Getting an independent, low-budget short film completed can be quite the process. Geraldine Lahiffe is a successful professional actor. She is also a writer and director who has invested years into getting her first movie made. It’s been quite a journey, and we got into it in this conversation about Geraldine Lahiffe’s Leo Award-nominated short film, A Night at Malibuz (Comedy, Canada, 2025, 28 min, 16mm)
HNMAG: Where were you born?
Geraldine Lahiffe: I was born in Ireland. My family moved when I was a baby, immigrants looking for a better life. We lived in Northern Canada so my dad could work with foreign credentials, Michigan so he could retrain as a dentist. We ended up in Vancouver because my dad went to a Boy Scout jamboree here when he was a kid, and ever since then he’d always wanted to live here in the rainforest.
HNMAG: When did you become interested in entertainment?
Geraldine Lahiffe: I did musical theater as a kid, I grew up on the stage since I was seven years old. I loved the ‘triple threat’, of singing, acting and dancing. Then I studied opera at UBC music, to keep the show business life going.
HNMAG: Wow.
Geraldine Lahiffe: Yes, but opera was too much about being technically perfect, and inevitably falling short of that ideal. When I took my first real acting class, I found my thing. It had more breathing room. As long as you’re authentic and committed, as long as you’re in character and clear on what you want, you can craft a compelling performance, It’s…
HNMAG: More subjective.
Geraldine Lahiffe: Yes, and that appealed to me. Then from theatre acting I explored film and TV a little bit and realized, if I want to create something good, I’ll have to make it myself. This was my take on it, that there were relatively few really appealing, well written parts out there in Vancouver film and TV for young females.
HNMAG: The way they were writing for and casting females in Vancouver, you decided to make something yourself.
Geraldine Lahiffe: Yes, I thought it would be nice to learn to make my own project from the ground up. Film school seemed so expensive, and with less autonomy to just make what I felt drawn to make.
HNMAG: You’re only really going to learn how to make movies by making movies. Instead of spending $50k on film school, why don’t you spend less and make films and just keep making them until you finally figure it out?
Geraldine Lahiffe: Yes, and it might even end up costing more, but you’ll end up with something that is all yours.
HNMAG: How challenging was the A Night At Malibuz shoot?
Geraldine Lahiffe: It was big. My producer and I got really into realizing the vision, and the more we committed to it, the more we realized it needed a lot of moving parts. We ended up with a crew of 25, a cast of 22. With background performers, there were two shooting days with almost one-hundred people on set. Also, we were shooting on 16mm film, so it was quite costly.
HNMAG: That’s going to add up for sure. Today is so much less expensive with almost unlimited video data. This was back in 2000?
Geraldine Lahiffe: Shot in the year 2000, yes.
HNMAG: That’s twenty-six years ago.
Geraldine Lahiffe: Yes, so back then, video wouldn’t have been an option. As a result of shooting it on film though, my project was taken more seriously and I was able to attract some excellent actors, their performances really stood out. I likely wouldn’t have gotten that if it was just a video project.
I had saved some money from working at a nightclub during university, so I used that to fund the project.
After so many years of working two jobs to live and pay for school, I really wanted to make a project about the service industry. I’d always found the movie Clerks entertaining and cathartic because they’re specifically describing the ways that customers are ridiculous. I’d worked in a movie theater as well, and that’s what we loved to do, was make fun of customers, especially since the movie theatre used the 1990’s ‘Disney model’ of customer service: be bubbly and nice to them no matter what they do.
HNMAG: Sure. That frustration must have been really prevalent in the 1990s and 2000s, the 2005 Ryan Reynolds’ movie Waiting was also about servers. He probably had similar real-life experiences.
Geraldine Lahiffe: Sure. And workplace comedies about so-called blue-collar jobs and come-uppance are more common now, like Superstore, or Tires.
I changed jobs to working at a bar at 20, because I needed to make more money or I couldn’t finish school and get out of the poverty trap. My manager at the bar, who actually plays the manager in my film, he would often tell us, don’t take any shit from people. I’ve got your back. We’re here to make money.
It was definitely a dive bar, and we had the opposite of the Disney model. I wanted to make a movie about that place.
HNMAG: How did you finally get to post-production?
