Tribeca: Olivia Accardo Pulls at Absurd Heartstrings in "Baby Tooth"
“Are you here for the boat or the tooth?” It’s a question that perhaps has never been asked before, yet it is the inciting incident in Olivia Accardo’s Baby Tooth. A man (Keith Roy Chrismon) shows up to answer an ad by a young woman (Dakota Bouher) which is when she asks the question of utmost importance: “Are you here for the boat or the tooth?”
Ahead of Baby Tooth’s screening as part of the Shorts: Pick N Mix program at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, Olivia Accardo sat down with Beyond the Cinerama Dome to discuss the short’s origins, the vulnerability of absurdity, and the magic of rural Oregon community theaters. This transcript has been edited for space and clarity.
Beyond the Cinerama Dome: I just want to start by asking where on earth the idea for Baby Tooth came from.
Olivia Accardo: It was very wholesomely born out of my main actress, Dakota Bouher, and our friendship. She was an acquaintance of mine who I knew was a performer, and she wanted to be in a film of mine. She would ask me if I had something she could be in, and I didn't want to shoehorn her into an existing project.
I wrote Baby Tooth for her. Initially, our friendship started because she was selling her grandfather's speedboat and I really want a boat. Ambitiously (laughs). I was like, I think I want your boat. I don't think I can buy your boat, but can I come see it?
Baby Tooth was sort of a psycho-fictionalized version of that day.
Does someone have an actual baby tooth that needs to be pulled?
Dakota has one. That didn't come up when I was looking at her boat or anything, but when I wrote the earliest drafts of Baby Tooth, which was not called Baby Tooth, it was called Boat Girl or something. It was too basic. I was like, it's missing a twist and Dakota was like, well, you could rip out my baby tooth.
I was like, excuse me? She said, I always kind of wanted to make a piece of art out of it. I was like, I'm not going to pull your tooth out on camera, but she said she really wanted me to do it. I very much vetoed it, but I ran with it as a threat for the film.
Sad that the wrap party was not everyone gathered around you as you ripped out the tooth.
We should have. We really should have. I'm way too much of a baby though.
courtesy of Olivia Accardo
It's such a great line. “Are you here for the boat or the tooth?” Does that feel like the crux of the movie to you?
In a world where this is an expanded feature, that might be the inciting incident. The thing that launches you into the problem and the real story. To describe it as a crux, yeah, I would say that's pretty accurate.
Are you thinking about an expanded feature?
Not when I wrote this. I totally just wrote it as a one-two punch short. While I wrote it, I was, or am, working on a feature to take place out here in Oregon as well. The Marina character's not part of the world of this other movie, but I feel like she deserves more time and space. There are some things in the works.
I think it would be great if you just did a series of these. Various modes of transportation she’s selling and she's still got the baby tooth.
It's literally come up because Dakota lives in Portland now. She is someone, and this happens to me too, where a lot of older people just gravitate toward us and talk forever. Her neighbor in Portland does this and he’s taking her on to sell all the stuff in his house, including a race car. An old race car. So now she’s helping him sell a race car on Facebook Marketplace. She was telling me about it, and she's like, if this isn't like Baby Tooth 2…(laughs)
I saw your other film, Finding Beast, and I like that both of these have a kind of underlying sense of absurdity and strangeness. It's a little off, but there's such a sweet heart to both of them. Do you feel like humanity, by way of absurdity, is the path your films are heading down?
I'm glad you were able to find a throughline because I feel like I've had people see my first work ever as Baby Tooth, and they’re like, what else can I watch? I say you can watch this slow, wholesome documentary about me contacting a pet psychic to talk to the ghost of my deceased cat. I think the logline for it is a lot more absurd than the delivery of it.
It's definitely just my humor, though. I'm pretty earnest, I'm pretty wholesome, but I also have a darker lens on things to go with the sweetness. I'm actually just so nice that it’s annoying, so I'm really glad that comes through, because, I mean, I can't even help it.
No. It's great. I thought it was quite brave of you to log into your Tumblr account on film. That is bold.
