EXCLUSIVE: Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone Talks Bringing to Life her Story in “American Reject”

Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone knows a bit or two about heartbreaking rejection. After being cut from NBC’s GREASE: You’re the One That I Want, Kathleen didn’t let those feelings sideline her. Instead, she used those emotions to write her newly released movie musical, American Reject. We had the lovely opportunity to chat with Kathleen about her new film and the writing process below.

Let’s kick this off talking your new movie, American Reject. This was based on your life, so how did this story come to life?

“It was a very long process. I wish I had been a little quicker witted after I got eliminated to go, ‘You know, this would make a great story.’ It took a while to get back into my career and deal with why it was hard to be on a reality show, why it was really fun, why it was funny, but I, almost a decade later, decided to start writing about it, and just find ways to laugh at it, and it was a bit of therapy for myself. It was a little like, ‘You know, that was kind of a fun, funny thing,’ and what kind of people get to be around reality show hosts, and all these different things. Then as I continued to dive into this story, I found really more of something I was going through, which was needing to face this hardship, needing to face this rejection, and how do you do that, and really what happens when you do that?”

Since this is your first writing project for film, how was that process for you?

“I remember having a few scenes put together in 2013, just some funny reality show scenes, and then I didn’t really finish them. We didn’t shoot until 2018 and 2019. So, it really took me about five years to create this script, and that was not me by myself. Yes, it was a lot of me by myself, but we did a lot of actor readings to find out what really lands. I had a lot of mentors that really helped me. I had producers giving me feedback. I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, but what was interesting is because I was a first-time writer, it was a little like, ‘How are you going to make this movie?,’ or doing a music movie, ‘How are you going to make a music movie? You need to have a big budget. You need to have all this music,’ or, ‘How are you going to get a movie with a reality show stage? You can’t do that.’”

How did you do that?

“Weirdly, I just stuck to my guns, I think, because this was my story. I felt really passionate about continuing and working on it, and then once our director came on board, and I just really homed in on what needed to be shot and how to tell this story. There are things I was writing all the way up until we would shoot. The scene would be there, I’d be with the actor, and it’d be like, ‘Okay, we actually need to shift this line.’ So it has been a huge process, but very well worth it.”

Did you find any comfort in the writing process?

“The whole thing was new for me, because I’ve never done a project like this before, but because I’m so familiar with scripts, reading them, being an actor, and also familiar with musicals, knowing how music needs to play such a part into a musical story. Our movie is not a musical in the sense that the characters are, ‘Here’s my hat, where’s my dog,’ but these musical numbers actually do need to tell the story and they need to share the characters.

So Derek Gregor and Selda Sahin, who are fantastic songwriters and very well… In the Broadway community, but also in Nashville and write a lot of pop songs, they understood that, that they needed to write songs that moved the story along, and so that did come naturally to me. That, ‘Oh, this would be the time that this character would sing, and this is what needs to happen by the time the song is over with.’ So yeah, I did pull on my natural experiences for sure.”

Did you help them with the song writing process?

“I was definitely collaborative. They wrote the songs, it’s them, but I would definitely be like, ‘Okay, and we need this song. This is what it needs to say. It needs to be this style.’ I would give a reference, for the song I sing when things are just getting good, I really wanted this bluesy… Kind of have this… A little bit of a pain, but like the blues, like the blues have. It’s kind of sexy, kind of pain. We needed to see that my character would get on a show like a reality show.

For the song that Angelica Hale sings, they gave us two songs, actually, to choose from, but it needed to have the same message, that it’s not over, that there’s life after your pain, after your rejection. That this is not the end. We needed to have a certain sound that really could be the 11 o’clock number of the movie. So we gave references to that, ,and actually the song that my character sings, ‘Now or Never’, which you hear very quickly in the beginning of the movie, that was one of the options to have as the final song when Angelica sings, but we really felt like ‘Chapter One’ brought the whole story together.”

You wore so many hats while making this movie, how did you balance it all?

“Yes. Well, first of all, there were actually a lot of benefits. One thing, as a producer, my husband co-produced it with me, and we also have other producers on our team. They really took the weight if they knew I needed to focus on the scenes that day or be the writer or be the actor. They would really take the weight of little things and they wouldn’t put that on me. They were pretty great about that.

