Bronx-born screenwriter and director Joel Alfonso Vargas describes making "Mad Bills to Pay," his slice-of-life drama and Sundance festival standout, as guerilla-style filmmaking. Built around Vargas's script about a small Dominican family, "Mad Bills to Pay" flourishes with improvised dialogue from the neo-realist indie film's stars—Juan Collado as Ricardo, a 19-year-old nutcracker seller on Orchard Beach, and newcomer Destiny Checho as Ricardo's newly pregnant girlfriend, also named Destiny.
The film's uncanny hyperreality came, in part, from its actors: Collado was cast roughly 36 hours before filming began, and Checho landed her role after being discovered on TikTok by the film's crew; with Vargas's coaching, both improvised their lines. And the supporting cast includes random beachgoers that the crew ran up on as they were shooting. In one of the first scenes, for instance, Ricardo drinks his stash at sunset when business is slow with a couple that was already on Orchard Beach. From there, the plot unfolds: Ricardo brings Destiny, who has been thrown out of the house by her mother, home to live with him, his mother, and his younger sister in their three-bedroom Bronx apartment. The characters become instantly familiar as the film progresses inside their cramped home. "I really entered it through a place of wanting to explore and understand things about not only the people that I grew up around," Vargas told Hell Gate, "but also something about myself."