Interviews // Julia Aks and Steve Pinder

Julia Aks is a writer-director, actor, and opera singer born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She rose to internet fame when her parody music video of Ariana Grande’s ‘7 Rings’ went viral, even being posted by Ariana herself. Combining her loves of sketch comedy, pop culture, and uncanny Julie Andrews impression, she created a successful YouTube brand all her own. In 2023, Julia stepped into narrative filmmaking when she co-wrote/directed and starred in Jane Austen’s Period Drama, a 13-minute narrative satire about menstruation. It will have it’s world premiere in competition at the 2024 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

 

Julia has appeared in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, and was a series regular on Personal Space starring Richard Hatch (Battlestar Galactica).

 

On stage, Julia has performed with LA Opera, La Mirada Theatre, Boston Court Theatre, 3D Theatricals, and the Independent Shakespeare Co. You can hear her singing high notes as the featured vocalist on the score for John Wick III.

Steve Pinder has written, directed, acted, and sung for both stage and camera. With Julia Aks, he is the co-writer and co-director of JANE AUSTEN’S PERIOD DRAMA, which made its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in February 2024 and has gone on to play at the Tribeca Film Festival and many others. Steve and Julia began collaborating on sketch content in 2019, when they produced and co-directed a parody of Ariana Grande’s 7 RINGS music video in the style of Julie Andrews. They went on to do a myriad of other sketches together and are now developing long-form, narrative comedies.

​

As an actor, Steve can be seen as the title character in the recently released horror feature, THE EXORCISM OF ST. PATRICK, directed by Quinn Armstrong. Other acting credits include: MEETING YOU, MEETING ME (dir. Lina Suh), I REGRET TO INFORM YOU (dir. Yusuf Nasir), and Michelle Khare’s YOUTUBE REWIND: THE MUSICAL. On stage, Steve has performed with the Actors Theatre of Indiana, Beef and Boards, Illinois Theatre Center, SLATE at GSU, and Circle Theatre in Oak Park.

Harmony Witte: Congratulations on getting your film screened at Tribeca film festival. That’s so cool!

Julia Aks: Thank you. We think so, too!

Harmony Witte: I saw that you’ve been writing directing partners since 2016. Will you tell me a little bit about how you met and the projects that you’ve worked on together?

Steve Pinder: We met in 2016 when I was at USC in film school, and I came up with this really bonkers sound of music parody idea, and I was writing and directing, and I was trying to find an actor who could do a really great Julie Andrews impersonation. And it was really hard to find. Very hard to find someone who could, like, sing it, act it, be funny, acting it. It was pretty heavy camp, so there were some really dramatic moments that I wanted to play very seriously also. So I needed someone who could do all that and ended up talking to a casting director, and she recommended Julia, and I met Julia, and it was like, bam, there it is. Done.

Julia Aks: I remember even reading the script or hearing the concept for that, and it was one of those things where as an actor, you read it and you’re like, “oh, my God, I just understand it. This is me. I would love to be a part of this” more than, you know, most of the things that came in front of my face at that point, and then after that, we just kind of kept collaborating. Like, Steve cast me and a couple other things that he was working on at that point. And then in 2019, I started doing some content creation as a producer director performer, and he was, like, one of the first people I called to come on board and collaborate more, and then we’ve just kind of grown from there.

Harmony Witte: Oh, that’s great. It’s nice to find someone that it really works with.

Julia Aks: Yeah. Not super common, it turns out, but it really has just been nothing but fun. Fun and joy. And it’s so easy to work with him and playtime every day.

Harmony Witte: How did the idea for Jane Austen’s Period Drama come about?

Julia Aks: It started with the title. I thought it was a really funny pun. And at the time, I was kind of in the throes of YouTube content creation, so I thought I’d make a really funny sketch and, you know, just like a three-minute video. And then the more I kind of researched it and thought about it and started writing it, it kind of just kept going until it became the first draft of what was supposed to be a three page sketch ended up being like a 72 page draft of something. And during that, throughout that entire process, I found myself just going back to Steve over and over and over and over and over again for notes and feedback. And so that 72-page draft was really the product of both of us. But we hadn’t officially agreed to be a duo yet, and Steve was a really big proponent at that point. Also, he says, I think this is more than a sketch. I think it might even be a feature film. We also have a feature script version of the idea that we officially became co writers on. And when it came time to make the short, because we wanted to test out, but also prove that our tone and this concept could really work it was at that point, we’re co writers, co-directors, and we both love the concept. He was on board with every silly bit since the beginning, which is why we work.

Harmony WItte: What kind of research did you do when you were writing this short or the feature length? I imagine that a Jane Austen deep dive was in order.