But because I wrote this, we were able to shoot it in 15 days. If I were an actor that was handed a script like this and then was like, ‘Okay, you’ve got 15 days,’ and you only have two takes per shot, I don’t know, if I hadn’t written it, how easily I would’ve been able to just step in that way. So, there were some benefits to wearing all the multiple hats.”

What would you say you learned about this how process?

“What I learned most about filmmaking is it’s so much about the prep, and then by the time you show up, you’re like, ‘Okay, here we go.’ It actually feels more live than live theater, which I’m more used to, because the camera’s rolling, we’re on a schedule, whatever comes out comes out. It was such a long journey that by the time we were shooting, I thought, ‘I got this. Here we go. What comes, it comes. This is part of the fun of it.’ It was crazy.”

Because you have so much experience on the stage too. Did you find the nerves a little different?

“Yes, absolutely. Actually, very much more nerve-wracking, but what’s interesting is there were, of course, moments and scenes that I really wanted to be able to deliver what I had envisioned for that scene, I wanted to deliver as an actor. The main thing that brought nerves was an overall thing of people believing in this movie and believing that I could lead this movie, and that I’m a first-time writer writing this movie, and that I’m also producing this movie. There was more of an insecurity, although I believed in it and we went for it, that I had to deal with, like, ‘I hope people can get on board with this.’”

What would you say was your biggest obstacle while filming or even leading up to filming?

“A lot of people said we couldn’t make this movie as an indie movie. The music stage, like I touched on, the cast. There are so many miracles in this movie of people like Billy Ray Cyrus and Juvenile and Angelica Hale and Rebecca Black. We were getting these fantastic people who not only were available and wanted to do the movie but were actually drawn to the script. I was blown away by that.

So yeah, there were a lot of difficulties. The thing I learned about filmmaking is things can happen. Like I said, someone can not show up, we actually don’t have a location, or we don’t have money for that, or whatever it is. There were all these kind of hoops to jump, but what was also really rewarding about filmmaking was that you kind of also had to just accept what you got, and then you ended up getting something you didn’t even imagine, but it was better, and because of these little obstacles, I was really thrilled with some things that we received out of the movie that we normally weren’t planning on.”

Would you love to do another musical, whether as a movie or a stage version?

“Well, I would love to bring American Reject to the stage. I think that would be a really fun musical, and I think audiences would like it. I have two musical things I’m writing. One about a country trio, three best friends that grow up in a trailer park together, and they become America’s hottest country trio, and the story of fame and friendship and can they ever escape the trailer park life? I love the Dixie Chicks; I love country music. It parallels well with musical theater and storytelling, so I love that.

Then I have something I’m writing called Daydream Daisy. It’s all musical theater, New York, Broadway based, about a girl who daydreams and has a nostalgic mind and always goes back into history in her mind with these iconic music numbers. So yeah, I realize I like music movies, and I like characters that sing. I think when I was first writing this, I kind of felt like I had to be in this club of really interesting things, and that’s great too, but as I continued to write, I was like, ‘No, I like to just write what makes me laugh and feel good,’ and that can just be feel good folks. So yes, I have stuff in the works.”

Musicals bring a sense of joy to many, so what is your hope for fans to when they see this movie?

“There’s a mix of I hope that they just enjoy it, and they just get to enjoy this fun ride for an hour and a half that does have surprises and is enjoyable and it’s funny. I hope they’re inspired. I really do. I’ve been saying this a lot, but of course, not everybody’s been on a reality show and gotten the boot, but they’ve had something in their life that they could relate to, a moment of rejection or a, ‘What if that would’ve happened instead of that?’, and I hope it inspires them to look at their own rejection, but I actually hope that people can laugh at themselves too.

One of the things I love about the movie, and in writing the movie, is I was able to put my real pain in there, but then I was able to laugh at it too. By the end of it, that’s when I knew, ‘Okay. I have a different way now. I can move forward,’ because I can actually laugh at the moment that took me down for 10 years. I hope those three things. Enjoy, inspire, and just laugh at yourself.”

American Reject is available now to rent and buy on Apple & Amazon now.

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity