INTERVIEW: Matthew Simpson on Self-Financing “Before Me” and the Endurance of Independent Filmmaking
- William Glen Jones
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
The Georgia director shares behind-the-scenes info ahead of the film's premiere at Tara
“Who were you with… before me?”
This question doubles as the tagline for the independent feature Before Me, which is slated to world premiere at Atlanta’s Tara Theater on Sunday, June 14.
Before Me follows a heartbroken photographer as he falls for an aspiring writer. However, after discovering her secret past, his retroactive jealousy threatens to ruin everything they’ve built.
The film, which was shot in Carrollton, GA, with a budget of approximately $7,000, marks the feature directorial debut for 25-year-old Matthew Simpson. Yet, Simpson has been making movies, and invested in the world of cinematic storytelling, from a very young age.
Simpson cites his growing up as an only child – in the small town of Blackshear, GA – to be pivotal in his development as a filmmaker. While being left to his own devices, he found himself turning to storytelling, whether in the form of books, video games or movies, as his own sort of comfort.
Through adolescence, and especially during high school, Simpson began experimenting with his own cinematic efforts, mounting homemade short films shot on the iPhone 7, often without a script. The process was both to hone his own sense of style and craft, as well as discover what made him fall in love with movies to begin with.
“I knew that movies were something I was passionate about,” Simpson said. “I wanted to give people the feelings that movies would give me… movies that made me think about the world in a different way and offered me a different perspective.”
Simpson went on to major in film/video production at the University of West Georgia, with a minor in creative writing, fusing his innate visual understanding of the medium with a larger sense of screenwriting expertise and storytelling scope.
This is precisely where Before Me was born, and it was born partly out of a challenge.
“I was about to graduate college in 2023, having made a number of no-budget short films,” Simpson said. “I was talking to my film professor and looking to do something challenging next, and he said, ‘I think you should either raise the money for an expensive short film, or try your hand at a no-budget feature film.’”
Simpson decided to pursue the latter, knowing that the feature film format – although a path that he had not pursued before – was the best delivery system for telling a longer story with more in-depth characters, harkening back to the films and filmmakers he loved growing up, including the early works of David Fincher and Christopher Nolan.
“The type of movies that I really like to watch are those with complex characters that deal with moral or ethical dilemmas,” Simpson said.
The ethical dilemma at the heart of Before Me is the concept of retroactive jealousy, a condition where one becomes fixated and threatened by their partner’s past relationships and/or experiences.
Simpson compounds this notion in his Director’s Statement for the film, stating, “I believe that one of film’s great powers is creating space to talk about difficult topics.”
While other movies have utilized the retroactive jealousy hook before – Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy and Noah Baumbach’s Mr. Jealousy come to mind (both coincidentally from 1997) – Before Me is the first to transplant these anxious feelings into our modern dating age, where one’s romantic past can become accessible at the click of a button.
Simpson drew from his personal experiences in writing the feature-length script and cites the project as being instrumental in allowing him to confront his own brushes with retroactive jealousy. While rooted in both specificity of character and circumstance, Simpson strongly believes that audiences will find sympathy for his jealousy-stricken protagonist, played by actor Angelo Rosario.
“The more I researched, the more I realized how common it is to struggle with retroactive jealousy,” Simpson said. “Viewers hopefully have not made the same destructive decisions as the characters in Before Me, but they recognize the feelings and motivations behind those actions.”
When it came time to put the final draft into production, Simpson, once again, relied on the path set forth by his cinematic influences.
While the aforementioned Christopher Nolan has now ascended to the large-scale likes of The Odyssey and Interstellar, he began, like virtually every great filmmaker, working independently.
Nolan’s early low-budget movies, Following (1998) and Memento (2000), in addition to being critically acclaimed, have served as a creative and logistical template for many up-and-coming independent filmmakers. Simpson candidly borrowed from this template, in both crafting his morally ambiguous screenplay and in thinking about Before Me’s production in a holistic sense, from inception (pun intended) to release.
Simpson attempted to hew toward Nolan’s budgetary model on Following, – approximately $6,000 (the budget of Before Me, impressively, only exceeded this amount by $1,000) – as well as follows his production template of shooting solely on weekends with a limited crew, both keeping costs low and properly maintaining the intimacy of Before Me’s scope.
