Many movie premieres are typically followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker. “Before Me,” which played to a crowd of over 100 people on June 14 at the Tara Theatre, was no different.
Most of those Q&As, however, probably don’t involve a licensed therapist. But after the movie, Dr. Margo Rice joined filmmaker Matthew Simpson onstage to offer academic insights about the topic his film deals with – something a lot of people have struggled with, but aren’t necessarily able to name: retroactive jealousy.
“Before Me,” which is Simpson’s feature film debut, follows Roland (Angelo Rosario), a photographer dealing with the aftermath of a devastating breakup. When he meets an aspiring writer, Stephanie (Grace Berry), they hit it off immediately. But Roland’s irrational jealousy over Stephanie’s past relationships threatens to ruin everything.
Simpson is from a small town outside of Brunswick called Blackshear, Ga. He grew up loving movies like “The Dark Knight” and Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” movies, and after a brief stint at Georgia State University before the COVID-19 pandemic, decided he wasn’t much of a city boy and enrolled at the University of West Georgia. That’s where he began writing “Before Me” in 2022, with the help of some encouragement from his mentor and professor, Deon Kay.
Simpson had already made a few short films by that point, and asked Kay what he should do next if he wanted to continue to challenge himself and grow as an artist.
“You should either try to raise money for an expensive short film, or you should make a very cheap feature film,” he remembered Kay saying.
Simpson chose the latter. He had already written a few feature-length scripts by the time “Before Me” came around, but this was the first time he had written something with the intention of being able to actually shoot it. He wrote “Before Me” with budget constraints in mind, and drew from his own personal experience to flesh out the story.
Around the time he had the idea for “Before Me,” Simpson had been dating a girl who had more relationship experience than he did. He knew his jealous feelings about her past weren’t fair, but he couldn’t make them go away.
“For whatever reason, I was getting plagued by these intrusive thoughts of her with previous boyfriends,” he said. “It made me really angry, really uncomfortable. After a few fights about that, I realized if I don’t figure out what’s happening to me, I’m going to sabotage my own relationship.”
He did some research and came across a term he had never heard before: retroactive jealousy. While trying to work through his own issues with the topic, he began to think that it might make a good idea for a film. What would happen if someone let those feelings ruin their life?
The answer is, nothing good. But finding the trajectory of the script would take a couple more years. After Simpson graduated from West Georgia, he got a day job filming depositions and continued to go back to the script intermittently. Eventually, he decided the script wasn’t working and did something he had never done before – a full page one rewrite, starting from scratch.
“Up until then, I was so scared [to do that], because you’re like, did I just waste all this time?” he said. “But you’re not really wasting time. You’re just uncovering what’s the real story underneath all this.”
When Simpson finished the final draft in April of 2024, he immediately jumped into pre-production. He and the crew started shooting the film at the beginning of 2025 over a period of five months.
“We had a lot of moving parts,” Simpson recalled. “We had a lot of actors, a lot of crew, and we could only do it on weekends because we all had day jobs.”
Because of all those stipulations, scheduling and organization were two of the most important skills that Simpson had to master. They ended up prioritizing their shooting schedule based on actors and location, grouping those two things together so that they ideally wouldn’t have to return to a character or a location after they finished shooting those scenes.
They got hit with a couple of early obstacles – the second weekend of shooting was derailed by Winter Storm Cora. But by keeping to their prioritization rules, they were able to make things work.
“I think the way that we landed on doing it, mainly by getting rid of certain characters first, getting rid of certain locations first, helped ground us and keep us on track,” Simpson said.
So far, Simpson has submitted “Before Me” to around 20-25 film festivals in the Southeast. After a festival run, he hopes to start a grassroots theatrical run in early 2027, similar to what filmmaker Aaron Strand has done with his film “Withdrawal.” But for now, he’s still basking in the glow of a successful premiere.
“This was my first time seeing it with people that weren’t a test audience, or people who worked on the movie,” he said. “There were so many points throughout the movie where people would laugh, people would gasp, people would react to it. Hearing audiences react to the movie just gives you this unworldly feeling. Okay, maybe I did something right.”
