The startling and compelling trailer for a new short film, Queen Bee, is released today introducing filmmaker and lead actor Johnny Healy. His name and face are sure to be recognizable in Hollywood as the buzz about his work – which blends dark, eerie storytelling with nonsensical comedy – is building.
And “buzz” is the operative word here. Queen Bee, a 15-minute film that – like any taut suspense thriller should – leaves the viewer with many questions, hovering around a mix of mystery and intrigue, dark humor and surprise, and a desire to hit rewind and watch it over again, to see what new aspects of the story and characters might be revealed.
A “creepy fetish-undertoned thriller” is how Healy describes Queen Bee, which showcases his impressive skills as a director, writer and actor. Suspense is a key ingredient in all of Healy’s work, which exhibits a flair for arousing all the story point elements of a full-length feature into the short film format, sometimes in the space of just a few minutes. Queen Bee arrives on the heels of the gripping five-minute short Realm, which recently had its world premiere at the Beverly Hills Film Festival, and the 16-minute Baggage, which won a slew of awards on the festival circuit in 2016.
Queen Bee is Healy’s most complex and large-scale project to date. Script, cast, photography and production design are sophisticated and meticulously executed. If Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut comes to mind when viewing Queen Bee, Healy says that’s no accident. “My co-director and I referenced images from Stanley Kubrick films to our cinematographer”, he says. “We utilized symmetrical wide-angled shots with the subjects in center of the frame to create a world too perfect for comfort.
“We were strategic as to when we’d use close-up shots, reserving their use for intimate moments, or intense interpersonal struggle. We also worked with our production designer to decorate with items that had little color in the early scenes of the film, gradually adding more color in each scene up until the climactic Queen Bee scene, or the ‘Hive’ as we referred to it on set.”
Queen Bee was shot in Los Angeles with a local cast and crew including co-director Katie Larsen and cinematographer Andrew Lemon, known for his work on TV series Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy. Both Larsen and Lemon are regular collaborators of Healy’s. Supporting cast includes J.P. Manoux, (Veep, Grey’s Anatomy, Curb Your Enthusiasm), Morgan Bradley (Big Little City, Power Rangers Ninja Steel, American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story) and Marissa Pistone (The Sound of Settling, Mogulettes, Tequila for Penguins).
Locations in Queen Bee include the picturesque dining patio at charming East Hollywood restaurant Melody, and a late night shoot took place at Patras, a perfect-for-filming burger joint in Cypress Park, North East LA. Healy enjoys finding locations in different areas of the city, and shot Realm at a large residence in Woodland Hills nicknamed “The Sinatra House,” as legend has it Frank Sinatra was among numerous celebrities who lived in or stayed at the house.
In Realm a bride becomes distressed when an ex-boyfriend crashes her wedding; the sinister, disturbing after-shocks of the short hint at a potential episodic series. Healy cites The X-Files and The Twilight Zone as inspirations, aiming for the level of quickly provoked engagement that the episodes in those series hurled the viewer into.
Taking the lead roles in both Realm and Queen Bee, Healy is a natural on screen, so it’s surprising that he considers Realm as his true acting debut. With a lengthy career in film camera sales and rentals, he has been on sets from a young age and has become an accomplished and exciting self-taught filmmaker whose work is immediately arresting.
“In my early projects, I rarely got to act because I couldn’t trust any of my friends to operate the camera properly, and I really wanted the projects to look good,” Healy says. “So I found myself directing more than anything, then learning lighting, audio, editing, and so on. But I always wanted to eventually make my way onto the screen as a performer, and I did this once I networked and was able to hand over all the technical jobs to a team I trusted.” He adds that the first movie set he set foot on was near where he was raised, in Northern California. “It was The Princess Diaries starring Anne Hathaway. I was about 15, and was a background actor.” After moving to Los Angeles after high school, he took jobs as an extra on various films and commercial shoots.
“One time I was an assistant cameraman on a small Sport Chalet commercial, and they decided to cast me in the commercial. This happened on several occasions, which only urged me further to consider acting. But I never imagined myself being chosen in an acting audition. I’m sometimes shy, or self-conscious, and intimidated by auditioning. So instead I went and made a movie that I could act in. Similarly with writing, to find a script that I would like enough to make a movie out of seems like such a monumental task that I just write them myself.”
Queen Bee – Synopsis
During a confrontational meeting at a coffeehouse, Chris’s friends, Wade and Shannon Turner, inform him of their disapproval of his wife, Melissa. Later that evening, and after an argument with his wife, Chris attends the Turners’ social affair without her. During the course of the visit, Chris grows suspicious that the Turners have collaborated with Melissa to lure him away from his home. He abandons the Turners’ gathering and warily returns home, fearful of what he might discover.
