How do I write this article?
Aside from this film being a gatecrasher at the Beverly Hills film festival of 2025, there’s a haunting beauty to Growing Daisies, an indie film from Alessandra Williams and Arielle Raycene, that lingers long after the credits roll. Set in the summer of 1995, this dark, aching film follows a young woman spiraling through the streets of New York in search of connection, control, and something like love. The story is not so much about sex as it is about what drives someone to use sex as a form of self-expression, escapism, and punishment.
At first glance, Daisy’s actions are reckless—trading sex for rent, medicine, drugs, or nothing at all. But beneath the surface is a painfully honest portrayal of trauma, mental illness, and the desperate search for validation. It’s a film that forces you to watch without flinching, even when it hurts.
Danger Boys
I have rewritten this piece so many times. Much like Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 ‘Magnolia’, there was so much pain, and beauty in this film, so much of myself, and people that I loved, I saw my queer friends from my youth in this film. The film brought me back to a term we used when I was younger, the term “danger boy” or “danger girl”, and the people that I knew whom identified with it.
I’ve lost many friends to this behavior, lifestyle, dangerous trade so Growing Daisies hit me hard. These danger boys were the young gay men that were kicked out of their homes, or left looking for better possibilities and would sell themselves for money, drugs, housing, and other so called benefits. I say they were, but of course this horrid trend, this way of surviving, this way of living is still going on today. Homeless LGBTQ+ youth are still a part of our homeless community that we know exists and their numbers are too large. This movie reminded me of both gay friends and straight women I have lost to what we see in Growing Daisies.
And that is why I wanted to share this film with you. If I felt it, I am sure many of you will feel it even stronger. Please understand I approached this article with a sacred respect for the subject matter.
I spoke with the film’s creators to understand the inspiration, choices, and risks behind Growing Daisies.
“I have a lot of love to give, I just don’t have anywhere to put it”
Quiz Kid Donnie Smith….. Magnolia, 1999.
Jeremy Hinks: Ok ladies, thank you so much for your time. Let me start out, Growing Daisies was fantastic, it messed with my head a lot and brought up a lot of strange painful feelings. But they way the story of the film was presented to me, I was wondering if it would be like Eyes Wide Shut, and I watched it, and some scenes I was laughing, others were really heavy. What was the significance of Summer 1995.
Allesandra Williams: Summer ’95 was mostly because in that era, before we had iPhones and distractions today, as well as low rent, the music at the time, and the edginess of the movies of that time were essentially why we chose to make it in this era. We didn’t want to have to include iPhones, because she is kind of stalking, and that would over-complicate it, Arielle and I grew up in that era, so we thought to bring back that time.
JH: Yeah, the music, Dido, Garbage, but I was living the life of a monk in 1995, I couldn’t even listen to music, so I missed out on all that music. However, I did see that iPhone in the guy’s pocket in that one scene.
AW: Yeah, I wanted to do all of this to perfection, and a good friend of mine who I respect and is an indie film maker he said, “This is what indie film is, the imperfections are what makes it beautiful”. So I liked it having so flare, not being a “studios” film.
JH: And that is what I loved, where it’s a homegrown effort, the actors are the directors, are the lighting, camera, whatever. Those are often some of my favorite films. Indie films rely on creativity to tell the story. I don’t often interview actors, because they are doing someone else’s work, but this is YOUR work, and I’m talking to the people who made it.
AW: Totally, it is exciting that we got to do every part of it, one of the pieces of inspiration for me on this film is Lars Von Trier a Danish filmmaker. I watched his films growing up, his movies made me feel so uncomfortable but I couldn’t stop watching. It was like watching a train go into a wall but I couldn’t turn away, from me that feeling of the conflict, I wondered if I could do that too without making it obvious. How can we make this look as beautiful as possible?
This was when I met Arielle, she is so gorgeous, so beautiful, and has this aesthetic, and brave enough to go there. If we can make her look gorgeous in these very gritty moments, whether it’s the trees, or the beautiful colors in this frame to still make it delicious to watch even though it was so dark you can’t stop.
What I learned from Lars Von Trier was like his film “Nymphomaniac” and the opening scene was this pipe dripping, and it goes down the pipe, and it takes 5 minutes to get to this dead person, and the water was dripping on them. I feel that if he was going to take the time to absorb the feelings of the place was the goal here.
In shooting and editing with Ariel, we made sure to take the time with everything, meaning we shot fast, like we got it in one or two takes, but we took our time for shooting, we were really in the scenes. Then editing we took our time and did not cut, just let it ride out a little further than normal. It gave us a sense of tension, and we won “Best Editing”.
JH: So when I watched Growing Daisies, I realized sex was not the story, sex was the vehicle to tell the story.
Arielle Rayence: No it was not, that’s right.
JH: I mean, porn is you watching bad acting to get to the sex, hoping the sex is interesting enough to tell the story. In this film there is not a lot of dialogue here, but so much to pay attention to, because everything else around the sex was telling the story. It was brutal to watch the film.
AW: BEAUTIFUL, YES YOU GOT THE FILM!
JH: So was Daisy as we would say in Germany “Lady Nina”?
AW: Like a sex worker?
JH: YES, she needed rent so she was selling herself, or was she on a rampage, and just doing this for the fun and the rent?
AW: It is the second, she is OCD, she is obsessed with cleanliness, she is obsessed with this guy, sex, money, food, drugs, anything to escape in her mind. It’s escapism, most women live with this, and don’t talk about it, so this is why I thought it would be brave to talk about. The amount of pressure that’s put on a woman to survive, where creates this conflict. I know so many women who are Daisy but it gets darker and bleaker, and how can I tell that story, let it get that bleak, and not let it be unwatchable?