Vulnerability is really important to me. I try to show things I really want to see from other people. I'm so curious and definitely go down rabbit holes that I shouldn’t, like finding people's Tumblrs. Sometimes I just want to give people permission to be themselves. I'm not the kind of person who goes through my Instagram and deletes all my old posts. You can go back to 2012. It's there. I'm not going to delete it. It's not good, but it’s there and it’s who I am.
courtesy of Tribeca
Like you said, Finding Beast and Baby Tooth are stylistically at opposite ends of the spectrum. I don't want to spoil too much of the film, but the part where she's talking about all the features of the boat is really fun and such a cool deviation from the rest of it. Can you talk a little about finding that style, and whether you had any difficulties transitioning from documentary to this more manufactured style?
All the work I made pre-Finding Beast was straight narrative. I think, if anything, the hard part was transitioning into doc work. I’ve had other doc ideas since Finding Beast that just kept being hard to get into production, because it's hard to get people to agree to do these things. I was like, fuck it. We're going narrative again. There's so much more control and predictability.
For Baby Tooth, there's the sequence within it that’s almost its own separate movie. Camera's position is different, color is different, Dakota’s entire performance is different. I wanted to embrace what I knew of her as a performer. She’s mostly an improv dancer. I did rehearsal with her the day before where I had a shot list with my DP. When we blocked rehearsal with Dakota and my DP, my DP and I looked at each other like, we're throwing away the shot list.
Dakota would climb up onto the boat and do a split just because she could. So I was like, yeah, you're going to have to do that. I really wanted to emphasize that she's kind of in her own world and the boat is her stage.
courtesy of Tribeca
The film is basically a two-hander. Can you talk a little about your other main actor? I think you found the gentleman at a strange place.
At a hardware store (laughs).
With Dakota, I wrote it for her. I don't generally write without someone in mind. I did that for his part, which I was like, what have I done? Previously I lived in New York and LA, where there's a billion people to choose from, and you can probably whittle down who you need. Now I'm in southern Oregon. I was like, this could not work.
I put out a casting call through Backstage and all those websites in San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. I had a bunch of good bites, had video auditions, but there's so much of the Pacific Northwest in Oregon spirit that's about supporting local in a way that I don't know I've seen as much in other communities. Like, a lot of the beers on tap here are from the local breweries. A lot of the cheeses are from the local farms. I really wanted to embrace that spirit and not just be the city girl who came in with the hot city actor.
I looked at what the local theater community was like. Every town on the Oregon coast has its own playhouse, for the most part, which I don't think is true for the rest of rural America now. I don't know if it's because it's raining here half the time so everyone's like, let's go indoors (laughs).
I reached out to the local playhouses, made a little flyer, printed it, hung it at the grocery store and at the hardware store, and booked a day at the theater to hold auditions.
A handful of people showed up. I had two people in particular who knocked it out of the park. Better than the video auditions from Portland and San Francisco. They both were retired SAG actors from Los Angeles. One moved here basically to be a pot farmer. Just these old stoner dudes who had kind of crazy histories. One in particular had this wild IMDb page that was mind-blowing.
courtesy of Tribeca
We ended up casting Keith. The other guy also would have done an amazing job, and it would have been a different movie. Keith had this kind of Big Lebowski energy to him that I think fit more for what I was looking for. He saw the flyer at Ace Hardware. He called me and was like, I'm on my way. His car broke down on the way to the theater. He called me to let me know. He's like, but do not leave, I will make it there. My husband was with me and he was like, this guy sounds like a mess, I feel like you don't want to rely on and design a production around this kind of unpredictable man.
I'm like, no, if you look at it, he's making it all go right. His car broke down, but he's coming. He rolled up sweaty, hair everywhere. Cigarette burns in his shirt. I sent him the script that morning. He did not read it. He sat on stage and cold-read it in front of me and just knocked it out of the park. I was great, it's Keith Roy. That's who I was looking for.
Tribeca is not your premiere, but it’s still extremely exciting to play at Tribeca. Are you going to attend and what are you excited about bringing to the festival?
Yeah! I'm attending the latter half of the festival. When they called me, I already had a trip booked during the window of Tribeca (laughs). I remember when we booked our trip, I was like, but I could get into Tribeca. I try to do everything and not cancel things. I'm like, I'll just do both. We're squeezing in 3 or 4 days at Tribeca.
Because I'm from the Tri-State area, I also have to see all of my family. Then an additional layer, I'm pregnant. My mom was like, I’m throwing a baby shower (laughs).
You have quite the weeks ahead of you!
Yeah. I've got back-to-back screenings and then I'm missing a third screening they tacked on at the last minute because I have my baby shower (laughs).
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