Behind the Scenes

Five Days to Live started with a mistake. The script was purchased off Reddit from writer Leo Meza, who was then credited, incorrectly, as “Leo Maza.” The error slipped through production and made it all the way to festival screenings before Daryl caught it and reached out to apologize. Not the cleanest start.

The project itself goes back to 2021, when Daryl first floated the idea to Lorenzo Ocon. Nothing came of it at the time, and the script sat. It came back around in 2023.

At the Austin Under the Stars Festival, Daryl saw a short film by Jake Barcus while When Stars Are Bright was playing. He wanted to work with him immediately and assumed, incorrectly, that Jake was local. An email went out. Jake replied from Cleveland, Ohio. So in January 2024, Daryl and Sasha flew to Cleveland and shot Jake’s portion of the film first.

Jake played Dr. Finkey, a name borrowed from Sasha’s gynecologist, who turned out to be something of a celebrity the Cleveland crew recognized from reality TV. The scene was shot at Jake’s friend Gabe Gerry’s workplace, and in the process, they discovered a mutual connection through Max Franko. Daryl added himself into the scene as Dr. Holt, a silent counterpart to Jake. Then Five Days to Live sat again.

For nearly a year, the Cleveland footage existed on its own. The original plan was to build the rest of the film around it, including a phone call structure tying both halves together, but momentum stalled. Lorenzo had physically transformed and no longer fit the character as originally conceived, and Max Isaacson passed on the role, feeling the material wasn’t for him.

Pat Duggan came in next, taking a pass at the script and pushing it in a different direction, rewriting scenes and reshaping the tone. That version sparked something. Daryl and Sasha rewrote it again, pulling it back toward their sensibilities while keeping the new structure intact. At that point, the film stopped feeling like something sitting on a shelf and started moving again.

The original script was tight. One character, one idea, quick hits, and out. That was part of what made it work. But as it moved through rewrites, it started to open up. More characters came in, scenes got bigger, and what had been a simple sketch turned into a chain of set-pieces, each one pushing a different angle. The structure stayed the same, but the scale changed completely.

That shift wasn’t for everyone. Jake saw it as something that should stay fast and contained. He wasn’t wrong. But Daryl leaned the other way, stacking ideas instead of trimming them, letting the film stretch out into something closer to a series of connected sketches than a single clean premise.

At one point, Daryl dictated an entire sequence in his sleep, half-conscious on the couch, while Sasha wrote it down. The result became the ambulance montage in the final film. He has no memory of writing it.

Production in Austin brought in a wave of new collaborators from the local scene, many of whom were folded directly into the film. The story adjusted as it went, with real-life details bleeding into scenes and shaping the material in ways that hadn’t been planned.

Other scenes took on a life of their own. Becker flew in for what was originally a small part as a heart attack victim. In the rewrite, it turned into a full sequence, a back-and-forth duel of heart attacks that kept escalating. The scene became one of the biggest laughs in the film, and quietly marked the first official Dollars & Donuts fart joke, timed exactly where it needed to be.

The date scene evolved the most. Kelsey Leigh Johnson’s character became obsessively fixated on the movie Cars, pushed to an absurd extreme. What started as a throwaway idea turned into a centerpiece, playing with the kind of overanalysis and cultural noise that dominates online conversation. The scene walks a line, hitting from multiple angles without settling on one, which is why it consistently lands with audiences who aren’t quite sure how to take it.

Then there was Ann-Margret. After joking about Bye Bye Birdie one too many times, Daryl and Sasha wrote her into the script, with Sasha playing the role. By coincidence, the real Ann-Margret was scheduled to make her first-ever convention appearance in Kansas City, which was close enough to consider.

Sasha reached out. Someone on the other end said yes. So they drove. Sixteen hours from Austin to Kansas City, with a wig, a costume, and the expectation that they were about to shoot a cameo. When they arrived, it became clear that Ann-Margret had no idea who they were and had never agreed to anything. The “agent” who approved it was no longer her agent. The situation wasn’t going to resolve itself. So Sasha did what she could. She played it off, grabbed a quick video under the guise of a selfie, and that footage ended up in the final film. Permission or not.

Five Days to Live ultimately became something different than what it started as. Not a straight adaptation, not a clean rewrite, but a layered piece built out of different versions, different collaborators, and different moments in time.

It also worked. The film won both the ATX Short Film Showcase and the Comedy Award at the Chandler International Film Festival, closing the loop on a project that took years, detours, and a few wrong assumptions to finally come together.