For Denver’s Taylor McFadden, birthing her debut feature film has been a six-year labor of “Lovers.”

It’s a new creative life born out of relentless creative losses.

“I lost five close friends from my music community over the course of a year and a half,” said McFadden, each to addiction or suicide. The fifth was a close family friend.

“I had known her for years,” McFadden said. “She was in her early 30s and an incredible artist. That was the tipping point where I was just like, ‘Man, this is one too many.’”

When that friend lost her voice in 2018, McFadden found hers.

“At that specific moment in time, I think I was really ready to write something that was my own story,” she said. “I was just like, ‘I need to talk about this for my soul. I just want a place to put all of the things that I’m feeling about what it’s like to lose people. People who are the most creative, incredibly artistic humans who just were too sensitive for this world.’”

McFadden was joined in her grief by her life partner, Denver music superstar Nathaniel Rateliffe, who was adrift himself over the 2018 death of his record producer, Richard Swift, from alcohol addiction. It was attending one of several benefit concerts following Swift’s death that crystallized McFadden’s creative vision for her film.

“Seeing the way these artists sang his music as a way of honoring him was this incredibly cathartic, extremely spiritual experience,” she said. Music, she added, has been proven to be a powerful antidote to stress and grief.

“I’ve done a lot of research on the science of what happens to our cortisol levels when we gather together and listen to music,” McFadden said. “Maybe it’s spiritual, maybe it’s science, I don’t know. And I don’t really care. All I know is that music is a way for all of us to come together and find some peace and healing.”

McFadden set out to do the nearly impossible: To write, direct and complete a small musical film with enormous emotional depth as a first-time female director. And with apologies to Frank Sinatra, as she put it, “I did it my own way.” As in, she started her own company to do it – one called I Play Different.

But it’s not like she had a choice.

“It’s really hard to get your first feature film off the ground, especially as a female director – and it’s really hard to get someone to give you money,” she said. “So, I did this from the grassroots up.”

Meaning she wrote the script. She recruited music artists and negotiated the rights with the help of music supervisors. She assembled the cast, then reassembled it after COVID hit. She raised $1 million to pay for it, which these days doesn’t even qualify “Lovers” as an independent film. “It’s actually called a micro-budget film,” she said, “and it’s really hard to accomplish what we did on that budget in this economy.”

She directed it. And she saw it all through. And overcoming all those challenges means McFadden gets to say one thing almost no young filmmaker ever can:

“I own it.”

It’s a pretty tough world out there for filmmakers, McFadden said. But especially so for women, who comprised just 16% of all directors working on the 250 top films of 2023 – a statistic that is actually down 2 percentage points from 2022.

“This has been six years of my life, so I cannot express how many times I almost gave up,” she said. “It is a real journey to get a film off the ground. It is certainly not for the faint of heart. Honestly, sometimes I didn’t know if I was going to continue doing it because it was just too hard. But I believed in the story. I believe it had something to say.”

That story is about an aspiring New York writer who gets a call from her best friend informing her that her ex, Tommy, has taken his life. When the two women return to their hometown to attend his funeral and reconnect with their old close-knit group, they find themselves in the same old music dive bar that first brought them together as friends.

McFadden stresses that this bar “is just a metaphor for what could be any bar in the country” – but it is one everyone in the Denver music scene will instantly recognize as the hi-dive on South Broadway. It’s where the entire film was shot over 15 days.

“This bar is meant to represent any place where musicians who tour can come and kind of find their community when they’re pretty lonely on the road,” she said.

Growing up Denver

McFadden moved to Colorado from Detroit when she was 10 and grew up around the Denver music scene. One of her first concerts was seeing Death Cab for Cutie in 2001 at a long-gone club called The Cat back when she was underage and the area around 2334 Welton St. was a dangerous place to be. One of her first jobs was at the hi-dive. (In December 2022, owner Matty Clark closed the joint down for five full days just for McFadden’s team to film there.)

