Keep Your Feet
on the Pedals

Keep Your Feet on the Pedals is a very personal script for me.

Twice in my life, my creative journey has been completely halted by sudden tragedy. There are a lot of stories about tragedy and the immediate aftermath. We see the moment someone's world falls apart. We see the funeral, the anger, the grief, and the struggle to survive what happened.

But I wanted to tell the story of what happens years later.

What happens when you've survived it, life has kept moving, and at some point you realize that a part of you never started moving again? What happens when the thing you lost wasn't just a person, but also your connection to the art you made, the people you made it with, and even the version of yourself who existed before everything changed?

I've lived that story twice. I've had to find my way back to creating twice. And I don't see that part of grief reflected very often.

So if I was going to tell that story, I wanted to put as much of myself into it as I could. Puppets, music, Austin, old friends, stupid jokes, and making things with people you love are all deeply important to me. This isn't my autobiography, but emotionally, there is a lot of me in these characters and in the question at the center of the film: How do you start creating again when creating reminds you of everything you lost?

I also didn't want to make a relentlessly sad movie about grief, because that isn't how I've experienced grief. Some of the funniest moments of my life have existed right next to some of the most painful ones. We laugh. We say inappropriate things. We drink beer, play games, make each other uncomfortable, remember stupid stories, and somehow keep going.

That's the balance I wanted Keep Your Feet on the Pedals to live in. It's a story about grief, but it's also about friendship, creativity, puppets, music, and the strange collection of things and people that can pull us back toward ourselves.

Ultimately, I think it's a story about learning that moving forward doesn't mean leaving everything behind.

That last sentence feels particularly right for this title, too. "Keep your feet on the pedals" becomes more than a phrase or a cute title. It becomes the thesis: you don't have to forget, resolve everything, or stop grieving. You just have to find a way to start moving again.