Principal photography is set to commence on Circles, a relationship drama with a high-concept twist, directed by Ariel Heller (Mammoth) from a screenplay by Sam Baron and Heller. The indie feature from Heller’s production company Good Point will film in Idaho and LA in early 2026.
Sam Baron and Alli Brown will star as Sam and Emma, a couple in crisis who retreat to a remote cabin to repair their marriage, only to find themselves trapped in a mysterious time loop that resets every time they lie.
Sam Baron and Ava DuVernay Credit: Sam Baron
No Film School sat down with Baron and Heller to discuss how they got here...In 2014, NFS podcast alum Sam Baron won the Academy’s prestigious Nicholl Fellowship award for his screenplay The Science of Love. That got him signed at UTA and snagged him his first writing assignment. But after several years in development on high-level projects in LA and London, he found himself missing the personal storytelling of his early student films. He decided to make the first film in a trilogy with BAFTA-nominated actor Amit Shah, The Orgy, a tragicomedy about a heartbroken man who goes to his first orgy and quickly discovers the pitfalls of falling in love at a sex party. The film takes a tender character-driven approach to its premise and has more in common with the Duplass Brothers than with American Pie.
'The Orgy'Credit: Sam Baron
The Orgy won the Shore Scripts Short Film fund and was selected for top-tier festivals around the world, including the Austin Film Festival, where Ariel Heller was screening his student Academy Award-winning USC thesis film, Mammoth. That film is also a tender character-driven story that uses humor and heart to take the audience on a devastating emotional journey. The Orgy and Mammoth were screening in the same block, and Baron and Heller adored each other’s work. The pair met on stage for the post-screening Q&A, and it was love at first sight. Baron marvelled at the way Heller’s film truthfully explored a cancer diagnosis without ever falling into the maudlin trappings of the genre. “My Nicholl script was about cancer, and I’d lost my Mum to cancer two years earlier. My standards for a cancer drama were impossibly high, and Mammoth exceeded them.” Meanwhile, Heller was captivated by Baron’s ability to put so much depth, nuance, and honesty into a sex comedy. “I remember looking at him on stage and thinking, ‘Who ARE you?’”
In the subsequent years, Baron has been tackling exactly this question in his films. He followed up The Orgy with his own cancer drama Big Ears (“I thought about Mammoth a lot while we were making that,” he admits, “especially the way that Ariel gave the audience permission to laugh in the darkest moments. That felt real and important.”). Big Ears was developed with Amit Shah for him to star in. It’s set in Shah’s family’s health food store in London, and it makes explicit reference to Shah’s distinctive ears.
“As vulnerable as it was for Amit to play a man who goes to an orgy, he went a lot further in Big Ears. I was struck by his bravery as an actor. It’s rare to see a man expose his insecurities on screen like that”, said Baron. They co-wrote the final film in the trilogy, Tall Dark and Handsome, about a British-Indian man who discovers his girlfriend has a history of dating Indian men and can’t shake it off. That film was selected for Palm Springs ShortFest, won the Audience Award at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, and premiered online with Short Of The Week and Vimeo Staff Picks. The trilogy affirmed for Baron the power of personal filmmaking. “The more we made the films about things that felt uniquely specific to us, the more they seemed to resonate with audiences.”
Baron has had a complex relationship with his manhood. He has often felt more like an alien observing humanity, and Transparent writer Mel Shimkovitz once described him as “a person trapped in the body of a man”. Even so, he increasingly found himself questioning the value of continuing to make films as a male filmmaker in the current landscape. “I had to ask myself, ‘Is the best thing I can do for society to step back and shut the fuck up?’”
But as he went through therapy in his personal life to recover from the death of his mother, he became fascinated by the Jungian concept of “shadow work” - the process of examining aspects of the psyche that have been pushed into the darkness, that can only be healed when they are brought back into the light. “I was concerned that if men stopped seeing themselves represented on screen, male audiences could be pushed even further into the arms of “red pill” anti-feminists. But for the last century, male filmmakers have told stories with a male gaze that has objectified women and glamorized men. Clearly, a new approach was needed, so I decided to turn the lens around - to focus on stories about modern masculinity in crisis. But if I wanted to invite men into the conversation, rather than alienating them, I had to offer myself as the sacrificial lamb, and make myself the most vulnerable and exposed.”
Sam Baron at AFF Credit: Sam Baron
Baron decided to collaborate with a string of acclaimed rising filmmakers to create a series of short films in which he would star as “Sam”, a semi-autobiographical character who embodies the toxic traits of millennial men. “He’s the kind of ‘nice guy’ who thinks he’s an ally, thinks he’s a hero because he doesn’t shout, he’s sensitive, he’s always there for you with a smile, but beneath the surface, there’s a cauldron of repressed emotion. He’s so disconnected from his anger that when he does snap, it’s awful. He’s riddled with shame, but instead of doing anything about it, he pretends it’s not there. Then he keeps score of all the ‘good things’ he’s done, until he doesn’t get the ‘rewards’ he thinks he deserves, at which point he turns on the women he claims to care about and reveals himself to be a fragile little boy.” If that sounds like you, or a man you know, you’re not alone.
