“It is definitely surreal”: Chandler Levack on ‘Mile End Kicks’, Alanis Morissette, and entering the SandlerVerse
Everyone knows the old saying about buses: you wait ages for one, only for two to come along at the same time. As it turns out, it also applies to cinema, as writer and director Chandler Levack discovered.
The filmmaker’s acclaimed feature debut, I Like Movies, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022. Three and a half years later, her second and third features were released on the same day, with Mile End Kicks and Roommates both debuting on April 17th, 2026.
The former is a semi-autobiographical story, following Barbie Ferreira’s music journalist, Grace Pine, as she relocates to Montreal for a summer to write a book about Alanis Morissette’s seminal album, Jagged Little Pill, only to become entangled in the local music scene, particularly the band Bone Patrol.
The latter is the latest Happy Madison comedy to roll off the Netflix production line, with Adam Sandler producing a college caper that stars his daughter, Sadie, in the lead role. Needless to say, it was a strange feeling for Levack to have both of her latest movies arriving at once.
“Yeah, it’s very surreal,” she understatedly put it. “I think there was so much build-up to my first film getting released, to just being like, ‘Yep, and there’s two and three.’ Yeah, it was very strange Friday for me, like I didn’t quite know how to celebrate it.”
On one hand, Mile End Kicks is a passion project that’s been gestating for a decade, whereas Roommates is a Sandler-backed studio comedy. Again, it was understandably jarring for Levack to have been working on them both at the same time, something she wouldn’t recommend to any filmmakers out there.
“I was in post on Mile End Kicks when I got hired to do the Happy Madison movie,” she explained. “So it was a lot of flying back from New Jersey to Toronto to work on the sound mix, or colour correct, or late nights after location scouting, or shot listing, to kind of work on the score and the sound mix and stuff. So, yeah, it was a bit intense. I don’t recommend that anybody make two movies at the same time, let alone release them on the same day!”
Not that it was a bad thing, with Levack equally proud of both. One is “a real passion project that I’ve been doing for over a decade, made within these filmmaking communities in Ontario and Quebec,” and the other is “this huge Netflix movie, and my first studio film,” and the process of working on both simultaneously was “really interesting to witness as a relatively new filmmaker.”
This being her sophomore film, and given her own background as a music journalist that’s present in every strand of Mile End Kicks‘ DNA, it was almost inevitable that the looming, and in this case, potentially cruelly ironic, shadow of ‘second album syndrome’ was hovering in the background.
“I’ve been talking about that a lot, actually,” Levack concurred. “I felt like my first film, I Like Movies, was kind of like an indie film that I made on GarageBand, and then released online, thinking nobody would watch it. And then it became sort of this cult sensation that allowed me to have more resources. I think there is a lot of pressure for your second movie to follow it up, and still sound like yourself, but like a new, subverted version of it.”
As well-received hybrid of coming-of-age story, comedy, drama, and romance with a music journalist at its centre, Mile End Kicks has found itself being mentioned in the same breath as Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. That was the movie that made Levack fall in love with art, inspired her journalistic career, and became a foundational text for her life, but she’ll only embrace those comparisons to an extent.
“I definitely invite those comparisons, because it’s such an influential movie to me,” she said. “In some ways, I think the film has more in common with Cameron Crowe’s Singles. Like, young people looking for love, and a woman that’s trying to date this mercurial musician in a band that’s literally called Citizen Dick, which kind of sounds like a parallel to Bone Patrol as well.”
“I just love his films, and I love how warm and empathetic they are, and, yeah, it’s an honour to be mentioned,” Levack continued. “But I think the film does a lot more, just trying to talk about the female gaze and sort of like what it’s like to be a woman in the music industry, especially in the mid to late aughts.”
That’s something the filmmaker has first-hand experience with, and making a semi-autobiographical movie about a character who navigates incidents not unlike the ones she navigated herself, and in some cases, Ferreira is wearing Levack’s own clothes, led to a couple of moments on set where the writer and director found herself reliving some of those experiences, whether she wanted to or not.
“It is definitely surreal to make a portrait of your 20s and have an actress as incredible as Barbie portraying some version of you,” she acknowledged. “I think I was really lucky to have a very supportive crew on set that understood that this was a bit of a surreal movie to make, and just wanted me to execute the vision of it.”
Obviously, it’s a personal story set in a very specific time and place over the summer of 2011 in Montreal, but despite being a born and bred New Yorker, Levack quickly realised that Ferreira was the ideal person to play Grace, and she went out of her way to give what might well be a career-best performance.
