SO MUCH OF HOW KRISTIN describes herself is declarative. She simply says things — noun, verb, adjective — and you feel that she is confident in what she has to say. Even her speech has a groundedness, just like the way she looks, the way she walks, the way she is. People who know her, even a little bit, realize that she’s one of the best, funniest storytellers and vivid describers that we all know — in part because she expresses it with such deadpan delivery.
You can see that groundedness in the way she rides, in the way she interacts with her horses. She’s more than just a strong woman or a powerful woman or an intelligent woman or a funny one. She’s also a great filmmaker.
But the image I can’t get out of my head, the driving image, is of a young girl who learned to ride bareback because she didn’t have a saddle. A girl who understood the value of connectedness. Who did something that required balance and strength and confidence and fearlessness. I wouldn’t want to have a fight with her. — OL
Tell me a little bit about where you grew up.
I was born in Albuquerque. Grew up in the South Valley. So I went to school in Bosque Farms and Los Lunas. Then when I was 10, moved to Texas, East Texas, very small town. Went to junior high there, and then moved to Austin, Texas. So I spent high school in Austin. When I grew up in the South Valley, it was just all rodeo. That’s what I did: I barrel raced.
There was a horse show every weekend. I did 4-H. I got my first pony when I was five, and my dad would always get me these horses that needed to be brought back to life because he’d get them for free. So I’d always get these horses that couldn’t be ridden right away.
He’d rescue these horses, and then I’d bring them back to life. And I would ride my Welsh pony, Misty, and I didn’t have a saddle until I was seven. So I learned to ride bareback, and we also lived at Los Golondrinas when I was a kid, my dad was hired to make that a living museum. So we lived there for a year or two, and I would ride all over Los Golondrinas on my pony horse.
Why did you have to go bareback?
Because my dad wouldn’t buy me a saddle.
Were you afraid of falling off?
That’s a really good question. I’ve never thought of that, actually. It’s never occurred to me to question that. I think it’s just innate in my personality. If I came off, I would have to get back on in order to do the thing I wanted to do. So, you know, I was obsessed with horses. I thought about it all the time. I drew them if I wasn’t riding them. I would sit there with my horse until it was dark.
What’s hard about riding bareback is you’ve got nothing to hold on with except your legs and maybe your hands, but your hands are busy because you’ve got the reins. So you have to be strong. And you have a connection that’s different. It’s like doing ground work with a horse. It’s a very different connection with the animal.
I also think it was self-preservation in some way. Like my parents were kind of dealing with their own relationship, and they did not have parents growing up, either of them. They were both pretty much orphaned. So I think that their hands-off approach led to me finding this sort of touchstone in the horses that I was riding. They were always there for me. I was always, I felt good with them. I felt safe with them.
Did you prefer horses to people?
Absolutely.
Do you still?
With respect to my husband, honestly, it depends on the horse. I’ve met horses that I don’t want anything to do with.
You went from horses to acting school. How did you make that leap?
When I was 16, my parents divorced, and they just kind of, they were gone. I was living alone in an apartment where my mom would come back once in a while. My dad was gone with his soon-to-be wife. So I was kind of lost. I was trying to figure out my way.
I was going to high school, and I started writing comedy with my best friend. It woke up something in me as a writer. And I still didn’t know that it could be a job for me. But when I went to college, I took a film history class and I was like, oh, my God. I mean, I’d watched plenty of films, but they were always late at night. You know, it was the ‘80s films that we grew up with, right, that were in the theater.
You would see all the John Hughes movies and all that. But then late at night, when I was home alone, I’d watch things like Bringing Up Baby or Giant. You know, every year, we would watch The Sound of Music or whatever. So there was this connection to that in one way. And in Albuquerque, we went to the First Methodist Church downtown, and that’s when I first performed, was in the Christmas pageants.
Did you know you had a sense of humor?
I always knew. I could tell a good joke or a good story. We didn’t have a TV most of my childhood, and when we did get one, my dad wouldn’t let us watch it. So it was like just for the news or M*A*S*H. And so when I would go see a film, I would come home and tell him about it. And that’s how I started to learn how to tell stories, because he would listen as he’s working on something, and I would tell him about the latest movie that I’d seen.
