Producing

Casting fighters who could act

Sree built the audition pool himself, reaching out through LUX, UW Drama, Backstage, and beyond. The film builds to a fight between brothers, so Joshua had to look the part and actually box. Sree chose to cast an actor he could teach to fight, rather than a fighter he would have to teach to act.

He brought on an active amateur boxer and Muay Thai fighter to train Jack Spangler and himself three times a week for six months, on top of strength and conditioning and homework between sessions. Jack went from never having thrown a punch to ready for an amateur bout.

For Olivia, Sree ran another round of auditions and spoke personally with more than 20 candidates. Gabriel was a challenge of his own. He had to look convincingly like the biological father of Jack’s Joshua, and while his lines were few, the whole story turns on his presence. It was Sree’s first time casting much older actors, which meant working through their agents for permission to audition. He seriously considered twelve candidates before casting Jeremy Moller. Most of the cast and crew signed on after Sree pitched them the project with a deck.

Rehearsing like a stage production

The roles were emotionally complex, and one table read wasn’t going to build the chemistry the brothers needed. So Sree scheduled rehearsals the way a theater production would.

The cast ran three table reads and six rehearsals at Hutchinson Hall, with props standing in for the set, ending in a final rehearsal of more than eight hours that ran every scene several times over. Sree handled every schedule and location for the cast himself.

Two crises before the shoot

A few weeks out, Sree brought on licensed stunt coordinator Rynn Reigns to check that the fight Sree had choreographed read well on camera. Days before the first shoot day, Rynn left the project for personal reasons. Sree reached out to more than ten replacements, and Aimar Azis came aboard the same day. Sree drove to his house at 2 a.m. to walk him through every beat of the fight.

Then the boxing gym booked for the fight scene backed out. Sree called five coaches, visited two gyms in one day, and secured Elite Boxing in Kent for fourteen hours on a Sunday, with the whole gym to themselves.

Taking care of the team

Sree worked out a deal with Bothell Chaat House to feed the cast and crew every shoot day. He bought Jack new gloves, gave him his own boxing shoes, and arranged transportation and housing for the SFX artist, who came down from Bellingham. On fight day, one crew member’s only job was keeping both fighters pumped up and camera-ready every twenty minutes.

And through incessant, creative marketing almost every day until the premiere, he built a fanbase for Bleed and got people genuinely invested in it. His passion was infectious, something co-star Jack Spangler says outright in the official promo.