So we started off the film with her needing to pay rent, in 1995 rent for $2000 was hard to get. So she goes out to find men to give her money, you notice that not all the men give her money, the only people who give her money are the Dr and the bodega guy. They gave her money, which is to illustrate that people do things out of necessity, but that isn’t always why they are doing it. The truth is, she probably would have had sex with those guys anyway. In reality, she is falling and in love with Nick, she can’t help to get out of her way.
JH: I saw how you nailed the OCD with the coffee, Ok, Arielle, lemme ask you, your mind was in the story, I was watching the calculator. But you’re sitting there eating the banana, then you go and tuck your knickers into that begging guy’s coffee can, that was RISKY in 1995. And not for the money, you were there for the sex. I’ve known women like this, then you go to the next guy to score your weed, and then you drop the money to him, with the condom. Like, this was far less risky than the other guy, cause maybe she knew the guy she was buying dope from.
AR: I think as women, that when you are falling in love with someone and it’s in the brain, and you don’t have that love coming back, you will almost do nothing else for attention, to feel numb, then feel something else for this person.
That was my motivation to do all of it, just to feel something other than what I was feeling. Like I am quitting vaping, and I realize that those were all just feelings I didn’t want to deal with every time I picked up a vape. So it goes into everything, how you chose to repress her feelings. Like when she didn’t take the numbing with the botox, cause she wanted to feel something other than what she was feeling. Cause feeling love sometimes is a fucking pit, and it sucks, and it’s draining and she didn’t want to feel it.
JH: So, she’s there getting the botox, and said “No I don’t need numbing” then “Wow, there’s a feeling that exists”, It’s like that line from “High Fidelity” he was in the car with his ex, after her dad’s funeral, and she says “You have sex with me right now, or I’m going to go home and put my hand in the fireplace”.
The hard part for me was, that these women’s situations don’t end well. I had a friend in jr high, and I’m in 9th grade, and she was in 8th, and she went through 5-6 guys a week, I couldn’t watch her do this, then she got married twice, and both husbands went to prison. It hurt to watch that.
AW: I will say, that there is a correlation to childhood abuse, that drives them to become hyper-sexual, or anti-sexual, and what happens to underdeveloped kids, subjected to sexualization, is they lose a sense of wholeness. And when they get older they start to act out like Daisy, so we included a lot of child-like aspects to her character. And she has this nostalgia for this purity, because a daisy is so beautiful growing out of the mud, and to see “You can create beauty out of the darkness”, so it all stems for me as the writer that her childhood sex abuse is what created her today.
JH: Wow, that speaks to my friend, when she went “Danger Girl” she ended up dying of an opiate overdose in her parent’s basement and she wasn’t even 29, and I see so much of her in the character Daisy. (LONG PAUSE) Ok, so, like when you walked on the train Allesandra, as the Mormon church lady (Both laughing) and everyone commenting on her repressed sexuality.
AW: Every scene in the film has a facade and what’s real, but not judging a book by its cover, but if you get down to the heart of it, when she is with that guy Nick, she is a different person.
JH: I saw that with him, yes. So, is Daisy’s character bisexual? Or does that even play into this?
AR: Isn’t every woman kind of bisexual, I would say Daisy definitely has done some bisexual things.
JH: Cause she is getting texts from “The Redhead” Was that a hookup or a girlfriend?
AW: Yeah Daisy does this all the time, so we put that in there to identify her hookups, not by name, but “The Curly Redhead” to give you the understanding, though there was the scene with the Playboy.
JH: When she got the angry text from the doctor’s wife, what was her mind frame then?
AR: That wasn’t the first time that happened, she gets a text from an angry wife, so what, dealing with that had nothing to do with her, that’s HIS problem.
AW: My response is that the Dr T is the only repeat customer, so you know they have a connection, and they do this regularly, she goes on with her day, and his wife attacks her, its an “oops”. Then she is on to the bodega guy.
JH: Arielle, how did you get comfortable to get to where we got to see all that we saw of you in Growing Daisies?
AR: I am very comfortable with myself, but having a female director behind the camera. If a guy was doing the film, I wouldn’t have taken it that far. I’m blessed that there was a female that I trusted and loved and adored. That’s really what you need to do something like that.
AW: I have to say on the other side, what a gift it was to have Arielle who was doing everything I asked her to do without question. It was so smooth, without a crew.
JH: Yeah, with that when you were going around doing those crotch shots, did everyone in the train, just think you were nuts? How did you get your platform to yourselves for that scene with that old Italian guy?
AR: We didn’t, we just got up there and did the shot.
AW: We had to wait for everyone to pass for that shot. The others, we rode that train to Brooklyn, then back the the top, and back to 62nd street.
JH: So this was “Guerrilla Filming” then, I LOVE IT.
AW: Every single scene we did lights, so we’re carrying the lights with us, setting up, doing the shot, breaking down, then moving on.
JH: The bathtub scene, washing off in the mud, and then daises growing in the mud while you were there nude? I got that the daises blooming that was capturing the innocence of this person.
AW: YES, the whole scene whether she is clean or dirty, was the juxtaposition. She feels dirty but she is taking a bath. It’s her internal struggle, I feel clean, this fresh water, but this dirty mud is what she is doing. She has this OCD about being clean, yet she’ll fuck anyone. Two things going on at once.
JH: I didn’t mean for it to get this deep, I wish to let you know that I respect both of you for everything you said.
AW: Thank you for that Jeremy, thank you for telling us about your friend, I feel like a lot of people like that don’t feel seen, I hope that someone who sees this could look in the mirror a little. Or help people like you gain some perspective.
JH: Well, thank you both so much, I really wish you both all the best.
Growing Daisies trailer
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Fantastic Interview!