Before Filmmaker Russell Goldman Made His SXSW-Bound First Feature, He Was an IndieWire Intern

Guillermo del Toro. Jodie Foster. Ryan Coogler. Lupita Nyong’o. Saoirse Ronan. Laura Dern. Brady Corbet. Diablo Cody. Seth Rogen. It’s a long and rarefied list of filmmakers, creators, and performers who can say they’ve both written for and been written about on IndieWire.

Today, a new name joins their ranks: Russell Goldman. And, yes, as the headline of this interview makes abundantly clear, Goldman didn’t just pen an op-ed or a tribute on IndieWire: He was an actual intern at the site a decade ago, churning out all manner of news stories, features, and filmmaking tips. His author page still contains a joke that I remember thinking during his tenure was both very funny and only slightly true: “He writes articles that his bosses don’t have to write.”

Since his time at the site, Goldman has taken on a number of very cool jobs (including one that helped bring Jamie Lee Curtis into his orbit, more on that one to come), but he has long been dedicated to pursuing his primary passion: filmmaking. He’s directed seven shorts and written eight of them, and this weekend, he will premiere his first feature at SXSW, “Sender.”

Starring Britt Lower, Rhea Seehorn, David Dastmalchian, Anna Baryshnikov, Utkarsh Ambudkar, and Curtis (she also produces the film), “Sender” expands upon Goldman’s 2022 short “Return to Sender.” “Severance” Emmy winner Lower plays Julia, a newly-sober woman trying to get her life back on track. That’s a hefty enough ask normally, but when odd packages start showing up at her house — containing items she looked for online but never ordered — things get even weirder.

Along the way, she pulls into her orbit a friendly delivery driver (Dastmalchian) for the DoorDash-meets-Amazon-esque company that is filling her rental with all sorts of stuff, her jittery sister (Baryshnikov), an ex-coworker with his own DTC aspirations (Ambudkar), and a potential sponsor at her local AA meeting (Seehorn). The film is unnerving and smart, thoughtful and off-kilter, and it will really make you think twice before hitting “Buy Now” on any app.

Before the film’s premiere at SXSW this weekend, I hopped on a Zoom with Goldman and Lower to chat about their riveting film, Goldman’s winding path to feature filmmaker, and our shared history. And, no, I couldn’t resist instantly telling Lower about Goldman’s previous life at IW.

“That is giving me all the feels right now, and I’m just so curious about Russell 10 years ago,” Lower said with a laugh. Goldman chimed in, “Not that different, I fear.”

‘Sender’

Goldman, consistently dry and self-effacing (even a decade ago!), said he can’t believe he’s still so present in our minds that I made a point of snapping up his first interview before the film’s premiere. “I started reading IndieWire since whenever it was launched, probably, and working with you and David [Ehrlich] and Zack [Sharf, now at Variety] and that whole team there was so fun,” Goldman said. “I had no idea that this would be happening or that I’d still be texting with David [about stuff]. I’m very grateful.”

Warm and fuzzies aside, Goldman’s first feature is well worth our accolades and pride. He’s also refreshingly unprecious about his process, starting with the idea to turn his well-regarded short into a full-length feature. That’s an old school way of making the jump from shorts to features, but Goldman didn’t seem to get too tied up in simply expanding his original idea, rather than taking it into new directions.

“To me, we made the short to forget it, which was really exciting,” the filmmaker said. “It was like we got to totally redraw everything that we wanted to do and just make something that exhilarated us and that felt very freeing. I think there is an expectation with proof of concepts of, how are you riffing on the original thing? I wanted to take the pieces of the story that I knew were the bedrock and then make it into something that surprised me, because by that point it had been with me for so long that I had lost perspective.”

At the center of both films is a scam targeted at Julia that seems oddly personal, crafted in a way to make her go nuts, not just anyone. It starts with packages from Smirk (possibly inspired by Amazon Smile, Goldman noted) showing up at her house, things she’s searched for online, but never actually purchased. Then it’s stuff she’s thought about. Or stuff someone might think she’d need. Then product reviews start appearing online, with Julia listed as the author. As she investigates these kinds of events, she learns about another woman (Curtis) who was the subject of a similar scam and opted to escape it by decidedly dark means.

‘Sender’

“There was something to it, of the scam that was more than a scam, and of all the different ways that it could kind of permeate your own inner world with packages coming in and reviews coming in,” Goldman said. “The challenge of it was not just expanding it, but … I realized in partnering with Britt, and everybody, was that I wanted to be more in the head of [Julia]. That’s the way that you can anchor this in a longer story and create something that’s kinetic and exciting and unpredictable and fun.”

When Lower got the script, she also received links to three of Goldman’s previous shorts. That impressed her. What really attracted her to Goldman as a creator and collaborator was that she could feel “his specific point of view, but also his ability. I could just tell right away he was enormously collaborative and generous with his flexibility, and that continued through the process of us working together.”

Getting Lower on board as Julia helped Goldman feel secure that the project was actually going to happen (not always a given), and that he could cast a wider net to surround her with other stars he loved.

“I was kind of casting from that perspective of, ‘What do I like? Who do I want to see in the movie?’ Like with every indie movie, this thing died and came back to life multiple times. I thought it was, for a while, completely dead,” Goldman said. “I feel like I had a more freeing experience and a more ‘cast the people that you think will tell this story great’ experience. Once I started talking to Britt, there were a bunch of buzzers going off in my head in the best way, like Britt is going to be a Julia that is going to surprise me.”