“I was always a huge fan of Barbie in Euphoria, and I was really disappointed that her character arc got less complex in the second season,” she confessed, something that many fans of the HBO series would no doubt agree with, but it was her turn in 2024’s Bob Trevino Likes It that sealed the deal.
“I was just really floored by the kind of emotional nakedness of that performance, and just how raw and effective she was as an actor,” Levack offered. “Instantly, it was clear that she really wanted to do the movie. She learned a Canadian accent for the movie: she took voice lessons with a voice coach to learn, I guess, my Southern Ontario accent, because I really wanted to make sure that the character felt Canadian, and really committed themselves to that Canadian-ness.”
Levack can’t speak highly enough of Ferreira, who was “immaculately prepared” for the role, and effortlessly navigated a complex arc that finds Grace coping with toxic masculinity, uprooting her life to chase her dream, the personal and professional setbacks that unfold along the way, problematic relationships, romantic feelings, and more, all within the space of a few weeks, narratively.
However, Morissette and Jagged Little Pill underpin Mile End Kicks every bit as much as Grace, and despite the film having been in the works for ten years, evolving from its original title of Anglophone to the version that was released in 2026, the musician was always what set the events in motion.
“It was always Alanis from the very beginning,” Levack confirmed. “As a former music critic, I feel like that idea of writing a 33 1/3 was the dream of any critic at that time: Those books, to me, were so iconic, and Jagged Little Pill was the album that I loved the most when I was a child, and just completely got obsessed with, so to me, it felt like that’s what she would be writing about.”
It was the filmmaker’s love of the record that got the ball rolling, but she didn’t know the whole story: “And really, what it said about Alanis’ experiences as a young female, you know, 19-year-old. When I was first writing the script and doing a lot more research on Alanis, as more information from that time kind of became clear, like the Jagged Little Pill documentary, it was very uncanny to me, how she was kind of like speaking through me, or something, in Grace’s story as well.”
She found it “kind of fascinating, how much of Grace’s journey and Alanis’ journey intersected” in what they were forced to deal with in their chosen profession, and while Mile End Kicks initially began with Levack’s desire to write a hangout-type movie, it organically grew into something much more personal.
“I evolved,” she impressed. “I started writing the script when I was 27, and I made the film a decade later. So I think as I matured and went through experiences and had more distance, kind of, on that time of my life, I think the film got a lot more complex.” With that in mind, then, could Levack have made the picture ten years ago with the benefit of hindsight, or was that distance always required?
“I’m very grateful that I got to make I Like Movies first,” came the reply. “I mean, that film wouldn’t exist if Anglophone hadn’t fallen apart in 2018 when I originally wanted to make it, and I think that gave me a lot more experience in learning how I want to work and write as a writer/director, and I don’t think that if I had been able to make the film earlier, that would have been as good.”
Levack feels that “it’s all for the best that the movie took ten years to make,” but no matter when it was made, the one thing it always needed was for Morissette to approve and sign off on the use of her image, likeness, and music. She did, but there’s no word on whether she’s seen Mile End Kicks as of yet.
“It’s still an unresolved mystery for me,” the filmmaker admitted, and it sounds like she prefers it that way. “I know we got a message from her team, and they were like, ‘Alanis gives you her blessing.’ Honestly, that’s all I need to hear.”
Sticking with music, Levack has repeatedly called the Montreal four-piece Tops her favourite band. They’d never worked on a movie before until they recorded music for Mile End Kicks, and, as you can imagine, it was a dream come true for the writer and director to kill those two birds with a single stone.
“It was so fun!” she exclaimed. “I mean, I completely idolised Jane [Penny] and David [Carriere], so I was super nervous about approaching them, but, I don’t know, I just had this sixth sense that they were going to be the greatest people to do it.” As it transpired, her instincts were on the money.
“They were really open and excited about the challenge of writing these songs for the movie,” Levack shared, leading to a collaboration that saw them create playlists that inspired Bone Patrol songs like ‘ASL’ and ‘Slept in My Jeans’, which the actors who form the fictional band perform in the movie.
“As soon as I heard the first version of ‘ASL’, I was already, like, pretty floored by it,” she revealed. “It was more about adding little details, like, ‘Oh, we need a guitar solo, maybe.’ I guess my favourite part of the whole process is when David recorded all the vocals with the real cast members and taught them how to play the song, and they would do days of band practice where they would really jam it out so that they could learn how to play the song live as a real band.”