“I grew up going to Paris on the Platte,” McFadden said of Denver’s oldest coffee shop, which closed in 2015. “I was just really deep in the music scene and deep in the art world here.” She was also the fashion director at FM Magazine, where she built large-scale fashion shows in partnership with the Denver Art Museum.

“That was when I finally realized that I was trying to tell stories, and that kind of led me down a path,” she said. That path led her to the fated Esquire Theatre (“Rest in peace,” she said), where she saw Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited and Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” in the same week. “I remember this one moment in that theater where I saw the way the characters and the lighting and the camera and the music all came together to make you feel something – whether the filmmakers were conscious of it or not – and that changed my life,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, (bleep), I think that’s what I’m trying to do.”

When the pandemic hit in 2020, McFadden was living in New York and again had to put her simmering dreams for “Lovers” on hold. “I didn’t plan on staying back in Colorado, but I met a few people here who were like, ‘This is a Colorado movie – you should really shoot this here.’ So, I just started reaching out to people. And it was one person after another who really believed in more narrative film happening in Colorado – and particularly from female voices. It just kind of snowballed from there.”

At its core, McFadden’s story shows what happens when this group of old friends reunites and confronts both the loss of their friend and the addiction issues that tend to permeate artistic communities. And what they discover is that the tie that once bound them – music – still wends around them like a healing chord.

McFadden drew from the worlds of film, music and the Colorado talent pool for her cast, which includes Amelia Meath from the band Syvlan Esso, an electronic pop duo from Durham, N.C. She plays one of the two leading roles and is making her acting debut. She’s part of a deep lineup of musicians who contribute to the film’s score – or perform in the movie itself.

“I would say the music we were able to get for this film is probably the thing I am most proud of,” said McFadden. “We moved mountains to make this happen, really.”

The film builds to a climax where Meath sings an original song that Rateliff wrote from the perspective of Tommy, the character in the film who took his life. In the story, it’s written by the dead man, and Meath’s character sings it in his honor.

Also providing music: Hannah Cohen, Sabine McCalla, Abby Hamilton and Nicole Atkins, who sings a song as herself. It all makes for an entirely original score, one arranged by hotshot composer Justin Craig, who was nominated for a 2024 Tony Award for orchestrating Broadway’s “Stereophonic.”

“He’s a dear friend who grew up in a small town in Kentucky and also lost friends to addiction,” McFadden said. “We realized that we needed to engulf the audience in this world with music. You’re kind of in a sonic experience in this film.”

The cast includes local actors Monty Dickson, Paige M. Wilson, noted local comedian David Gborie (the voice of Comedy Central) and Judah McFadden. He’s Taylor’s brother, a Colorado State University grad and already a veteran of 15 films, including having played a young Al Pacino in “Billy Knight.”

“I can’t say enough about how amazing the whole cast is in this movie,” McFadden said.

And while Rateliff serves as the film’s executive producer, McFadden is wary of having that pull focus from what she believes is the film’s major success, which is that “It’s mainly women who power this film,” she said.

Taking stock

McFadden’s course for the Denver Film Festival, she said, was set by the 2016 presidential election, which she says made her take stock.

“When that happened, I just realized that I couldn’t be quiet anymore,” she said, “and that all my fears of using my voice and trying to do something with my life went away. I was like, ‘What kind of example am I giving for young girls?’

“I just felt like I had nothing to lose. And now I have a production company that is here to help marginalized and female voices. I’m also producing projects for younger artists. I just think it’s really, really, really important to provide mentorship and to help diverse storytelling happen. We’ve seen some really beautiful female films come out in the last year, but the numbers are way too low.”

The thought of her first full-length film being featured in her hometown film festival is almost too much for her to take.

“This whole film is about a character coming home,” she said. “And so to be able to screen it in the place where I grew up, in the city that shaped me as an artist, and to have both my community and our entire creative team all around me – there are really no words. I just hope I don’t cry through the whole thing.

“It’s going to be a real celebration. But, I’ll be real honest with you: So few people ever get to make a movie. I’m just grateful for every (bleeping) step of this entire process.”