Ilse Will Say

Tommy Martin is a Chicago based actor, filmmaker, and musician who has basically worked every job on a set at some point, and honestly it kind of exhausted me just hearing about it. We start with an unreasonable amount of hair talk (his, not mine) before getting into how a random DIY filmmaker workshop years ago quietly kicked off both our careers, his very unexpected path from a music business degree to Second City to booking his ...

This week, Ilse sits down with John David Wolfe, a DGA member and Chicago based producer whose two decade career as a location scout and manager put him behind the scenes on Spider-Man 2, High Fidelity, Proof, and Rhythm + Flow before he made the leap to producing his own work.

John talks through his path from West Des Moines, Iowa to Chicago, landing High Fidelity as his very first studio credit, and what he'd tell someone trying t...

Connar Brown Sprenger is an actor, puppeteer, voice actor, and award winning filmmaker who somehow makes all four look easy. She joins Ilse to talk growing up between Tokyo, London, and Atlanta, playing all seven brothers in one production of Grimm, and the practical, gross, wonderfully weird world of her short film Grilled Cheese.

Catch Grilled Cheese on the festival circuit:

TromaDance Film Festival (New York), September 4-6. Delaw...

Veronica Miles has spent over 25 years inside the business of film exhibition, running festivals, theaters, and now the American launch of a ticketing platform. On this episode of Ilse Will Say, she and Ilse get into film festival strategy, the reality of building a career in independent cinema, and why New Orleans might be running its own kind of energy audit on everyone who moves there.

Veronica walks through how a scholarship to ...

Tony Scott-Green spent years as a corporate consultant with an entire soundtrack playing in his head before he finally let it out of the speakers. This episode is about what happens when you actually listen to the thing that makes you different.

Tony walks Ilse through his path from a bedroom guitarist in Scotland too anxious to play live, through decades in tech consulting, to composing scores for feature films and building sonic b...

Chicago based comedian, writer, actor, and filmmaker Miguel Lepe Jr joins Ilse for a conversation that starts with a defunct pandemic podcast and somehow ends up covering pick-me culture, immigrant parent one liners, a haunted house, and the correct way to sleep in a marriage.

Miguel opens up about learning improv at Second City almost by accident, building his sketch duo Supremo with Rich Alfonso, and starting his own production co...

Juan Luis Garcia has designed key art for Netflix, HBO, and A24, and was the art director and photographer behind Narcos: Mexico. He also built a sports media company that hit 300 million YouTube views before walking away to go back to making posters, because apparently one impressive career wasn't enough for him.

In this episode, Juan and Ilse get into:

• Growing up in North Long Beach and the early Guadalajara years
• Buying his fir...

Sofie Khan is an actor, writer, producer, and director born and raised in Chicago, with a chapter of her childhood spent in Brownsville, Texas. She's the creator of the sold out, award winning one woman show MexiStani: Growing Up Mexican and Pakistani in America, wrote and directed the short film Ground Nuts, and won $25,000 through the CBS Pipeline program for her screenplay Ochoch, money she donated straight to an LA immigration ...

Kyle walks us through his path from a rejected Catholic school film submission to editing two of his friend's short films at Tribeca, taking his own 48 Hour Film Project entry all the way to Cannes, and turning that same project into an award winning web series shot partly inside Paris's city hall. He's now a Chicago storycreator turned festival programmer, and he brings that same unfiltered honesty to Hot Cakes, where things go fr...

Before he was orchestrating for Andrea Bocelli and Renée Fleming, Tim Corpus was fixing Segways and running walking tours around downtown Chicago. On this episode, we get the full story, including the day one of his tour Segways rolled straight off a cliff into Lake Michigan.

Tim is a Filipino American composer and arts manager whose music has filled Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and the Bolshoi Theatre, and who somehow runs th...

Vishaal Desai is a writer, director, and editor with over fifteen years of experience and a career that has taken him from Mumbai to London to Chicago. He's been a producer on the Asian Academy Award-winning series Bhak, directed the acclaimed documentary Uniting Through Yoga (crowdsourced from 500 strangers around the world with no script — yes, really), and is currently finishing post-production on his short film Clothes on...

Ever wonder what actually goes into editing a film? Like the real version, not the glamorous one? This week I sat down with Marco Rosas, a Mexican-American editor based in Los Angeles who has spent over a decade cutting everything from high-end commercials to HBO's Winning Time to Sender, a psychological thriller produced by Jamie Lee Curtis that premiered at SXSW 2026 and had critics calling out his editing by name. By name. In pr...

Nick Cartwright is a filmmaker, DP, Meisner acting teacher, and co-founder of two Chicago production companies: Cosmic Egg Productions and Film in a Bag. He started his filmmaking journey in 2023 when he and his wife turned their honeymoon into a short film production of HP Lovecraft's "The Picture in the House." Since then he has directed two more shorts, crewed on 25 others, and is currently directing three films as part of Film ...

Derry Shillitto is a writer, director, and producer from Nottingham, England — the rebel city, as he'll tell you, birthplace of Robin Hood, D.H. Lawrence, Lord Byron, and the Luddite movement. He's the founder of Foyle River Films and the director of The Correction Unit, a dystopian sci-fi thriller about young offenders in a prison run by AI, featuring Bella Ramsey as the disembodied AI voice. Vision Films picked it up. It's ...

This one's a little different.

No guest this week - just me and my producer Jacob Cagle, flipping the mic and doing a proper debrief on the last six months. We're talking Sundance, South by Southwest, and Cannes. What worked, what didn't, and what I'd tell anyone who's scared to walk into a room full of people who seem like they belong there more than you do.

We also get into something I don't talk about enough — the real reas...

Laurena Lourenço has been backed by Film Independent, Series Fest, and the Orchid Project. She's directed festival-winning shorts, an MTV music video for Anitta, and she's currently developing her first feature, Whatever Happened to Rosa Elena? — a queer horror comedy set in Palm Springs. She's also, somehow, terrified of horror films.

We met at Sundance, had lunch, and I immediately understood why people find me intimidating....

This week on Ilse Will Say, Ilse sits down with actor, musician, wine guy, and casual full-calendar haver Jake Ferree. You’ve seen Jake on The Baxters, True Detective, and more, but this episode gets into the stuff that does not fit neatly on an IMDb page: touring with his Irish punk band Hounds of Belfast, turning pandemic drinking into actual wine knowledge, why grocery store wine might be personally attacking you, and what...

This week on Ilse Will Say, Ilse is joined by sisters Sonya and Wendy Madrigal, two Chicago artists who somehow make multi-hyphenating look genetic. Sonya is an actor, director, choreographer, and educator, while Wendy is a multidisciplinary artist, producer, puppeteer, and voiceover agent, which is exactly the kind of résumé that makes you ask, “Wait, so what exactly do you do?” in the best way.

They get into growing up...

This week on Ilse Will Say, Ilse sits down with Giselle De La Rosa, associate director at Cine Las Americas and a SXSW film festival screener, for a behind-the-scenes conversation about film festival programming, short film submissions, festival curation, and what makes a film stand out fast. Giselle shares what it’s like to watch hundreds of documentary shorts, why the first 30 seconds of a short film can reveal so much, and...