"We All, Even As Adults, Are Still Coming of Age" 'Outerlands' Cast and Director Discuss Trying to Honor Real Life and the Importance of Video Games (2025)

Elena Oxman makes her feature debut with a queer coming-of-age story, Outerlands, that begins well into adulthood, as confronting past traumas and addiction become milestones in the journey of coming to your own.

Asia Kate Dillon (Orange Is the New Black) takes the lead in this production as Cass (they/them), a reserved San Francisco resident who juggles multiple streams of income, including babysitting children, serving at restaurants, and dealing party drugs. After a steamy encounter with Kalli (Louisa Krause), Cass agrees to babysit her 11-year-old daughter Ari (Ridley Asha Bateman), only for Kalli to mysteriously disappear. As the film progresses, Cass comes head-to-head with the demons they have been running from, leading to a heartfelt exploration of self-acceptance, queer family, and childhood healing.

Outerlands screened at South by Southwest (SXSW) 2025, where Oxman, Dillon, Krause, and Bateman talked to Steve Weintraub in Collider's Media Studio at the Cinema Center in Austin. Oxman discusses her goals of trying to honor real life and respecting her audience by scaling back the script, as well as how video games became integral to the story. The cast members also reveal their anxieties about filming, from shooting 17 scenes a day, learning to drive a scooter, or sprinting into the ocean. Hear about how Dillon managed to secure a song from one of their favorite bands and more in the video above, or you can read along via the transcript below.

'Outerlands' Is a "Queer Coming-of-Age" Drama

"We all, even as adults, are still coming of age."

COLLIDER: What's interesting is, there was just a film here that took place in San Francisco, and your film takes place in San Francisco and I really enjoyed both films. It must be something in the San Francisco water.

ELENA OXMAN: Definitely. It's a magical city. Very photogenic, very inspiring to film there.

I have a lot of things I want to talk to you about, but I have to start with the generic up front, which is most people watching this will not have seen the movie yet, so how have you been describing it to people?

OXMAN: We've been describing it to people as a queer coming-of-age movie that is about a person who works as a nanny in San Francisco who gets left with an 11-year-old girl, and her mother disappears. That's the setup of the film, but really, it's a drama. It's about coming home to ourselves and acknowledging wounds that we might not have acknowledged in the past. Ultimately, when I say coming-of-age, we all, even as adults, are still coming of age, so it's like, how do we come into adulthood?

One of the things that I commend you on is that the characters and the situations felt very authentic and real like this could really be happening. Can you talk about trying to capture that and put it on screen and not make it feel like Hollywood?

OXMAN: I think that's staying true to what life feels like to me as a writer. I feel like when we make movies, we're aspiring to honor how rich and deep life is, and I don't think [we] ever get there. It's a very hard thing to do, but as a writer, I always try and just stay close to it and avoid the clichés of the ready-made ideas but stick to my experience or the experience of people I know and be loyal to that, and then I think it flows from there.

'Outlanders' Honors Real Life Through a Pared-Back Script

"Trusting and respecting the audience."

For all three of you, what was it about this script and this story that said, "I really want to do this?"

ASIA KATE DILLON: The writing, first and foremost. The story was so clear. The first time I read through the draft, I immediately understood not only my character, Cass Marks, but also all the characters. It felt very, like you said, real. I hadn't ever read a script like this before. I hadn't read this particular story before. I hadn't played this particular type of character before. It felt very new, very relevant, but also there were elements of the story that were personally nostalgic for me, and/or synchronistic for me. I read the script on an airplane, and I immediately texted my manager and I just said, "I have to make this film. Please set up a meeting with the director as soon as possible." The writing was the answer.

RIDLEY ASHA BATEMAN: Just the fact that it was so real, and it could actually happen in real life. It just spoke to me in a way.