Julia Aks: Well, some of the most fun parts were watching the films. We were both really inspired by the Jane Austen films, I would say more than the novels. And my favorite Jane Austen film is the Joe Wright, 2005, Pride and Prejudice.
Steve Pinder: Yeah, I’m more an Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility.

Harmony Witte: Oh, nice.

Steve Pinder: But we like them both.

Julie Aks: We both like them both. So, we really look to those two films for, like, the visual aesthetic and, you know, the pacing and we looked to Austin’s stories for the different archetypes that can emerge. But we also did a lot of menstrual health research. And I learned a lot about my own body during this whole entire process that I had never learned and that no one ever told me. And we reached out to, I was in this Facebook group of female identifying opera singers because in a former life, I was pursuing opera as a career. I had posted, I said, just give me your craziest period stories. And the response was just overwhelming with, like, funny stories, but a lot of really heartbreaking stuff and very common conditions that, you know, so little is still known about. It was kind of that response. And then the more we researched, like, literally what is happening and what do people know and what don’t people know? That it kind of blossomed into this story with a lot of heart and a lot of purpose, in addition to being a bonkers comedy.

Harmony Witte: I really loved how this captured the tone of the Jane Austen stories and expanded on her humor. Was it difficult to capture her tone?

Steve Pinder: Yes and no. I think. I think we both have an okay ear for the language, and so it’s really fun to try to come up with dialogue in that style, but it’s not always easy. And sometimes we’re navigating whether or not, like, how much anachronism we want to use because we’re talking about what is really a modern problem. We want to invite a modern audience into it. So, there’s this balance constantly where we’re asking ourselves how much modern language we use to crack a joke versus how much do we stay true to Austin’s style of speech? There is some balancing, but also, it’s mostly just really fun. There does tend to be this perfect balance where we can say something that sounds like Austin speak but hits with a modern audience, and something about that ends up being doubly funny because it’s like the propriety in the speech just amplifies the joke.

Harmony Witte: Was it difficult to condense all of your ideas into a twelve minute 40 second short? I’m imagining it was since you’re working on a feature version.

Julia Aks: Yes, it really was. Because there’s, you know, what was really hard? Deciding which names, character name we wanted to put in the short and which one we wanted to, we had to leave out. But it really, I’m trying to think, do we have. It was hard not to overwrite it.
Steve Pinder: Yes.
Julia Aks: And it’s also, you know, with Austen’s tone, as two people who are trying to write in a style that can sometimes be verbose. It was harder. It wasn’t hard, but it was a challenge that we didn’t even know was a challenge until we actually got into the editing room, really, which was just to really streamline the drama and the scenes while keeping true to that tone, but also keeping the pacing clipping along. Does that answer the question?
Steve Pinder: Yeah, totally. Totally. I mean, at risk of, like, offending Austen fans, there are moments in her writing where she doesn’t have to maintain, like, a modern cinematic conflict pace the way that you do when you’re making a modern movie. She can have two characters go back and forth in an argument for quite a lot longer than we can in the film. And so we couldn’t mimic her style exactly. We had to really be precise about what each character is saying and how the argument builds over the course of a scene.
Julia Aks: But I will say that this. This sequence sort of the story of the short film does exist within the feature somewhere. And we knew pretty early on that it would. That if we were to make any part of this larger script into a short film, that this was probably the one to make because it has a beautiful little arc and it can stand alone. The short film can stand alone, not as a part of a whole. It just is its own thing.

Harmony Witte:Bravo on the world building. The music, the lighting, the dialogue. Really felt like an Austen movie. Was it daunting to put her name on your piece?   

Julia Aks: No, not until right now.
Steve Pinder: No, because we’re parody artists. I think there’s a lot of liberty to just make jokes, and it’s not like we’re hiding the fact that we’re sort of sending up the genre.
Julia Aks: There is something we’ve talked about since Steve and I are both, naturally, really attracted to parody and satire that we don’t parody or send up anything that we don’t have the utmost respect for to begin with. And so parodying Jane Austen or trying to, like, put this satire in that world, in her own something, like her world, we knew. We felt confident that we were doing it with a lot of love and respect for the source material. And then when we finished the film, what we did talk about, do we put her name in the title, or do we just call it period drama or do we just call it period piece or something? At the end of the day, we’re like, no, this is pride and prejudice sensibility. Like, this is very clearly the world that we’re living in and we felt good about the product, the final product of the film, and we felt good about how we treated her world.
Steve Pinder: Yeah.
Julia Aks: So, yeah. And the response has been really good. Like, we get hardcore Austen fans saying, “you nailed it”, and we get people who are not at all Austen fans being like, wow, we love that film. So, it seems to run the gamut in terms of. In terms of who responds to it, which is really cool.

Harmony Witte: Do you get people who come up to you afterwards and want to tell you their wacky period stories?