Geraldine Lahiffe: That was serendipity. I had limited footage saved, and so I honestly wasn’t sure it was going to cut together into anything. I showed my old footage to a local filmmaker friend Kryshan Randel about a year and a half ago. He’s a director by specialization and a visionary by nature, and he’s helped a lot of emergent filmmakers to make our projects real.
I met with him to show him the footage, and asked him, is there anything here that you think I can salvage? He took it on, did the assembly and the rough cut, and he set me up with Mike Jackson to do fine cut and final cut. This was really the ideal team, I was so lucky. They got a Leo nomination for picture editing, and it was well deserved. It takes a lot to turn old footage, and limited footage into something intelligible, something good.
Mike is one of the best editors in Vancouver, and he happened to be available. He also did the sound mix and color correction. I think the 16mm film and retro footage appealed to him as an artist.
HNMAG: Where does the title come from?
Geraldine Lahiffe: The nightclub I worked at in the late 90’s was called Mardi Gras. Just a cringy name. So I named our fictitious nightclub Malibuz. An equally cringey name in honor of Mardi Gras. I had actually looked into shooting there, but it was too large and hard to light. Instead, we shot at The Purple Onion in Gastown, also a great name. The Purple Onion got closed down a few years later because of too many shootings, so did Mardi Gras!
HNMAG: What was the original title?
Geraldine Lahiffe: I called it The Industry, because that’s what bartenders call the bar industry. It was just a working title, I knew that wouldn’t stick. A Night at Malibuz is a nod to A Night at the Roxbury. Back then, my title would have sounded too similar, but now 26 years later, it sounds appropriately throwback
I’d felt bad over the years about not completing this project. But in a way, it’s been perfect to complete it twenty-five years later, because it’s got this built-in appeal that it wouldn’t have had at the time at all.
HNMAG: It’s amazing that it finally got finished.
Geraldine Lahiffe: Thank you. Things just line up when and how they’re supposed to. There’s a magic to life. I went to Bass Coast in 2024….Bass Coast is a festival here in BC, it prides itself as being on the cutting edge of Electronic Dance Music (EDM). And I just kept hearing 90s club music. The songs that give me flashbacks about working at Mardi Gras. I kept hearing ‘Show Me Love’ – it’s a screechy-voiced 90s “you go, girl!” anthem – and having a specific sensory flashback of cigarette smoke crowds and trying not to drop vodka paralyzers on people.
I heard that song at least five times. And I remember thinking, are the 90’s back? Are the 90’s hot right now?
HNMAG: Everything always comes around again.
Geraldine Lahiffe: It always comes back. So I started thinking in the back of my mind, Should I finish that movie? Maybe this is the opportune time. And then other things in my life started to line up, suddenly I had more personal support, more inspiration to be creative. And also, I unexpectedly got a bit of money from my mom, which was so very generous.
HNMAG: Definitely.
Geraldine Lahiffe: So I took out the old raw footage, showed it to my boyfriend, and he confirmed, “This is funny. You gotta finish this.”
HNMAG: You were able to finally afford post. Twenty-five years later, you could finally complete your film.
Geraldine Lahiffe: Yes! A rough cut, a final cut, and a composer who was willing to make a bunch of very good, bad 90s music.
HNMAG: You have another project that you’re working on now.
Geraldine Lahiffe: Yes, right now I’m in pre-production for a 4 minute micro-short called Signature Salad. I wrote the screenplay as part of a film production intensive. Here’s the pitch:
Signature Salad: a playful Sci-Fi comedy about entitlement, lunch salads, and the dangers of an AI assistant with too much time on its hands. So, it’s an absurd battle between a bossy lady and her trouble-making home AI.
HNMAG: We’re getting there.
Geraldine Lahiffe: Yes we are, but maybe not in the ‘intelligent’ way that we imagine. Maybe it’s just petty and absurd. In this scenario, AI won’t do what she’s saying, and then it’s revealed that it’s two gremlins in a retro control booth, and they’re just smoking pot and laughing at her.
HNMAG: That’s funny.
Geraldine Lahiffe: It will be fun to shoot, and I’m really looking forward to the creative collaboration.
Filmmaking is a passion. It’s not a job you pick up on a whim. It takes commitment, money, and time. If you don’t have the money, then it’s way more time. For A Night at Malibuz it’s twenty-five years. It’s a really fun, well-made short comedy. Geraldine Lahiffe has something she made that she can be proud of. Now we are waiting to see what she does with comedy as she takes on the perils of artificial intelligence.