The first film in the series, Fragile Package, was directed by Chloë Wicks, who went on to direct The Flatshare for Paramount Plus and TrueLove for Channel Four in the UK. Fragile Package follows Sam as he moves into a new apartment with his girlfriend, Lou, when she discovers he’s been secretly storing a gun in their bedroom “to keep them safe”. This triggers an argument which soon unravels their whole relationship, and reveals the tangled web of anxieties that have been warping Sam’s mind.
The second film, Tippy Toes, was directed by BAFTA Scotland nominee Louis Paxton (whose debut feature, The Incomer, will premiere at Sundance in a few weeks' time, starring Domhnall Gleeson). Tippy Toes stars Baron as a “nice guy” who gets dumped by his girlfriend and fired from his job on the same day, and finally snaps. It’s a wild journey to the dark side, and beyond.
Audiences have responded to Baron putting himself out there as a target. “All the things I was most afraid to put in there, the stuff I thought no one would ever relate to - time and time again, those were the things that men would come up to me and want to talk about. It felt like our own sheepish, shameful version of ‘me too’. So many of us had similar fathers, and similar memories of the macho 90s culture that gave us warped lessons about how we were meant to behave as men. I saw an epidemic of gentle, big-hearted men like me who felt lost, who hadn’t been taught what to do with their feelings, how to talk about them or process them, who now found themselves acting out in ways that exacerbated their shame and hurt the people they cared about most.”So for the third film, Baron sought out Heller. “I wanted to go even deeper, and Ariel is a master of nuanced storytelling - the kind of tonal dexterity that eschews easy answers and keeps audiences leaning in.”
They collaborated on Useless, which stars Baron as a man who starts using ChatGPT as his therapist and soon faces humiliating consequences. As Heller explains, “I’d been wanting to try making a film where ChatGPT could actually be an actor, improvising dialogue in scenes with the other performers, and when Sam let slip to me that he’d been using it as his real-life therapist, I knew we had our premise. I started shooting test footage, improvising opposite the machine, and we all felt there was something electric and raw in the real-time interactions. Sam was willing to use his real ChatGPT account, complete with its memory of everything he’d privately shared with it available for it to draw on, and he agreed not to censor whatever it said. We started shooting the next week.” The film also stars Alli Brown (Succession, Search Party) and Arta Gee, fresh off their SXSW debut in I Really Love My Husband, and will begin its festival run in the new year.
For Baron and Heller, this film is just the beginning. Heller has spent the last few years quietly building Good Point, a company based on a new model of radical transparency, a ground-up community based approach which gives all cast and crew equal access to the equity pool based on the time they’ve given to a project, and which bypasses the usual “Hollywood accounting” tricks to ensure that everyone sees a return on their stake from the first dollar in. “We were inspired by what they did with films like Jockey and Sing Sing. Every independent filmmaker knows how much the cast and crew give to the process beyond what is traditionally remunerated - we make these films relying on ‘sweat equity’ that is often taken for granted. This model flips that on its head. It’s a way to make sure that every person on the project is valued and rewarded equally for their time, which not only feels much better when you’re a director asking people to match your passion, but it’s also good business because you’re able to attract incredible talent to join arms with you as you set off to make your movie.”
That is exactly what Heller and Baron are now about to do. Circles will be their debut feature, with Heller again directing from a script they’ve co-written. The film reunites the pair with many of their key collaborators from Useless, including cinematographer Caleb Heller, producer Kyle Smithers, and lead actress Alli Brown (who is now stepping up to be a producer, and has been a key creative player in nurturing the project from its earliest conception).
As Heller explains, “The premise called for a take-no-prisoners examination of a marriage in crisis, full of secrets and lies. It’s a story about a couple learning to tell the truth, so in order to match that honesty in the writing, we took our ‘radical transparency’ approach to new levels, outlining the film in a Google Doc, which our real-life romantic partners had access to. The comments section was full of confessions, confrontations, disclosures, and disagreements as we all opened our hearts and shared about our private lives.
We were amazed by the commonalities. It felt like we were all struggling with the same issues and wrestling with the same existential questions about how to show up for the people we love. And the more we talked to our friends, the more we realized that the material that felt most personal to us was the most universal.
The Google Doc became a sort of siphon for the collective unconscious, and with Sam willing to portray himself as the ultimate embodiment of the flaws of modern masculinity, we took our gloves off and let rip. We’ve poured ourselves into this script and relished the outrageous fun of the premise, and we now hope to tell a complex personal story that will resonate with anyone who has ever navigated a long-term relationship.”
Circles is produced by Good Point, with Kyle Smithers, David Breschel, and Caleb Heller serving as producers alongside Heller, Baron, and Brown. Executive Producers are Alice Seabright (Sex Education, Margo's Got Money Troubles), Eric Pearson (Thunderbolts, Thor: Ragnarok), and Netflix executive Alexandra Canosa. Also joining the cast is Sundance alum Alexandra Qin (Thirstygirl), with two further roles set to be announced.
Sam Baron, Alice Seabright, and Alexandra Qin are represented by UTA. Alli Brown is represented by Kent Osche at Gersh and Rick Dorfman at Authentic Literary Talent and Management.