In addition to filming the movie in Carrollton, where the University of West Georgia is located, Simpson’s volunteer crew largely derived from his alma mater, as well as students and alumni from the Georgia Film Academy and Georgia State University.
He expressed his gratitude for not only the cast and crew’s artistic contributions, but for their consistency and professionalism throughout the production process, which occurred on weekends from Jan. to May 2025, barring a two-week hiatus for spring break.
“The big challenge was endurance,” Simpson said. “What helped us get to the finish line was that we never tried to do too much during a given weekend. We were able to take our time and get things done in a way where we wound up satisfied at the end of each day.”
This endurance sustained through the post-production process, where Simpson diligently worked alongside editor Kendall Veasey to shape Before Me into a finished product.
Simpson has been and remains candid about the harsh realities of not only producing and editing, but releasing a self-financed film into the larger cinematic ecosystem, which he has documented on a monthly basis via a free, subscriber-based newsletter under his Absolution Productions umbrella.
In the newsletter, Simpson provides a comprehensive first-hand account of the various intricacies and often unnoticed details that go into making a film, even on this relatively small budgetary scale.
One challenge he extensively reported on was the post-production process, which he points to as the most eye-opening step of his first foray into feature filmmaking.
With no studio in question to report to, Simpson and Veasey utilized their own system of checks and balances, so-to-speak, hosting multiple test screenings with a litany of sources, ranging from cast and crew to non-cinephile acquaintances. These screenings proved invaluable, transforming Before Me from a more scattershot 2 hrs. 20 mins. to its tightened final runtime of 1 hr. 52 mins.
Another challenge is his current battle: how to release the movie. How does one get the movie seen, as well as differentiate it from the other DIY movies premiering at various local arthouses or at regional film festivals (not to mention differentiating the film from the larger multiplex and streaming pools that dominate the zeitgeist)?
One strategy is “eventizing” the theatrical experience. For example, in conjunction with the film’s world premiere screening on June 14, Simpson will be accompanied by local therapist Margo Rice for a unique Q&A opportunity, directly addressing the film’s depiction of retroactive jealousy.
Simpson mentions fellow Atlanta filmmaker Aaron Strand’s film Withdrawal and their theatrical roadshow model as a vital inspiration for how he plans to showcase Before Me to the public following its world premiere.
“Attending a screening of Withdrawal and seeing what [Aaron] was able to do with his own showing was very inspiring,” Simpson said. “I saw that you don’t have to have a film festival show your movie, there are other avenues to explore.”
While Simpson still plans to submit to festivals, he emphasizes that the film’s main life will be as a theatrical roadshow experience, one where he can connect more deeply with viewers and engage in the types of discussions that his favorite films engender.
The process of making an independent film, and especially a self-financed film, can often feel like building a plane as you learn to fly it. Simpson remains sane through a strong work ethic, a gifted team of collaborators, and a confidence in forming a genuine connection with the audience.
On one level, he hopes that Before Me can help provide his own template for up-and-coming independent filmmakers. Most importantly, however, he simply hopes that people engage with the material and with the characters, and that the work itself has the ability and capacity to endure.
“A lot of people talk about what a micro-budget feature should look like, but what will make an interesting movie lies in the narrative and the dilemmas and the choices that the characters make,” Simpson says. “If you work within your limitations, and rely on how inherently interesting everyday life can be, then the budget will not be as big of an issue as people make it out to be: they will simply be invested in the story you are trying to tell.”
As he releases Before Me out into the world, Simpson already has his eye on his next project: a more expansive detective story.
For the time being, though, he remains proud of the finished product, and excited for people to engage with it.
“I am so grateful to this film for all the opportunities it has given me to grow as a filmmaker,” Simpson says in his Director’s Statement.
“Before Me” will have its world premiere at the Tara Theater in Atlanta on Sunday, June 14, followed by an after-party/meet-and-greet at Whitehall Tavern. Tickets are currently sold out. For updates on the film’s release and upcoming screenings, you can follow the “Before Me” Instagram.
