Based on a Jack London story, Sean Meehan’s Lost Face was always going to be a short film that turned heads. First featured on our site in 2016, when it was Oscar-qualified, the short film finally found its way to our YouTube channel in June 2025 – and has since amassed nearly three million views.

As audiences continue to discover and discuss its striking authenticity and unflinching narrative, we thought it was the perfect time to welcome back writer, cinematographer, and director Meehan to answer some of your YouTube questions.

For those who’d rather read the interview, here’s the edited transcript:

These questions are all inspired by the comments section of our YouTube upload of Lost Face and a lot of the commenters there are really happy that you decided to adapt this Jack London story. What made this a story you wanted to bring to the screen?

Short films are very difficult to kind of get right. I mean they’re not a feature film so you don’t have that huge palette to play with. They’re not an episode of TV. They’re definitely their own self-contained little thing and they’re difficult to get right. So I looked around a lot for a piece of material that had that self-contained story and that would be satisfying within itself. And this story absolutely has that. I mean it’s Jack London. It’s, you know, talk about standing on the shoulders of giants.

How faithful does the film stick to the original story, and how important was it to maintain Jack London’s voice?

Well in terms of how faithful this story is, I tried to be as faithful as I could. I mean obviously there’s a lot of backstory in the short story that I couldn’t and I just didn’t have the screen time or the resources to tell the entire story but authenticity was really important to me and I wanted to do, I mean again, Jack London, I didn’t want to mess around with his story too much.

With that kind of respect for the source material in mind and knowing that this is a well-known story, did you feel did you feel pressure bringing it to the screen?

Not until afterwards. During, you know, when I was adapting it and we were in pre-production then production and it wasn’t really until post-production that I thought, oh shit, this story means a lot to a lot of people and I hope I haven’t buggered it up. I mean there was, when we were editing without giving away what happens. There’s a kind of twist at the end and I had no idea whether that landed or not and it wasn’t until about 10 people had seen it and responded in the way that I hoped that it’s like oh it works thank god.

You’ve mentioned authenticity already and there are a lot of comments talking about your production on YouTube, with one in particular saying: ‘as a Native American thank you to the production for using our mother’s tongue and using real Indigenous talent’. How important was this authenticity for you when making Lost Face?

Firstly, that’s fantastic to hear from a Native American commenter. It was critically important to me. I mean, the short story is set in Russian America, which is now Alaska, and it was a Nulato tribe. There’s no film infrastructure up there, so we couldn’t, you know, not a significant enough amount and Alberta shoots a lot of period stuff, they have a lot of resources there. As soon as I sort of started tapping into that local community we got Gerald Auger on board and Morris Birdyellowhead and those guys are both Cree. And then once we started building it around the Cree language and Cree traditions, I kind of, that was a bit of a liberty I took with Jack London’s source material was to adapt it to a Cree. But yeah, the authenticity was critical to me. There was no point in attacking the material unless we got it right and we did it in a sensitive sort of way.

Did you face particular challenges in ensuring authenticity?

It’s just money, to be honest. You didn’t have a lot of money. We get lucky. It feels a lot bigger than it is. The place we shot was actually a Girl Scout camp in summer. And the fort is just a facade. Like, everything is very surface level. Money was the real limitation there. But what made up for that was the enthusiasm of everybody. The local cast were incredible. And Martin, it worked out really well, because Martin Debreuil, who we brought from the East Coast, was really the outsider. And then everybody else, that was the local filmmaking community, even the crew on the cast. So they were all very tight. And Martin really did feel like kind of the outsider there. And he played off that, and they played off that.

That limited budget certainly doesn’t show on screen. It looks great. But I think the cast are certainly crucial in the impact, how did you find them and how did you work with them to get the best from them?

I had a casting agent that I’d been working with for years and years and years. And Wendy Green, who’s amazing, she’s incredible and she always looks beyond obvious cast. And once we figured out, I actually worked with her to narrow down where to shoot. And she, in between us, we kind of landed on Alberta. And once she again, she found Morris, she found Gerald. And then those guys brought Michelle Thrush again and then Wilma Pelly. And, you know, suddenly we have all these indigenous celebrities. When it came to set, we had three days. One of the days was the winter solstice. So we had about seven hours a day of daylight. We lost an hour every day to literally warm everyone up because they’re all in period costume, we had one take for everything. There wasn’t a lot of time to discuss what was going to happen. We did a reading beforehand and everybody kind of figured out the level there and then we just hooked into it. It wasn’t so much me micro-managing anybody, it was their passion coming through on screen.

There are also a lot of comments praising the production of your short film. One user even suggested it’s one of the rare times the cinematography exceeds how you imagine the original story looking – which think is high praise when you consider the source of material. I know you shot Lost Face yourself, so I was interested in how you approached the photography and what was your aim with the camera work?

I mean, me shooting it honestly was out of necessity. Again, we just didn’t have any money. I would like to have had someone else to handle that while I concentrated on directing but it just, it wasn’t gonna happen. I did have an operator on the first day, but we got a little behind and my producer managed to pull in a session camera, which I operated. But in terms of the look, my kind of aim was just to get out of the way with the camera and let the story do the work because it wasn’t about me imposing a style onto anything. I knew I wanted it to look kind of epic and I knew I wanted it to look almost old school David Lean type. A lot of people who make short films will know this is like, you’re just battling to get through it. And it’s like, you’re fighting for survival and resting towards the end. And I knew that that was gonna be the case. So I prepped the hell out of it. I knew exactly where I was going to put the camera when you delivered where the track was going to go.

With some comments on YouTube suggesting that this short is better than some of the features coming out of Hollywood at the moment, there’s obviously an interest in returning to this story. Is there more from the Lost Face universe? Will you expand this story or tell similar ones?

I’ve had that question a lot actually. I did kind of explore where that story could go but I think it’s a self-contained thing but I did end up writing a feature. I was really fascinated by the women in the beginning of the story and the role that they played in the structure of the tribe and in that particular event. I did write a film based on the women at the beginning of the story and it was It’s kind of almost like a domestic violence thriller type thing. And I almost got it out. I just couldn’t quite find the funds that I needed to get it to happen. So, but yeah, I’m writing at the moment and I have, we have one out that we’re trying to get funding for.

Would you consider making more short films in the meantime?

Definitely. Yes, I would. Again, it’s just a funding thing. So it’s you need to find the money and find the story. I mean I’m really hoping, the one I’m writing now is a very low budget feature. I’m hoping that I can do that. I’m very enthusiastic about that one.