The directors were also influenced by the Dogme 95 film The Celebration, part of the movement originally founded by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg to strip back cinematic artifice, as well as by the tradition of using a more “consumer level” camera. As a result, Sinner Supper Club was filmed entirely on an iPhone.
“I think there’s a lot of resurgence and nostalgia around the mini DV cameras and camcorders that films like that [used],” explains Rosato. “The films made in 2025 or 2026 that are like that are great, but they’re not really ‘of the now’ in the same way. So we were like, ‘What would be our version of a mini DV camcorder?’ which is the iPhone. It started as a creative translation point, but it also became very accessible because I was able to submerge myself and the camera in a shower to shoot one scene. I wasn’t worried about the camera breaking, because these can be submerged under water. We threw it in a freezer, and we mounted it to a bike. It just made it a lot easier to play very quickly and keep up with our actors and ideas.”
Kaye notes that using an iPhone allowed them to get close to the actors and create a movie with “propulsion and freneticism.” They didn’t need to take breaks to set up new shots. And because people are used to having phones in their faces all the time these days, it didn’t feel strange to be improvising in front of them.
“We were given an outline every day,” star Jayae Riley Jr. reveals. “Nora and Daisy plotted out the entire script. We were given a beginning, a middle, and an end, with action beats in between. It was a lot easier to improvise off of that, because we had a ton of information about the character, about the day, about how it was going to go, about any conflicts that needed to happen.”
Co-star Elise Kibler adds, “I think the nature of the way that we made this, at least to me, made the stakes feel a little bit lower. We were surrounded by our friends. We were excited about spending the week creating something together. And because we had such minimal equipment, there was a feeling very different from being on your typical set where there’s a [lot of] people and everything takes forever. This was just fast and loose. I think it took some of the pressure off that you might feel to create the perfect scene, or the perfect lines, and I think that freedom led to a lot of the wonderful lines that my fellow actors created in our film.”
Rosato and Kaye originally met through their screenwriting work, with both finding they were drawn to complicated, “fucked up” ensembles. The pair created the characters of Sinner Supper Club before casting them, using “a base of clown” as archetypal jumping-off points.
