Harrison Houde and Dakota Daulby spent years trying to get a feature film made. Then a producer called and essentially said: write the movie — we’re shooting it this year.

The result was Tight Lettuce, a bilingual English/French dark comedy inspired by a true story about a son trying to maintain a relationship with his heroin-addicted father. The film went on to premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival and win the Golden Audience Award for Best Quebec Film.

In this episode of Off The Lot, Harrison and Dakota break down what it actually took to turn the project into their first feature — from originally developing it as a $100,000 short to suddenly having the opportunity to make the full movie.

We get into:

• How a Facebook message eventually became a feature film
• Writing a first draft in roughly a month
• Financing the film outside the traditional Telefilm model
• Making a sub-$2.5M indie feature in 20 shooting days
• Why their 20-day shoot effectively became 16–17 days
• Casting Quebec star Emmanuel Bilodeau
• Combining comedy and addiction without trivializing either
• What they learned from 12–13 cuts of the movie
• Why Harrison says he’d never start another movie with car scenes
• The mistakes they made on their first feature
• Why they now want recognizable cast attached earlier
• What filmmakers misunderstand about theatrical distribution
• The reality of trying to get an indie film onto movie screens

They also talk candidly about the biggest writing problem they discovered in the edit, what they would put in their contracts next time, and the lessons they’re already applying to their next films.

Subscribe to Off The Lot for conversations about what it actually takes to finance, make, finish, and release independent films outside the studio system.

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