Really, film was sort of my window into the world at large. You know, watching Giant was mind-blowing for me in high school. Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Dennis Hopper, these actors were just phenomenal, and I just disappeared into that world. So in high school, I took drama class, because my best friends were actors and taking drama. But they were like, It’s an easy elective, just take it. So I just took it as an easy elective. I did not perform, I wasn’t interested, but when there was a school variety show or whatever, I totally participated. I remember lip syncing and having like people behind me and doing these comedy routines. I’m still kind of confused about how I was so fearless with that.
So I was getting my graduate degree in acting, a three-year program. And in my undergrad at UNM for acting, I had switched my major from playwriting to acting, so when I auditioned for acting school for grad school, it was really just me going, I don’t know enough to just go out into the world. So when I got into DePaul, it became a really intense training ground for me. And ultimately, at the time DePaul was very Grotowski; it was very Artaud: the theater of cruelty. It was like, break you down.
There were classes called Movement to Music, where you would physically learn how to respond to a sound or an energy in motion, and it would be a couple hours long or an hour long of you in a room that’s dark with mats and actors just moving off of each other. It was a very freeing experience. It got you out of your head. Ultimately, most artists and creators understand that it’s meditative, honestly. And so that’s where you find your particular genius.
If you have it, yes.
I think everybody probably does. I think they just are looking for their genius to be like somebody else’s, and so they don’t find it. But it’s between those thoughts, and it takes a lot of practice and commitment to find it and know where your genius is. Because it was so physically based; if you can physically embody something, you can vocally say it. You can voice something if you are physically embodying it, but you can’t voice it if you haven’t physically embodied it.
It’s all either slowing yourself down enough that you are in the moment or letting go enough that you’re in the moment. I think once you can, maybe you’re on your way to mastering those two things and you really give it its due; then it becomes a muscle; it becomes supple; it becomes organic for you. Whereas for somebody else, it wouldn’t be.
I mean, that’s why actors continue to take classes, because you have to exercise that muscle when you’re not on a job. You know, going back to being on a horse in solitude as a kid, like, I was in the moment all the time, because there was nothing outside of me that was trying to get my attention. I was in nature, I was observing nature. I was connecting physically the whole time with my horse.
You were an actor, but you also became a director and a writer. Was there a moment where you said, I’m gonna do this and not that?
Yep. I stopped acting in Chicago.
Why?
I saw my husband and I saw all my peers loving being on stage and doing long runs, year-long runs at regional theaters. And I couldn’t fathom it. I couldn’t fathom just doing the same character over and over again. What I realized was, I liked the rehearsal process, I liked getting the show up, and then I liked being done. And I went, oh, that’s a director.
Actors like to explore the character and then play with it over and over again every night, with the same cast, get the audience’s reaction, go deeper. When I did that, every time I was like, oh, God, I can’t wait for this to be over.
We’re talking about your filmmaking now. You’ve just finished a film.
It’s called #UnderTheInfluence, all one word. It is based on the stage play that I wrote that was produced in 2021.
What’s it about?
It’s about two sisters, Brooke Haven and Chelsea Haven. They are the daughters of the first mommy blogger. We meet them as adults. Brooke Haven is a big deal mommy influencer, and Chelsea Haven is a functioning alcoholic. The premise is that Brooke, the influencer, is offered a reality television show for her family, but the condition is for her sister, Chelsea, to be on the show with her, and Chelsea wants nothing to do with being public. She’s a janitor at the aquarium. She dropped out of college, where she wanted to be a marine biologist, because of her alcoholism and her partying. She had a lot of trauma that she dealt with as a child, and you find out that the mother very early on died in a car accident with the girls in the car. So it’s really a story about how we frame our realities. It’s about perspective, and from a relationship perspective, you have two sisters who grew up in the same household who had completely different relationships with the mother, and a completely different relationship to what they were doing as children, and how they both respond to it.
