Poking at Seattle’s Sprawl from Your Favorite Bar: Marcie’s Tells All

Northwest Film Forum will show screenings of Seattle filmmaker John Helde's new film Marcie's on April 4 and 5, 2025. Marcie's is about a small Washington town on the outskirts of the suburbs of Seattle that is feeling the encroachment of the city and developers who want to demolish the beloved community hub of Ed's Tavern in order to bring big business to the area.

I sat down with John to talk about Marcie's and his unique style of filmmaking.

Zach Youngs (ZY): What was the film that made you want to be a filmmaker?

John Helde (JH): Oh that's a great question. It was in high school that I got really into watching films because I had a couple friends who were also into movies. The '80s were a great time for independent film. I was going to see a lot of American independent and international films in art houses.

I was really inspired by John Sayles, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, and later Hal Hartley. John Sayles' Return of the Secaucus Seven really hit me as a very character-driven, one location, simple setup with a group in a house navigating personal relationships. I think that was a lightbulb in some ways of "you could do this." You could get a camera and a bunch of friends together in a location and make a movie. That was something you could make in your own way, in your own neighborhood, so that stuck in my head and kind of drove me.

Title image for Marcie’s

From press kit

ZY: What was the inspiration for your latest film, Marcie's?

JH: This is the third fiction feature I've done and it's the third one I've done where I cast the key actors first and we all agree to go through a six month or so improvisation period where they're actually creating their character with my help and input. Then they meet in improvisation. We kind of move through time to create a backstory and history for these characters.

The spark really comes from Jenn [Ruzumna], who plays Marcie, developing this character who grows up in a small town turning suburban outside of Seattle with a lot of family pressures and troubles. The character kind of found her voice or spark being a bartender at this tavern and helping to build that community there. I liked that as it started to grow. It was a good place to bring in other actors because who knows who's going to walk into a bar.

Reggie Jackson was developing a character who was a karaoke host so I found a way to bring him into Marcie's bar even though he was technically working in Seattle. He went out to do a gig there and they developed a friendship and got pulled into that community. This was a venue where unexpected things can happen.

ZY: Did you have any kind of outline before the improvisation or did you just want to see what happened?

JH: No, I didn't have an outline for the story. That's the thing, it's an incredible leap of faith on the actor's part. They knew this going into it that they were going to build these characters where we don't know what's going to happen or what the story's going to be. As it developed, a couple months into the process, I started to have ideas about what this film could really be.

I was personally drawn to this idea of community as well because it's something that's been on my mind. Where do people meet and gather? The theme of isolation versus connectedness in the times we live in where we're incredibly connected, but ironically we're all sort of isolated by devices at the same time. Where are those places where authentic connection happens? So I was inspired by that and sort of in the back of my head I was carrying an interest in habitat and what are the disappearing places within nature as developments and cities grow bigger and bigger.

Seeing that around [Seattle] and the country and the world was in the back of my mind, so that's when I brought in the idea of an endangered species hanging out near the bar. I started to see the parallels between these community gathering spaces or independent businesses that are also threatened by growth and development. I began to work with that and came up with the idea of a developer coming in. There was a need for her [Marcie] to bump up against an obstacle so the development seemed to fit all those themes.

ZY: Do you find that editing the film yourself is a way to make sure all of those plot threads come together?

JH: I think working as a director this way, particularly with improvisation, draws on editing work. I like to open the hopper wide at the beginning. That's the idea I love about improvisation. Let's see what we come up with. Let's see where this idea goes. [It's] opening the door to unexpected moments. But a movie has certain strictures and audience expectations, so the story gets crafted in multiple places in the writing and in the directing. We're not learning it from the ground up. We've been there and it's comfortable. We know how to talk about these characters.

I really love to edit my own work. Especially this where I've been in that world with the actors for so long I'm just so attuned to them. We had to make some choices where some scenes didn't make it into the final movie for length or it didn't feel important or in the flow anymore. 

ZY: I can imagine you have a whole hard drive of just the open mic scenes.

JH: [Laughs] Exactly! That was a place where we let it rip and see what happens.

A moment at the mic in Marcie’s

From press kit

ZY: Were any of the actors in the open mic scenes regular stand up comics?

JH: Most of them didn't do stand up comedy regularly. There's this guy [Noah J. Rubin], his name in the movie is Nathan, and he plays a guy who's come out of the city and is doing his first attempt at stand up. It's a very short snippet, but he actually is a stand up comedian who at the time was hosting open mic at the Waterwheel Lounge so it was just fun to work him into the story. I loved what everyone brought to [those scenes]. I had written some ideas, but I opened it up to them. They came up with some amazing bits and it was not all supposed to be good, of course, it's meant to be people going up for their first time. The home-brewed comedy. 

ZY: How did you find the perfect bar to mimic what you wanted for Marcie's?

JH: We developed a vision for what this place was. In a small town, but not completely isolated from being encroached by suburbia and a nearby city. So I just started looking around at what was out there. I love bars, but I haven't spent time or fixated on one like a regular, so I started researching. I visited a lot and I drove out to Roslyn and Cle Elum. I drove up to Snohomish. In an ideal world there would have been someplace where we could shoot both the interiors and the exteriors, but we were juggling what the backdrop looks like [too]. It had to have trees around it because part of the story involved the idea that [Ed's Tavern] is next to ten acres of land. We even looked at a place in Quilcene out on the Olympic Peninsula so we did a lot of looking around at places. 

Kate Becker, the King County film liaison as well as Chris Swanson at the Seattle Film [Commission] had a brainstorming session. Chris suggested the Waterwheel Lounge. We looked at that and I liked it. It took a little while to get in touch with the owner. At the same time I looked at Mount Si Tavern out in North Bend, where I had a great conversation with the owner and they were very game. When we finally got in touch with the Waterwheel they were game and we loved it because it had a U-shaped bar, but also because the walls are wood panelled so it does not look like a place that's in an urban setting. There might have been a version where we shot everything in North Bend, but we didn't have the ability to shut down a business for two weeks, which is maybe how you do this in an ideal world. So, we decided to use the two together. Mount Si for the exteriors and the Waterwheel for the interiors.

ZY: You're not the first local filmmaker to use North Bend as a filming location. Is it a city that has been incentivising filmmakers to shoot there?

JH: I think over a lot of years there's been interest in the community there of having films come in. Maybe since Twin Peaks. I'm not sure if Twin Peaks started it, but I know [the city] loves that part of their history. When we talked with the chamber of commerce and the city of North Bend, they were just very welcoming and eager to make it work. The first decision was the tavern, but when I looked around I felt like it was a good fit for where scenes outside of the tavern could take place. We were going to be going there anyway so it felt great to consolidate and we just used [North Bend] as our fictional town. People were really great there. We're going to be bringing the film back there [April 27] for a special screening at the North Bend Theatre.

ZY: What is next for you?

JH: I have a couple projects I'm aiming for. A lot of my focus has been on getting Marcie's out in the world so we're planning screenings and moving it onto the video on demand release on April 29th. So, a lot of my head is in that, but there's a [narrative] script that I wrote that's not improvised that I would like to make around here and a documentary that I'm gestating and doing some research on. Hoping to get started on those projects in the second half of this year. 

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Marcie’s promises to be a poignant look at timely issues facing Seattle’s surrounding neighborhoods and natural environs from the point of view of our beloved third places we assume will always be there.