LOUISA KRAUSE: I agree. Definitely the writing. Sometimes scripts are just so jam-packed and there are all these words, and they're just not necessary. I felt like less was way more. Just the story and the story of acceptance—I really could connect to it. Also, the hearts involved, I would say, from the top down. Our producers are just the sweetest. They had us over to their home, all of us, the cast and crew. It's like the most diverse crew I've ever worked with. It was honestly so inspiring, and I'm just so proud to be here with everybody. I'm just grateful to be in this movie.

You bring up something that I wanted to talk about, and another thing that I really commend you on is the lack of unnecessary dialogue and exposition that's not needed. People speak when they would really speak, and it's honest conversations. Can you sort of talk about that aspect?

OXMAN: For me, a lot of that is trusting and respecting the audience.

I wish more people did.

OXMAN: [Laughs] We participate when we watch things, and I love it when films leave spaces and gaps for us to actually use our hearts and minds to fill those in rather than telling us everything. I make films because I'm in love with the visual medium, so it can say so much. This film happened to be about a character who's a person of few words—that's part of their character; they're kind of stoic. That was one of the reasons for casting Asia and really choosing Asia as, "This is Cass," is I just knew that they were an actor who's going to be able to convey so much with so little because so much of the performance is really unspoken.

Video Games Are a Major Aspect of 'Outerlands'

"There's a lot of solace in that activity."

I don't want to get too specific—I don't want to do any spoilers or ruin any aspect of the movie—but there is a video game component. I'm a big video game fan, I grew up with games, but you have the Super NES, and the game "Outerlands" plays a big role in the movie. The game is not real, as far as I know.

OXMAN: Well, I can say something about that. The game is actually real. It's a game called "Redder" by a video game designer named Anna Anthropy.

But it wasn't called "Outerlands."

OXMAN: It was not. "Outerlands" is not real, that's correct. The end sequence was written into the script, and she designed that very end sequence that comes at the end of the film. We did use a Super NES. People who know that system will recognize it, but it was meant to be generic, of a certain era, but not something in particular.

[Asian], your character goes to the arcade, plays video games and pinball, and I think that a lot of video game players—not all, but a lot—use video games as a form of escapism. It's entertainment, but for some people, it's just an escape from the reality of life. Is that something you thought about, or am I digging too deep?

OXMAN: Oh no, definitely. This isn't giving anything away; the movie begins with Cass playing a little game on their phone, and, in the context of that scene, it's soothing. It's a self-soothing kind of mechanism. At the same time, when we say "escape," there can be a negative connotation to escaping into phones or video games or whatever. It's more complex than that because there can actually be a lot of solace. A lot of people, for video games, there's a lot of solace in that activity, and I think the same goes for Cass. So, it's both.

I'm not trying to make it so it's all negative, but I've seen both sides of it.

OXMAN: Totally. No, you're totally onto something because I think a big theme of the movie is how we avoid pain.

Absolutely.

'Outerlands' Filming Schedule Had Multiple Little Challenges

"The scene that gave me the most anxiety was running into the ocean."

For the three of you, you know the shooting schedule, and you see what's coming up. What day do you have circled in terms of, “I can't wait to film this,” and what do you have circled in terms of, “How the F am I going to film this?” Sorry for my language.

DILLON: Please don't swear around me. [Laughs] Okay, I had the entire film circled as I can't wait to show up every day. Truly, every single day was a joy and also a creative challenge, which I love. I pretty quickly realized that I had to approach each filming day very differently than I had on previous projects. For example, on a given day, there would be 17 scenes on the call sheet because those scenes were just moments, like, "Cass wakes up and looks at their alarm clock. Cass wakes up on the couch and looks at the beer bottles. Cass is running down the stairs." It's all these little moments, but all of them obviously probably require a costume change, certainly a different emotional state.

Because Elena and I did so much prep for the film, and I knew the film inside and out, backwards and forwards, all the other metaphors, I just actually said, “I need to show up on the day, and you just tell me actually what we're going to do next," because if I look at it and I say, "Oh, I have these 17," I'm going lose my mind, actually. So, it was a different way of working for me that, ultimately, I found really benefited me and, therefore, I hope, the film.

