From Santa Barbara to Sundance, Hannah Pearl Utt is making a name for herself on the silver screen. As a 13-year-old thespian taking part in Santa Barbara’s Ensemble Storybook Theater, Utt was interviewed by the Independent about her love for acting. She told the Independent that she would “definitely not” fall into the traps of Los Angeles and film. (Spoiler alert: Utt now lives in Los Angeles and spends her time directing, writing, and starring in films.) Originally, her dreams involved doing Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre. However, during college, a journey that Utt began as a theater major at UCLA and finished with a Bachelor of Arts in “The Intersection Between Performance and Religion with an Emphasis on Metaphor” at NYU’s Gallatin School, she realized “that was never going to happen” and decided to reframe her love for storytelling in the form of short films. A good decision, as several projects and credits later, Utt and frequent collaborator Jen Tullock were able to take their feature-length debut, family comedy Before You Know It, to the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, and it is now playing at Santa Barbara theaters.
“Our producer, Mallory Schwartz, went through the Creative Producing Lab at Sundance,” said Utt. “We did their film financing program, Catalyst Women. I did the Director’s Lab, and Jen and I both did the Screenwriters’ Lab.” Utt recalls the amount of practice and procedure involved to bring the film to the festival in January. “And before we knew it, we were shooting blocks away from the restaurants Jen and I were working in when we started writing the script almost a decade earlier.”
The movie, which leans on Utt’s and Tullock’s shrewdness and attention to character quirks, serves as testimony that the offbeat indie film has not yet died since its rise and heyday in the ’90s and early 2000s. Before You Know It never falls into trite caricature and instead embraces the over-theatrics of the sharp-tongued daughter, the somewhat fumbling therapist, and the idiot lawyer. The film stars Utt and Tullock, along with some familiar faces: Judith Light, Mandy Patinkin, Mike Colter, and Alec Baldwin.