Rooted in its evocative small fishing-town location, Fairhaven is O'Brien's first feature, premiering at this year's Tribeca Film Festival.

Six years in development, and shot in only 18 days, O'Brien, a New Yorker, wrote the first draft of the script while visiting his mother, who was living in Fairhaven at the time.

"Chris [Messina] and I were friends for a long time and we were in a theatre company in New York and talked about wanting to make a movie together," O'Brien told me, in an interview.

O'Brien showed Messina his draft of the script and Messina loved it, and wanted to help him develop it.

"We worked on it slowly," said O'Brien, "because he was in Los Angeles and I was in New York. We would get together maybe three times a year for a week and do a week of script work. Meantime, I would be working on financing and reworking it and doing stuff on my own and he was having his career out in Los Angeles. It was a long process. I liked it like that because it allowed the script to grow organically."

Read the full story at Capital.