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 film that would soon be known as “The Dark Knight”.

I grew up with a love for telling stories, but I didn’t know many people who made them, much less at scale. In 2019, I moved to Los Angeles to study screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University. I was going to become a writer-director.

COVID had other plans for me, however, and my campus shut down in March 2020. With two options — back to my mom’s in Chicago or over to my dad’s in Melbourne — I chose Melbourne, assuming I’d be there 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.

Speech

One night in October 2020, between my 3am and 4am classes (18-hour time difference), I decided I would write a short film. It could be two scenes long. It could be silent. Anything. Within five minutes I had an outline for my first film, “Blood.”

Melbourne had talented crew, people with decades more experience than me, who were also stuck in lockdown and just wanted to work. That meant they were willing to take a chance on a random American kid with a weird little silent film who’d cold-emailed them. I went into the shoot with a team of fifteen professionals, all of whom I learned from in ways LMU never could have taught me. And after we wrapped the 2-day shoot of “Blood,” I realized I had accidentally built my own film school.

I took much of the same team and made “Speech” later that year, a short film about racism in Australian classrooms. 12 child actors, a shoestring budget, and shifting COVID restrictions were not an easy hand to play with. But we endured every challenge and completed the shoot. In May 2022, “Speech” was selected as a top-10 finalist at the Sydney Film Festival. I was the youngest-nominated director in my category.

I Fall to Pieces

SFF left me with two new beliefs: that what I’d been building in Australia, completely apart from LMU, had become more valuable than staying in university, and that I now had a real chance to get my first feature made.

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 genuinely affected by their isolation despite not sharing their experience. I’d also taken a French class at the Alliance Française, where the teachers, mostly middle-aged French women, described moving to Australia as profoundly lonely, a cultural divide that never fully closed. I had nothing obvious in common with either group. But both situations stayed with me. So I started writing a rom-com about a French woman getting 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, chased meetings with producers, and received a long education in rejection. After the umpteenth no, I gave myself an ultimatum. I hadn’t waited for anyone else when I made “Blood” or “Speech”; my own ability to organize and lead was what got those over the line. Was I really going to wait for the next one?

So, taking the same attitude from my two shorts, I decided that I would start my own production company, use a combination of my savings, work wages, and begging, borrowing, and stealing to write, produce, and direct my first feature film. It was inevitable.

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, titled “I Fall to Pieces”. I was 23.

Reckoning

The production went over budget. An actor had misrepresented their experience, which made several scenes far more difficult to direct and created tension with the crew I hadn’t anticipated. The financial gap was mine to close. From August 2024 through January 2025, I was working 60-hour weeks in hospitality jobs (mornings in a cafe, evenings in a restaurant) to pay it off.

On January 2, 2025, I was laid off from the restaurant. I had called myself a filmmaker for years, but I was running on fumes with no clear path to finish post-production on “Pieces,” no financial stability, and serious doubt about whether I wanted to keep going in film at all.

Michigan

I decided to return to university. I enrolled at the University of Michigan in Fall 2025 to study Data Science and learn everything I could about this little thing called machine learning. I never knew anyone in tech growing up, but I was becoming more interested in startups and AI, and I wondered if my background in storytelling might be of use.

The pivot has been harder than I expected, academically and in terms of identity. But the same instinct that had me writing a film at 3am in Melbourne is driving this too.

I’m now a PM intern at Wavoto, a marketing startup in Chicago, where I’m defining product strategy for their new community-commerce platform. I’m also on the marketing team at V1, Michigan’s leading startup and entrepreneurship community. And “I Fall to Pieces” is still in post-production. I haven’t abandoned it. But I have bigger things to build right now.