no sustainable way to support myself financially, no idea of what a career in film looked like in 2025, and serious doubt about whether I wanted to continue in film at all.

Michigan

I decided it was a good time to return to university and get my Bachelor’s. I packed up my life in Australia and enrolled at the University of Michigan in Fall 2025 to study Data Science and learn everything I could about this thing called AI. I never knew anyone in tech growing up, but I was becoming more interested in startups, and I wondered if my background in storytelling might be more valuable as the technical bar to entry seemed to be lowering.

Needless to say, the pivot has been harder than I expected, both academically and in terms of identity. But the things I’ve learned and the people I’ve met have more than made up for the sacrifices.

I’m on track to have “Pieces” ready for private screenings and to finish my studies in Summer 2027. As for what comes next, while I have a general idea of what kind of role I might be a good fit for (something along the lines of growth, marketing, comms, storytelling, branding, etc.), my guiding principle is the following: I’m looking for companies that have stories worth telling.

If this sounds like something you’re building, or you’d just like to chat, you can reach me on any of my socials.