On The Road with Jared “J.” Snow and YOU LOOK FINE
As the 2026 Slamdance On The Road tour kicks off in Salt Lake City, director J. Snow and co-founder Peter Baxter talk about the filmmaking journey of You Look Fine, the intense and uplifting award winning documentary about living with Sickle Cell.
Interview:
PETER: In your film introduction just now, you were speaking about the length of time it took to edit your film, but where did You Look Fine originate from?
J. SNOW: It began when I started vlogging, you know. My background starts in YouTube, making sketches, and there was a part of me that wanted to do vlogs, so I started in like 2018, just to record random moments, and that became a thing that I just did consistently and haphazardly. I accumulated all of this footage over several different drives over five or six years, and then in 2025 I got to a point where I was just like what am I doing with this? I was really, you know, down about the things at the time – the writers’ strike and everything – and I wanna make something for sickle cell people, for my family, for friends, and I just started editing this footage. And telling a story through all of these moments in the hospital or on stage telling jokes or with friends and the story started to tell itself as I started to edit it. And as I started to edit it, it gave me life. It brought me out of this dark place. So, yeah, the film kind of originated from a moment of despair that turned into a moment of triumph in a way I couldn’t have imagined.
PETER: With your background in vlogging and YouTube and the audience you have already created, why did you decide to go onto the festival circuit and why choose Slamdance?
J. SNOW: Well, Slamdance was very intriguing to me because the alumni are just incredible, you know. Slamdance has an incredible alumni of filmmakers who were first-time filmmakers and got a chance to be recognized on a grand, grand stage, and that was attractive for sure. But also, it was in LA. It’s coming to LA this year meant things just aligned. The idea to get onto the festival circuit was based on my previous film. I made a film, Flawed, which is a short film that did a lot of LA festivals. It didn’t really travel but it just gave me an experience of like, OK, this is where people come who love films and I wanted to be in a place where people love films and they got to see it on the big screen. Like that’s the dream of a filmmaker…to be in a theater with people eating popcorn and sitting down ready to watch the film and not like on their phone texting or being distracted and whatnot. Yeah, I have an audience online, but you know, you’re in the weeds, you’re competing with everything else that’s scrolling across their screen, but in the theater it’s like you, you’re seated and you have to pay attention to this thing and you learn and you listen and you laugh and I just love the theater more than anything, you know.
PETER: I think the audience at the festival got to experience that at both of your screenings.
J. SNOW: Definitely. Definitely.
PETER: What are your hopes and plans for distribution?
J. SNOW: The hope is that it gets national distribution and it screens in theaters nationwide. I would love for people to be going out to see it in, you know, Missouri and Chicago and DC or New York or wherever it is and talk about it, to bring their families and learn about it. I think this is one of those films that has the potential to just catch fire unexpectedly. You know, it was a very low budget film and it kind of came out of nowhere through pure willpower and energy around this topic (of Sickle Cell). So that’s, that’s my dream…to get it in front of as many people as possible and whether that’s the theaters, whether that’s through a streaming platform or a network television channel or something like that and get people excited about it in that way.
PETER: Having raised money to make their feature, some filmmakers are thinking how are they going to make their money back and profit from their work. Some are driven by the need to tell their story at any cost. Which camp are you in?
J. SNOW: This was a story that I had to tell. That was the driving force in all honesty. The conception of this idea came from a low moment and the idea was to create a farewell video. It wasn’t even to create a documentary, you know, and it became something that grew into a documentary and I guess I just put my heart and soul into it and that just naturally just created a documentary. And so, for me, the number one goal is to just create something that can tell the story about sickle cell and help people understand it better, tell something that actually has some authentic staying power and stands the test of time and then entertain people, make it fun while they’re doing it, learn and laugh at the same time. So, as long as those boxes are checked, I’m fine. I forced myself to think about the business part too because you can be very vulnerable when you’re like all art and spirit and energy around being a filmmaker and you’re not thinking about the business side of it. I honestly wouldn’t even call it a budget that I have for this film. I had some money that I needed to spend for these particular things that I did and I think anything that I get back will be a profit at this point. I would like for it to be financially successful, but more importantly, I just want people to see it and learn, you know.
PETER: What do you mean by making this film as a farewell?
J. SNOW: So, in the film, I say that 2024 was a really rough year. Like, I was admitted to the hospital like eight times. And this is when, you know, my sickle cell condition is just bad enough to go to the emergency room and then bad enough for them to keep me for days as opposed to going and then getting the treatment and leaving the same day. So in 2024, I spent 40 days in the hospital and it was just really rough. And you’re, you’re missing work. You’re missing events with your friends. You’re missing events with your family. You’re spending a lot of time in the hospital by yourself. So, by the end of 2024, I was at a really low point where I was like, I don’t know if I want to have another year like this. But the art, the artist in me was like, I can’t just, you know, just disappear or self destruct or anything like that. Like, I have too much to say and too much to offer, so let me try to say it with this and offer this gift to Sickle Cell Warriors, my friends and family before either I do self destruct or something happens with my health, you know, and, the condition succeeds at what it’s trying to do. That’s what got me on my editing path and here we are over a year later, and the film is in Utah.