As Whitney, Seehorn makes for an electric foil for Julia. The pair meet at an AA meeting, where Whitney’s brusque nature actually appeals to Julia, who is eager for any kind of camaraderie. Her attempts to get Whitney to serve as her sponsor do not go to plan, but even Whitney can’t quite shake the younger woman.

“I was an enormous fan of ‘Better Call Saul,’ and then the dynamic that she and Britt found was like, how can we do just way more with this than we had scripted? How can we push this further? How can we push the relationship further?” he said. “You have to just believe that there is a spark between these two characters that could set the rest of this fucking film in motion and has an emotional power that transcends what you would necessarily even believe if someone were to tell you the story upfront. So that chemistry was the power.”

Lower and Seehorn have long known each other (thank the TV awards season for that), and Lower was thrilled that they might finally get to work together. “We have an effect on each other in this way that just feels like you’re a kid at a candy store,” the actress said. “You’re like, ‘Oh, what is this? How’s this going to feel? And how’s this going to land?’ We were both really finding the character [during our first scenes], and the play off of each other, her being this sort of mentor figure for Julia, was informative for everything else too, because she’s so impressionable at this point in her recovery. She’s looking around for inspiration everywhere, and she finds this powerful woman.”

‘Sender’

Weird packages showing up at your house — often, with stuff you need, like a couch or a pair of walking sticks — doesn’t initially sound scary, but Goldman builds the tension with each new scene (and each new package). By the time Julia is fishing packages out of a tree, it’s clear things have gone way too far. But how? And why? Can’t this woman catch a break?

“She’s in this new phase of her life where she’s newly sober, and I think Russell did such a great job of having that journey be parallel [to how] she’s trying to get a quick fix to fix her life,” Lower said. “So she’s ordering all this stuff to fill up her house, but it’s like she’s inviting more in at the same time. Her recovery and this scam have gone wrong and are in constant dialogue with each other.”

Goldman credits Curtis for the initial seed of the idea behind “Sender,” about so-called brushing scams that target unwitting people. “We both experienced weird deliveries around the same time,” he explained. “Hers was first; her sister received walking sticks that she didn’t order, but she had just Googled walking sticks. These scams, they send you cheap knockoff products of things that you have looked up and then people write reviews in your name, which just seems like a step too far for something that is as stupid and seemingly insignificant as that.”

Goldman then got his own package, one that had been oddly tampered with, and got a juicy callback in the film. “I bought something for my now-wife, but in their place, I get these muddy shin guards,” the filmmaker said. “This was near the end of COVID, and my wife was the only person that had visited that home, so it felt very invasive [for the package to be in my home]. I remember that feeling. The idea of bringing all this weird, bad stuff into your home and you prescribing meaning onto it really excited me. You get to find so much meaning in these objects that are not speaking back to you, but you can prescribe this history with.”

Goldman’s relationship with Curtis harkens back to another cool gig he had back in the day. After IndieWire, he became David Gordon Green’s assistant, during which he met Curtis on the set of Green’s “Halloween.” Then, Curtis snagged him.

“It has been a thing. I don’t understand how it’s been a thing,” Goldman said with a laugh when asked to explain his long association with Curtis. “I was her assistant seven or eight years ago and I stuck around. She wanted to produce and write and direct more, and now she has a production company of her own. I think there was, almost kind of like what we’re describing with our film, there was a very childlike excitement to her when she started that journey.”

The brushing scam idea is just one example of Curtis’ creativity and curiosity, and one she happily ceded to Goldman to really explore.

“She gave me the permission to go run with that as an idea,” Goldman said. “Out of that, I met Julia, and out of that, I crafted the short, and out of the short, I started dabbling in the feature. She gave me the ownership, which is obviously the thing that every filmmaker needs, but she also, as a producer, she very much did what she needed to do to get the movie made and protect it at all times. … I see this with every project that she encounters, she’s very much [interested in the] director’s vision, showrunner’s vision, what’s the thing that you want to capture? What’s the feeling that you want to capture?”

Goldman has similarly positive things to say about Lower, who noted that the pair bonded so intensely during the making of the film that she now considers him to be a brother to her.

“I think Britt was the best at questioning and challenging choices and in turn, us coming up with ones that really excited us,” Goldman said. “The dance at the end of the movie, that was the last day and was a result of us trying to find a way for her to say goodbye to David’s character. Britt choreographed and developed that entire thing herself and auditioned it and surprised me with it. That was the perfect distillation of what this experience was, which was just incredible creativity and a gift of a collaborator.”

The pair can’t wait to show off the film in Austin this weekend, especially with other people. It’s a film about connections gone awry, so seeing it in a crowd? That sounds pretty good.

“I’m just excited to see it on a big screen with other human beings in a theater. That’s always such a thrill,” Lower said. “We filmed this a year ago, and it’ll be good to just squeeze each other’s hands and say, ‘Look it, we’re here.’”

Goldman, ever-thoughtful, added, “The film is very experiential, and I am excited for people to wrestle with it, not even in an intellectual way, but in a visceral way,” he said. “Britt is taking the audience for a ride, and I find that very exciting. I hope that the audience — and everything I’ve heard about SXSW makes me suspect that they will be — will give themselves over to every kind of tone and feeling that is in the story, because I think everyone involved in the movie really delivers that combination of feelings. I’m immensely proud of everybody.”

We’re proud too.

“Sender” will premiere at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival on Saturday, March 14. It is currently seeking distribution.