Behind the Scenes

Shadows in the Snow started with a simple directive: we need to shoot something in the snow.

Hank Della took that and wrote a compact crime story about two thieves, a suitcase full of money, and the dead partner neither of them can quite leave behind. South Lake Tahoe was buried under unusually heavy snowfall, and Daryl saw a window that was not going to stay open for long. If the film was going to look like this, it had to happen now.

That urgency created immediate friction with Michael Martin.

The film was pushed into production with only a few weeks of prep, and Michael objected to the pace from the beginning. He felt the project was moving before it was ready. Daryl felt the snow was the production value, and waiting meant losing the reason to make the movie at all.

The role of Stokes was originally offered to Chris Ross, with Daryl hoping to reunite with him after A Lovely Place to Die. The material simply wasn’t to Chris’s taste. He passed, giving Daryl a candid response about what he thought was a lack of motivation and calling the twist uninteresting. That opened the role for Gino Vigil, whose very different energy ultimately helped define the version of Stokes that made it to the screen. The casting change soon became its own running joke. Hank Della had a habit of confusing Chris and Gino with one another, so Gino stepping into a role originally intended for Chris only made the mix-up worse.

The shoot itself was punishing before a frame had even been captured. Daryl, Ray Revello and Kirsten Della arrived in the morning and spent hours digging out the property. Mitch Martin came later after picking up cinematographer Daniel Cruz from the airport. Michael did not arrive until very late that evening, after most of the heavy clearing had already been done. That did not go unnoticed.

The behind-the-scenes footage captures the mood better than any retrospective could. Ray, exhausted and buried in snow, calls it the most physically taxing production he had ever worked on. Daryl responds by reminding him that at Dollars & Donuts, being the talent does not get anybody out of manual labor. The joke was real because the work was real.

Josh and Sierra Russell returned to handle practical effects under equally miserable conditions. Their work included blood splatter across the snow and the frozen-corpse makeup for Ray’s hallucination sequence. All of it had to be done outside, in sub-freezing temperatures, without the comfort or control of a proper effects trailer.

The cold also began attacking the equipment. The Panasonic GH4 cameras became unreliable enough that the crew resorted to rubber-banding hand warmers around the battery compartments just to keep them operating. In the confusion, a settings mistake resulted in roughly half the movie being captured in 1080p rather than the intended 4K.

The hero car came with a different kind of problem. Daryl wanted to use his grandfather Henry T. Della’s prized Cadillac, but permission came with one absolute condition: nobody drives it. Technically, nobody did.

The Cadillac was loaded onto a flatbed trailer, which Mitch Martin drove around the neighborhood while Gino sat behind the wheel and performed the driving and the production honored the letter of the agreement while finding a way around the spirit of it.

The physical toll on the cast was worse than the mechanical one. Ray became sick while trudging through the snow and, according to the production legend, vomited blood into the drifts before casually blaming it on “too much pizza sauce.” The shoot finally ended with a wrap party at the Tahoe casinos that spilled back into the house and produced another round of cleanup the following morning.

The film also brought Lori Carsillo back into the fold for one of its most memorable finishing touches. Lori recorded a special cover of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” specifically for Shadows in the Snow, taking a familiar winter standard and dropping it into a considerably less cozy setting. The sweetness of the song against the snowbound paranoia, violence and supernatural turn gave the ending exactly the wrong kind of warmth. It became another example of Dollars & Donuts using music less as decoration than as a final joke on the movie itself.

The film premiered at the Dollars & Donuts Showcase in December 2017, where Shadows in the Snow became tied to another major turning point for the company.

Daryl had wanted for years to publish comics. For the showcase, attendees received a physical Dollars & Donuts Showcase comic containing a four-page prequel to the film, written by Hank and illustrated by Chilean artist Diego Toro.

That collaboration didn’t stop there. Toro went on to become one of the defining artists of the Dollars & Donuts comic line, helping establish the visual identity of characters and stories far beyond Shadows in the Snow. When Dollars & Donuts Showcase Vol. 2 revived the comics in 2023, the original prequel returned in remastered form alongside a new ten-page adaptation of the film itself.

Shadows in the Snow also became one of Dollars & Donuts’ first significant festival successes. The film won the Audience Award at the Intendence Film Festival in Denver, Colorado, and the trip marked one of the first times the company actually traveled out of state to attend a festival screening in person.

Daryl, Ray Revello and Becker Von Felsburg made the trip together, with Michael Martin arriving a day later and taking a separate hotel room. The timing gave the weekend an unexpected weight. On the morning of June 8, 2018, news broke that Anthony Bourdain had died. The trio decided to make something of the day and head to Biker Jim’s Gourmet Dogs, a Denver sausage spot Bourdain had featured on television. Michael declined to join, choosing instead to stay in the hotel lobby with his laptop.

Daryl, Ray and Becker went without him, ate strange sausages, wandered next door for pickle shots, and wound up being interviewed by a local news crew that had shown up because of the Bourdain connection. It turned into one of those accidental festival-trip afternoons that had almost nothing to do with the festival and became more memorable because of it.

When they got back to the hotel, Michael was still sitting in the lobby on his laptop. Only then did he announce that he was going to Biker Jim’s after all… by himself.

The trip ended considerably better when Shadows in the Snow took home the festival’s Audience Award, giving the film one of the company’s first real festival wins and making the Denver trip an early taste of what it meant to take Dollars & Donuts outside its own screening circuit.