Upon finishing college in May 2020, Steven Nassif entered the job market just as the world was shutting down due to the COVID-19 outbreak. And so, with the goal of breaking into the entertainment business and with the unexpected free time he had on his hands, the young go-getter set out to make his first feature-length film.
“Homecoming,” which Nassif independently financed and made over the past four years, is set to premiere at 2 p.m. on Saturday at the Lumiere Music Hall in Beverly Hills. The movie, Nassif said, is a coming-of-age narrative about the unexpected perils of growing up in an idyllic suburb like Santa Clarita.
“I have this theory that, like, you don’t really come of age when you leave,” Nassif told The Signal during a telephone interview. “You do it when you come back, when you’re able to compare how things used to be, and you notice the passage of time. You notice how things have kind of gone on without you there.”
Twenty-five-year-old Nassif grew up in Canyon Country, but he moved to Los Angeles to study film at Loyola Marymount University. He’d come home for summers and, following graduation from LMU, he’d come home to live during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
But that wasn’t his original plan. He’d hoped to jump right into the business through a connection of his at Freeform, the cable channel owned by ABC Family Worldwide.
“It was a friend in high school whose parents were trying to help me out,” Nassif said. “They worked for Freeform, so they were trying to get me an internship there. I applied during the summer between junior and senior year, and I narrowly missed it. But there was that ‘come back next year’ kind of thing. That would’ve been 40 hours a week — full time. I would’ve been thrown right into it.”
Instead, Nassif came back to the Santa Clarita Valley, to a place that didn’t quite feel like home anymore. His family was still here, but the place was no doubt foreign to him, he said. Nassif had similar feelings the first summer he came home after beginning college. He felt like he didn’t belong anymore, like he was a different person. He wrote about it, “it” being the subject of his movie “Homecoming.”
“Homecoming” takes place over the course of 24 hours and tells the story of first-year college student Nelson, who plans to secretly move out of the stifling suburban neighborhood he grew up in, not telling any of his childhood friends about what he’s doing, only to get sucked into a very chaotic last day that’ll change his life forever.
The film isn’t autobiographical, Nassif told The Signal, but there are certainly elements of his life that he used in the film, emotions and feelings and people he knew, with an examination of the internal struggles so many youths face on their way to becoming adults.
“He (the main character in the film) goes from apathetic to learning how to express what he actually feels about it,” Nassif said. “Because the apathy is really just a defense mechanism — because he’s so sad about it — he kind of just bottles it up and pretends he doesn’t care. So, the journey’s about coming to terms with how he truly feels about leaving behind his childhood.”
In order to better tap into what the film is about, Nassif cast a character he knew very well, one he’d sparred with in his own life, that being his own neighborhood in Canyon Country, to star in about 80% of the film. Part of what Nassif wrestled with was the idyllic nature of the Santa Clarita Valley, and the effect it can have on some teens.
“I think there’s just something innate in human beings, especially young people, where you seek out conflict,” Nassif said. “Life without any conflicts is inherently uninteresting and boring. I’m sure if you grew up in Santa Clarita, it’s a very common thing. I’ve heard people say — young people especially — that it’s just very boring. So, they kind of just seek to create the conflict themselves, and whether it’s getting into low-stakes trouble — or some people getting into even higher-stakes trouble — it’s all needless.”
Making “Homecoming” helped Nassif leave his own childhood behind — going back gave him the confidence to move forward. He first went into the movie with a director attached. That director cast the actors in film and shot just over six days of the 14-day shoot before someone on set came down with COVID and spread it to others.
Much of the cast and crew had been staying in Nassif’s childhood home during production. Nassif’s parents fully welcomed them and had even been providing meals for everyone during the course of the shoot.
“Obviously we shut the whole thing down immediately and sent the kids back home,” said Nassif’s mother, Michele Nassif.
And when it came time to start back up, the director had moved onto another project, as had the lead actor.
Discouraged at first, Nassif eventually took on the task of helming the project himself.
“My main thing was writing,” he said. “That was the thing I had the most confidence in.”
Calling all the shots on set, however, was something completely different in his eyes, daunting even, with lots of people to oversee and coordinate. Nassif’s parents knew he could do it, though.
His dad, Nicholas Nassif, said, “I told Steven, ‘You should be the director. You have the confidence to do it.’”
Nassif decided to better prepare himself for the task. He enrolled in a directing class at the UCLA Extension, got some directing experience, and then he recast the film and started over from scratch, leaving behind all the work the other director had shot.
“I think the guy was a more talented director in terms of using camera angles, injecting energy and good pacing, and just, you know, more polished in that sort of sense,” Nassif said.
But having written the film, Nassif ultimately felt good about directing the picture because he knew exactly what he wanted it to be.
“You know, I think for the most part, it’s better this time, because it’s more specifically my vision,” he said. “I guess it’s a subjective thing, but it feels a lot more like my movie now, which is a nice feeling.”
Nassif crowd-funded the film, but he also used personal savings to get it done. He’s happy with the finished product. And his parents, while they haven’t seen the movie yet, are proud of their son and confident about what he’ll learn once it’s out there for people and the industry to see.
His dad said, “We’re excited for him because he’s a smart kid. He’s got talent. He’s got great people skills, so if he can sell this movie and go to the industry, that’d be great.”
His mom added, “I think he’s using this as a test. Sometimes people think they have talent, but they want to know they have talent.”
But maybe Nassif doesn’t trust his parents, his mom said, because they’re his parents. Maybe, she suggested, her son just needs some assurance from the outside world — from outside his family and from outside his hometown — before he can move forward. However, as Nassif previously stated, he first had to go back.
“It was really important to me that the film took place in Santa Clarita and where I grew up,” he said. “It’s like the film is me saying goodbye to my own childhood.”
To attend the free cast-and-crew premiere screening, RSVP by going to https://bit.ly/4f12kBF. Seating is limited to first come, first served.