But also, it sounds like you had done so much work prior to stepping on set thinking about everything.

DILLON: Definitely. They were like, “We're going to do this now,” and I was like, “Great, I know what that is.”

BATEMAN: There weren't days that I didn't want to do. There were days that were more challenging than others. It was always fun to be on set, and it was just more challenging than others on certain days.

Good answer.

DILLON: Yeah, I had to learn to drive a scooter, but Ridley also had to learn to be a passenger on a scooter with me. I feel like those days might have been just a little more challenging, certainly because of the physical aspect.

KRAUSE: Same. It was just fun to show up. We knew what we were signing up for, so we're all game. It's so funny. The intimacy scene was so easy to do because it was just well guided and that was a piece of cake. I think the scene that gave me the most anxiety was running into the ocean potentially. People were standing by with blankets, and we were so well taken care of, and it was actually exhilarating to be able to do that. It was very cold. I think we were right next to the Cliff House in San Francisco on the beach, but it was a thrill, actually. So, yeah, lucky.

'Outerlands' Features a Mystery Band Allied With the Queer Community

"It was a very easy and genuine letter to write."

This is not a spoiler, but over the end credits, you have a song by a band that I love. I don't know if I can say it or not.

DILLON: My instinct is don't, because I have a good story about it, but we don't need to spoil it.

I want to know how you managed to get this band to give you a song.

DILLON: I can answer without telling you what the band is. I wrote them a letter at the advice of our producers and our PR team. Everyone was like, “Just write them a letter.” They are one of my top five favorite bands of all time—one of the best live shows I've ever seen. Their records have been on repeat for me for, like, 20 years at least. It was a very easy and genuine letter to write, and it was just about whether or not we could get that letter to them. Magic and hard work and diligence made it happen. It's just cool to know that they read my letter, and they were like, “Yeah, we want to give you this song for this film.” Part of it was acknowledging that dance music is so integral in the LGBTQIA+ community, how they've been allies for so long, and how it would really mean so much to have their song in the film. So, yay! [Laughs]

I am a huge fan of the band, and without giving anything away, they have a soundtrack out for something, and I have listened to that soundtrack probably 1,000 times. It is one of my favorites of all time.

I'm almost out of time, but I like talking about editing. So, you're editing, you have a cut, you're showing it to friends and family. Did you jump out the window, or were you like, “It's coming together. This is good. Just some small tweaks?"

OXMAN: [Laughs] Yeah, a little bit of both, I'd say. It's very nerve-wracking the first time you show what you've been working on to an audience. What was reassuring is that [for] my amazing editor Chris Brown and I, who'd been kind of holed up in his apartment/our editing suite, working on this, the same things that our gut told us needed work were what got reflected back to us by our audience, and that's always just such a great thing when that happens. It was just reassuring that we're on the right track. We had one small little test screening when we were about, I'd say, three-quarters of the way there, 80%, and then from there, finished the cut.

Did you end up making any sort of big changes to the film that you were not expecting, or was it more little like surgical cuts?

OXMAN: There were both. There were definitely surgical cuts, but there was a substantial change towards the ending of the film. It was nothing that wasn't in the script, but it was cutting and pruning to streamline things. I think something that can happen, this happened with my script, is there can sometimes be multiple endings, or multiple low points, and we sort of had that going on. That, unfortunately, meant we lost some great performance moments and whatever, but you have to always sacrifice for the flow of the story.

Special thanks to our 2025 partners at SXSW, including presenting partner Rendezvous Films and supporting partners Bloom, Peroni, Hendrick’s Gin, and Roxstar Entertainment.

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Outerlands

Drama

Release Date

March 8, 2025

Runtime

100 minutes

Director

Elena Oxman

Writers

Elena Oxman

Producers

Henry Russell Bergstein, Allison Estrin, Asia Kate Dillon

Cast

• 

  Asia Kate Dillon

  Uncredited

• 

  Louisa Krause

• 

  Ridley Asha Bateman

• 

  Lea DeLaria

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