PETER: So out of this farewell comes something that now drives you…
J. SNOW: Yeah, my ideas, and then community, honestly. I like to connect with people and I like to feel like I’m a part of some type of community. I discovered one with, you know, the sickle cell community and the filmmaking community and the stand-up community. I’m a chameleon in that way where I can sort of blend in all of these different crowds and just be a part of these communities, but in that, what drives me is having something to say. In stand up, I feel like I have something to say. In film, I feel like I have something to say. That is my driving force. And naturally, I’m just creative. I naturally have a comedic undertone under everything that I do so that just comes through.
PETER: At the festival this year, our Market Monday industry event focused on nondependency in filmmaking. Several speakers told us about the value of building your own audience around the release of your film. In many ways you’ve already done that! How did you do it?
J. SNOW: It just happened! Like I never actually set out to create an audience and become an influencer and get followers. When I started on YouTube it was because I just hated day jobs and I was like, I just want to make funny stuff. I had all these ideas and I wrote scripts and sketches and I was working a security job. I’m literally getting paid to watch YouTube. I’m seeing these kids that look like me, that are my age making all these fun videos and then they’re getting paid and flown out to do more. And I was like, I could do that. I hit the ground running it, so I just created and created and created whatever came to me, whatever I felt like was funny to me, I made it. And some of them weren’t funny to everybody else. But I think because I just kept posting and kept showing up and kept bringing people into my world, the audience naturally started to follow me and get on board with what I was doing. But, you know, I don’t know. I think people who set out to create an audience and a following are better at managing it because I never set out to do that. I was like, not great at that sometimes. When I wasn’t feeling creative, I just wouldn’t post and then you start to lose followers…you start to lose the audience. What I learned is just being yourself and being authentic. You don’t have that pressure to keep posting every, every week or every day or whatever. That kind of goes away, because then they just get it. They’re like, all right, you’ll be here one day, you’ll be gone the next, and that’s fine.
I think what we heard at Market Monday wasn’t wrong but everything wasn’t right either. It’s interesting because the people who are in movies and don’t really do social media that much are trying to figure out how to get their social media going, and the people who have social media going are trying to figure out how to get into the movies. It’s like everybody’s trying to figure out how to do the opposite thing right now and figuring out what works.
Obviously, there’s a lot of power in social media following and posting your own content on your own platform and the ownership that comes with it, but I think, you know, for everything that you get, you have to give stuff up too like, you give up the energy around having something on a big platform on a theater screen when you just go straight to the internet. And vice versa. I feel like you have to just decide that I wanna do it this way and then go with that way and then be OK with adapting when you see that you have to change something. Don’t just box yourself in and say I gotta get a million followers and then do this, or I gotta get this big budget to do this film. I’m a perfect example of when you literally just speak from your heart as authentically as you can, both things can happen, you know. So, I think authenticity is the key and not necessarily social media or big backing.
I feel like authenticity is a rarity right now.
PETER: I’m with you. You performed so many roles in your film, but we usually benefit from collaborating with others and sometimes they come from unexpected places. Who helped you?
J. SNOW: There are three key people that come to mind for different reasons. For comedy, stand up, my friend who’s featured in this film, Sydney Castillo, is somebody that I would want to run jokes by or talk to about if this is funny or if this is too heavy. He’s actually one of the biggest advocates for me being so honest on stage. There’s a lot of stand up about Sickle Cell in my film, and a large part of the reason that that’s there is because he kept telling me to tell my story and I was telling him, no, it’s too heavy, I don’t want to talk about Sickle Cell on stage. He was like, it’s your story. Nobody else can tell it…and figure out a way to make it funny. There’s another friend who’s featured in the film, RJ. Haynes, He’s been a writing partner. We wrote a film together and he’s really good about scripts, story structure and whatnot. So when I’m writing a film or when I was editing this, I would run it by him and be like, what do you think? My other friend, Oliver Lukacs, is a great cinematographer. He was a cinematographer for two of my shorts Flawed and I Can’t Hoop. I trust his eye and I trust his opinion. These friends feel very real, very honest, and so I trusted them and those are the few people that I do go to, you know.
PETER: My last question asks for your advice. Every filmmaker says how difficult it is to make their micro budget film, whether it’s a short, a feature, documentary or whatever it is. What advice would you give to a filmmaker that is just about to embark on making a feature now that you’ve now experienced it?
J. SNOW: If you can get help, get the help. I wouldn’t recommend doing everything by yourself. I would not recommend writing and directing and then editing and then being the subject of your film because you may not be able to get to that finish line before going crazy, you know. So get the help that you can, but if you can’t, chunk it down into pieces so that you can continue to make momentum and get the project done. The story matters but getting it done is what matters most.
For On The Road ticket and schedule information go here. You Look Fine will play next at The Little Theater in Rochester, New York on July 10.
Slamdance 2027 film submissions are open now.