For a year in the the 2010s, filmmaker Alex Haughey worked for a social media influencer — a job he quickly tried to put behind him.
“It was not a good job, but it was an interesting character study of this life outside of reality,” says Haughey, who went on to direct the low-budget supernatural thriller Prodigy, which was released in 2018 and eventually made a bit of a splash when it later streamed on Netflix.
Haughey was looking for his next project after Prodigy, and found it with Under the Influencer. “If you saw Prodigy, you wouldn’t pick this out as my next project,” he notes with a laugh.
Inspiration struck when Haughey happened to watch the 1962 French feature Cleo from 5 to 7, which centers on a singer who, while she lived decades before social media, still reminded him of the influencer he once worked for.
“Everyone handles her and pampers her. She isn’t allowed to do anything for herself,” he says of the main character.
He decided to lay in his experiences working with the influencer with the French new wave style of Cleo from 5 to 7. The result is Under the Influencer, a feature he wrote and shot over 13 days in an around Los Angeles.
The film follows a successful YouTuber, played by Taylor Joree Scorse, who is aging out of social media stardom, and must rediscover who she is outside of the praise and feedback afforded her.
It has done the festival circuit at places like Cinequest and Dances With Films — and now arrives Dec. 12 on VOD. THR has the first trailer for the project ahead of its release. All these years later, he admits to being surprised that his job working for an influencer has stuck with him artistically.
Says the filmmaker: “I had put that behind me.”