In the interest of avoiding spoilers, although Levack happily weighs in with a couple, Mile End Kicks ends with Grace and Devon Bostick’s Archie making out in the front seats of a van. The credits start to play over the elongated make-out session, which is kind of a happy ending for both, in a way, but not quite in a ‘let’s tie a neat little bow around everything and go home’ kind of way.
“I don’t know if it’s necessarily a happy ending,” she countered. “For me, I just thought it was darkly hilarious and kind of sweet and romantic.” What’s dark about that, you might be wondering? Well, Archie has a visible case of oral herpes, but Grace doesn’t care, and they lock lips anyway.
“There’s something funny to me about the idea that, like, the greatest, most beautiful kiss you could ever have in your life might be when someone has oral herpes,” Levack ruminated. “I don’t know, to me, that’s sort of this metaphor about love, and how we all have to get each other’s metaphorical herpes to be open to really being in love.”
Ah, the sensation of falling in love, or metaphorical herpes as it shall now forever be known. As for the credits playing over the STI-assisted tonsil tennis, that was inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name. “I just thought that was so effective,” came the explanation. “And I’d never seen it done in a movie before, so I don’t know, I just wanted to try it!”
Levack’s debut, I Like Movies, cost around $130,000 to make. By comparison, Mile End Kicks was roughly $4million, while Roommates upped the ante to $30m. After crunching the numbers, based on that trajectory, her next feature should cost somewhere in the $200m range, surely?
“I doubt it!” was her answer. “Having made movies at all three budget levels, the sweet spot, to me, feels like $10million, that would be the dream for whatever I make next. Depending on the idea, of course, I don’t know. It was interesting to me how much those different budget levels affected the process of making a film, and the recent resources that you have to play with.”
All that matters to Levack is “trying to make something happen that’s real and authentic with actors, in a limited amount of time, with your crew,” which is a universal thing. Regardless, it’s been a rapid rise up the budgetary ladder in a small amount of time, with the filmmaker grateful to her collaborators.
According to her, a large part of the reason why I Like Movies was successful was “because of the ingenuity of my producers,” Evan Dubinsky and Lindsay Blair Goeldner. For Mile End Kicks, the co-production between Ontario and Quebec, and the way the producers “really understood how to make that work, and allowed that film to exist,” were instrumental factors in its existence.
For Roommates, enter ‘Sandman’: “It didn’t feel like a studio movie because of Adam Sandler, and how much he protects filmmakers from that process,” Levack elucidated. “You really feel like you’re making a movie just with Adam and the Happy Madison team, it doesn’t feel like you have to, necessarily, follow studio notes.”
“It feels like you’re making a personal indie in some ways, because Adam, in some ways, is the studio, and so that was really like a fun and exciting thing, because it felt like we were really connected and together and with the writers and the other producers and stuff, and just making like exactly the kind of movie that we found funny and interesting and beautiful,” she added. “That kind of surprised me. I think, probably other filmmakers at other studios, have a different experience.”
There was a sense of kismet to her hiring. Levack had named Sandler as one of her dream collaborators, and as fate would have it, the actor, comedian, and producer had watched I Like Movies and loved it, which saw her hand-picked to helm Roommates, a scenario the filmmaker could never have envisioned happening on her third film.
“Definitely, definitely not,” was the expected response. “Even the fact that Anglophone even got made was such a miracle to me. So to get that call, I felt like I truly stepped into a new multiverse or simulation or something. It still doesn’t feel like it really happened to me. It’s still so surreal that I got to spend the whole last year with him and his family, making comedy and learning from him. It was an absolute joy.”
This being Sandler, who keeps his friends close and has a habit of welcoming them into his repertory, Levack wouldn’t think twice about becoming the latest member of the Happy Madison family: “Yeah, put me in for Grown Ups 7,” she joked. “Let’s go!”
Speaking of hypotheticals, if the writer and director had the creative carte blanche to make anything she wanted, there’s a fascinating-sounding idea percolating in her head, with the I Like Movies, Mile End Kicks, and Roommates helmer keen to remake a stone-cold classic, albeit with a fresh twist.
“I always wanted to remake The Apartment, the Billy Wilder film, from the perspective of a teenage boy who has a rich dad who’s never there,” which sounds interesting. “And so, all the teenagers in his high school have sex in his dad’s Manhattan penthouse. So maybe I would do, like, Gen Z’s The Apartment.”
If that ever comes to pass, and Netflix announces Adam Sandler Presents: Chandler Levack’s The Apartment, remember: you heard it here first.