Steve Pinder: Yes.
Julie Aks: Yes. And it’s awesome! My dream is if we have, is to do a Q and A after a screening, at some point and just ask the audience to share their stories.
Steve Pinder: That’s such a great idea.
Julie Aks: Raise your hand and, like, tell some wacky, sad, happy, funny period story.
Steve Pinder: I do feel like I don’t know how you experience those stories when people tell them to you, but when people come up to me and tell me those stories, I do notice that people who menstruate tend to have this little hesitancy and then there’s this release that they can tell a man. I don’t know that someone’s available to sharing that story. It’s been very cool experience for me.
Julie Aks: I’ve been most struck by all the men or non-menstruators who have shared their period stories. Calling back to a time when they said “I was like, Mister Dickley and I had all these questions, and I didn’t know what was going on with my girlfriend.” I have my cousin’s husband who just loved it. He’s like,” when she first got pregnant, neither of us had any idea what was going on with her body” And so that’s been also really striking for how many men seem to come forward and be like, “I didn’t know and I laughed the whole time”. That’s been really cool, too.
Steve Pinder: Yeah.

Harmony Witte: It’s really important to note that this is a parody set in the 18th century, but there’s still a real problem with period illiteracy, because even in 2024, it can be taboo to talk about such matters publicly. Was it hard to decide what to include to make sure that some education was mixed in with the comedy?

Julia Aks: We talked a lot about this, actually trying to balance wanting there to be some educational purpose sounds so it’s not like an after school special, obviously. But we did want people to get something out of it, and we wanted people who maybe feel uncomfortable asking some of these questions because it is still taboo for some people to talk about this stuff, to feel like they got some questions answered and maybe that gate has now been opened for them to ask even more questions and. We had a lot of conversations about, “is this feeling too preachy?” We wanted to steer clear of that, for sure, because at the heart, it is a rom com, and we want people to have a good time and for it to be fun and for it to mean something all at the same time. So we did have a lot of conversations about how to balance all those elements.
Steve Pinder: Yeah. Good. I agree.
Harmony Witte: I think you really nailed it. You did a good job balancing it, and I appreciate it.
Julia Aks: Thank you.
Harmony Witte: Yeah, I really appreciate that you included the fact that period blood can’t just be held in because I see people on Reddit even now saying my boyfriend wants me to hold it in so we can go skiing or whatever. I swear I see that post on Reddit at least once a week.
Julia Aks: Still relevant today. Still very relevant.

Harmony Witte: So something that I always like to ask people who are creatives is, does confidence come naturally to you or do you have to suffer through imposter syndrome with your work?

Julia Aks: That one.
Steve Pinder: Yes, that one.
Julia Aks: I suffer through impostor syndrome. I will say, I think doing all the YouTube content creation together helped me gauge what works and what doesn’t work. Where I can take risks and where I can’t. I won’t speak for you, but because for better or worse, social media, you get on social media, you get immediate feedback in the comment section with the likes and stuff like that. You know, we were just kind of pumping out sketches and music videos and parodies and then getting immediate feedback from our audience. And then the next month we would make something else. I would have these ideas in my mind. And what we learned overall is, like, even our weirdest ideas, like, people really dug for the most part. And that gave me a lot of confidence. Making the leap into narrative storytelling with this film, because, you know, we have, I didn’t go to film school, so I kind of treated my YouTube time as, like, my film school. I had a pretty good track record or a pretty good catalog of feedback on a lot of my ideas that I really just pursued with abandon a lot of the time. So that was helpful. That being said, imposter syndrome is always there.
Steve Pinder: Yeah. I feel like every new thing we do, I’m like, every new thing that we do, I feel like an imposter for some portion of the experience.
Julia Aks: Yeah.
Steve Pinder: And then I don’t. And then it sort of stops at some point.
Julia Aks: It is helpful, and then you do something new again. It is helpful to be a duo making comedy, I will say, because I’ve written things alone where I’m like, I think this is funny. Does anyone else think this is funny? So when Steve and I work together, you know, I’ll write something or he’ll write something that makes one of us laugh, and then if it makes the other one laugh, we’re like, okay, at least two people find it funny, and maybe there’s something here.
Steve Pinder: I also think we have, like, a built-in partner to combat imposter syndrome. You know, if either of us is experiencing it, the other one can kind of address it and just sort of dispel it. And so there’s a really nice back and forth there, just in terms of us being able to both keep our egos in check and support each other and encourage each other.
Julia Aks: Yeah.

Harmony Witte: So what do you want people to take away from this project?

Steve Pinder: We definitely want people to laugh and to enjoy, like, I think to be able to come to this subject matter that is loaded with shame and stigma and to leave feeling joy. I think that’s what I want.
Julia Aks: Wow.
Steve Pinder: Did I just repeat that?
Julia Aks: No, that was beautiful. That’s the best answer we could have had. I think I agreed wholeheartedly.