Wisconsin filmmaker uses own experience in ‘My Dead Friend Zoe’

Kyle Hausmann-Stokes first started making movies when he was a teenager — “skate videos in the parking lot of Verona High School,” he told WPR’s “The Larry Meiller Show.”

His new movie, “My Dead Friend Zoe,” is a portrait of a veteran grieving the loss of her friend. The film is based on Hausmann-Stokes’ own experiences being deployed to Iraq and coming back home.

He said he wanted to make the movie realistic, and he went to significant lengths to achieve that. For example, group therapy scenes are completely improvised by actors who are all themselves veterans — including actor Morgan Freeman. 

Although the film has received positive reviews, it has been pulled from theaters due to insufficient ticket sales. The movie can be streamed on many sites, including Apple TV and Prime Video.

Hausmann-Stokes joined “The Larry Meiller Show” to discuss his first feature-length movie and the real events that inspired it.

The following has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Larry Meiller: What’s the movie about? 

Kyle Hausmann-Stokes: It’s an autobiographical film. It’s a dark comedy and a drama, so you will absolutely laugh. I call it a film about my own journey with post-traumatic growth. It’s about fun ways in which we process grief. There’s a core friendship at the center of the film between these two women who are Afghanistan veterans. And it’s about a divided family. 

Ed Harris plays my grandfather, who’s from Rice Lake, Wisconsin. Sonequa Martin-Green plays myself. Natalie Morales plays one of my battle buddies from the military. And then we’ve got this up-and-comer named Morgan Freeman, who plays a [Veterans Affairs] counselor who was very helpful to me in my journey. 

This film is almost 20 years in the making for me. There’s a lot of truth in there.

LM: How’d you put this cast together? 

KHS: I had been writing this script for two years. I made a proof-of-concept short film. I reached out to Ed Harris first, because I wanted to cast him in the role of my grandfather. I just wrote him this very carefully worded letter and then waited patiently.

Ed got back to me, and then we met at a cafe near his place in Malibu. He walked in, and I was ready. I had all this stuff to show him. I had photos and memorabilia. I had shrapnel from my Humvee — all the things to convince him. And he said, “Well, I’ve read the script again this morning. I think it’s great, and I’d like to do it.” And that was it. 

I nervously pushed all my things aside, and then we split a tuna sandwich and we’ve been friends since.

LM: Morgan Freeman has a military background, actually. A lot of people didn’t know that. 

KHS: If people stick around to the end credits of this film, there are two special things that you will get in the end credits. One of those is a way to communicate who in this film is a veteran. 

But my letter to Freeman started a little bit differently. I said, “Airman First Class Freeman, this is Staff Sergeant Hausmann, and I’ve got a mission if you’d like to join me.” And he did.

LM: There are a few scenes of veterans speaking and group therapy sessions. I wondered about the scripting on those.

KHS: I intentionally wrote no dialogue for those folks. The scene that you’re talking about is, there’s group therapy happening. And Morgan Freeman’s the leader of it, and that scene is filled with veterans. And they are all different shapes and sizes, different branches and ages. And they’re real veterans. They’re  people that I know here in Los Angeles who are incredible working actors. They happen to be veterans.

LM: What did you want this film to say about the lives of veterans after service?

KHS: I wanted the film to change the narrative on how we veterans are portrayed in film and television. We oftentimes get reduced to a trope. We’re one or two things on different ends of the spectrum. We’re super soldiers in combat, Navy SEALs kicking down doors and saving the world. Otherwise, we’re just broken, homeless, drunk, angry, can’t handle ourselves — completely affected by our service to the point where we’re not functional. 

And that describes a very small group of veterans out there. Most of us are completely invisible to the country because we’ve done our thing and we’ve blended back into society. And we’re the best that society has to offer, and we don’t talk about it that much.

War is an odd thing to have as part of your occupation. You absolutely should be affected by it, but that does not define who we veterans are, and it’s not the only conversation about us. 

LM: What does the general public — particularly people who have not served in the military — need to understand about post-traumatic stress disorder?

KHS: PTSD is a normal reaction to an abnormal experience. There’s a line in the film that is one of my favorites that always gets a laugh. My protagonist, Merit, she’s on an uncomfortable first date at a local bar —  by the way, drinking a brandy old fashioned because I set this film in Wisconsin, even though we shot in Portland. And anyway, she says, “We don’t own PTSD. We do happen to be the best at it.” 

But what I want people to know about PTSD is that it’s not owned by the military. It’s a very normal thing. Anybody can have it if you have experienced something traumatic in your life, whatever that might be. We’re sensitive creatures.

LM: A caller had a question. They are a 10-year veteran from the Navy, and they wanted to know what tropes you were aware of that you wanted to avoid when making this movie.

KHS: I tried to avoid every single one I could think of. I thought of it as a trope buster.

In one scene, we see two soldiers, Merit and Zoe. They are pulling gate guard duty. And it is not interesting. It is boring. Anybody who serves in the military knows that it is “hurry up and wait,” and war especially tends to be about 95 percent boredom punctuated by 5 percent terror. Even all the way down to the crappy folding chairs that we would have on some of our outposts. I just wanted there to be a visceral grittiness, the texture and patina of the Army.

We have the greatest military of all time, right? But at the same time, so many aspects of it are held together with duct tape and paper clips. And that’s the reality for a lot of soldiers, so I really wanted to bring that aspect of it to life.

LM: I would say, though, that the conversations that Zoe has with Merit, it’s kind of a boring setting. But they light it up.

KHS: I think that’s what a lot of people that have served in any branch in the military can relate to. You have battle buddies, you have men and women that you spend a lot of time with that you never would have crossed paths with in your normal life. 

That is one of my favorite things about the military. I’m a kid from Verona, Wisconsin, which is fairly homogenous — everybody’s more or less the same. I got plucked out and sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, and then Fort Benning, Georgia for airborne school, and then stuck in Fort Polk, Louisiana with people that I never would have crossed paths with otherwise. And they are now my best friends.

It gave me insight into different kinds of people. I don’t know how much I feel about the idea of a draft, but in some parts of my brain, I think I like the idea of a conscription or something like that, where it forces folks to jumble up a little bit before we all get set in our ways.