For me, the bigger idea was how we have all this social media and television and this new fake reality and AI. And so people don’t trust what’s real anymore. The tagline for the film is Reality is how you frame it, because it’s a human experience to really know what your experience was and argue with your sibling. We’ve all been in the room and you’d be like, That’s not what happened. Yes, it is. Dad didn’t say that. Yes, he did. He would never do that. Dad liked you better. No, he liked so-and-so better. Like, everybody has this framing of their experience.
So it’s also about branding and selling ourselves. Selling your life for likes.
People are just sharing their kids’ lives with a bunch of strangers, for attention, for validation, for relevancy. And it is selling. Nobody’s posting the bad day you had. You’re posting, like, the great trip you went on. And it’s gotten to a point where people will post trips that they didn’t even go on. It’s blowing my mind how it is just deteriorating the fabric of community and, like, just authenticity and just knowing who you are.
The actors in this new movie are your friends.
Yes. Alexandra Renzo, Cassidy Freeman, and Patrick Fabian are the leads. It was just a dream to work with them.
Patrick, I’ve known for over 20 years, Cassidy for six years and then Renzo for over 10 years. And getting to go on set every day and work with them and guide them and support them and play with them was fantastic. There are some scenes in this movie that are just master classes in acting, like, just phenomenal, phenomenal acting.
I really, really, really enjoy working with other creatives. I really enjoy the process of hearing a good actor lift your words off the page and make it seem like they just thought it. Like, that is like 100 cups of coffee for me. You know, when you see somebody connecting deeply to something that you’ve created. And so when you start that process and you see that happening, my brain, as a film director, oh, my God, you have so much you have to take care of and deal with.
Ultimately, everybody has signed on to this thing to create the vision that you put forth. It’s a profound experience.
Is it harder to be a filmmaker as a woman?
Currently, eight percent of the films in the United States are directed by women.
It went down from last year. But you’re gonna notice that the most impactful films from last year were directed by women.
There’s cultural reasons, right? But if you were to go back and look at the 2025 films that were embraced by the industry or embraced by the critics or embraced by audiences, the female-written and directed films, or female-directed films, are not going to be what you are used to seeing because female perspective has been missing. The male perspective has been sort of like forced down our throats in Western culture since Aristotle, since the hero’s journey.
What’s happening, I believe, right now with film culture is that people are predicting every scene and every line, and everything that’s gonna happen, because we have used this model for so long in Hollywood, where script readers were told at page ten, this has to happen, at page 30, this has to happen, at page 60, this has to happen. And audiences have become so bored with the predictability and linear and simple-mindedness of that model that then you see a film like If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, or Die My Love, or Hamnet, or The Bride and you see something that was written by and directed by a female that did not use the male perspective.
It is amazing because it’s not linear. The male perspective follows sort of like the male/female orgasm. A male orgasm is like, whoop! And it’s down, right? Climax and then down, right? The female orgasm is all over the place. It’s unpredictable, it’s rolling, it changes, you can’t figure it out. It’s the same as men’s hormones throughout life, they go up, and then they go down. Women’s hormones, they don’t know what the fuck to do with women’s hormones yet because they haven’t studied it, but also, it’s like the wind. Every woman is a little different. So now you have women that are actually using that female perspective that is influenced by our chemical makeup. Women creators have gotten to a point where they’re not following this model anymore, because we’ve done it, we’ve kicked it, it’s a dead horse.
Now you’ve told me everything I need to know about orgasms, just one more question. What does Santa Fe do for you now?
You know, I lived in Texas, Chicago, L.A., and here. And every time we would come back to visit family, every time, I’d look in the mirror, and I’d go, Oh, there you are.
I think we’re here to know thyself. I think that is whatever that means to somebody. That’s what it means to me. I’m here to be alive and to experience being alive, not surviving, being alive. And it’s going to take different turns, and the circumstances are always gonna change.
The experience that I’m here for is to feel alive. And so when I’m in Santa Fe, there’s a groundedness to what I experience here, that I don’t feel other places. There are other parts of me that wake up in different places, but the person that I am, the soul that I am, is connected to this area geographically in a way that it’s not anywhere else. You know, the dirt, the water, how it tastes, it’s all, it’s part of something that is real and it’s almost like a memory, and it’s foundational to who I am.