How ‘Voicemails for Isabelle’ Filmmaker Leah McKendrick Went Big Without Losing Her Voice

For IndieWire, McKendrick talked about Taylor Swift, Shonda Rhimes, embracing rewrites, and the language of genre filmmaking — all while tracing the eight-year path that brought her to Netflix.

By Alison Foreman

June 18, 2026

“I’m here to make movies, not write scripts,” filmmaker Leah McKendrick told IndieWire.

That’s the kind of hard-earned wisdom that sounds obvious until you seriously consider the person and career behind it. For the writer/director of Netflix‘s newest rom-com, “Voicemails for Isabelle,” streaming on Friday, June 19, arriving at that conclusion took eight years, a global pandemic, multiple industry strikes, countless rewrites, and the long, often painful process of shepherding an intensely personal screenplay into the mainstream.

“I learned it does not serve me to be endlessly, blindly loyal to a script that is not going to get made,” McKendrick said. “I can either die on this hill with this script or I can make a movie.”

Blunt but essential advice, that lesson sits at the center of “Voicemails for Isabelle,” which follows overworked prep chef Jill (Zoey Deutch) as she attempts to rebuild her life after the sudden loss of her chronically ill younger sister. When a series of heartfelt messages intended for the late Isabelle begin reaching a stranger (Nick Robinson) instead, Jill finds herself pulled into an unlikely relationship that echoes the anonymous connections of classics like “You’ve Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle.”

McKendrick’s third directorial feature contains all the expected pleasures of the rom-com genre — grand gestures, calamitous misunderstandings, and a swoon-worthy (read: deeply misguided) leading man — but its emotional heart beats elsewhere. Beneath the boy-meets-girl framework, “Voicemails for Isabelle” is a story about family, grief, memory, and the relationships that help us endure our toughest times.

“It’s first and foremost inspired by the love for my little sister, Olivia,” McKendrick said, quickly clarifying that her real-life sibling is “alive and well and healthy.” “Really just how sisterhood taught me what true love is and how hard that can be to find out in the world.”

That sentiment runs deeper than the film‘s title, underpinning much of McKendrick’s work. Years before she was directing for Netflix, McKendrick was a struggling writer and actress in Los Angeles who routinely called her sister in New York to get through rough days. She would vent about failed auditions, bad dates, and the feeling that both her professional and personal dreams might never materialize.

“Because of the time difference, sometimes she was asleep already and I would leave these long voicemails,” McKendrick recalled. “I would just cry sometimes and talk about whatever date I just went on or whatever job I did not get. I remember feeling like this town didn’t want me. All I had done was dream of being here and I didn’t feel like I was making anything of myself.”

Those experiences became the foundation for “Voicemails for Isabelle.” But as with much of McKendrick’s work, autobiography was only the starting point. The clearest illustration of the role this particular movie has played in McKendrick’s evolution as an artist arrived just hours before our interview.

Earlier that morning, McKendrick had met with Shonda Rhimes, a striking coincidence that wasn’t lost on her but took some explaining in conversation. When McKendrick first wrote “Voicemails for Isabelle” eight years ago, the screenplay looked very different. Jill wasn’t a chef but a television writer trapped in an all-male writers room — dreaming of a job at none other than Shondaland. In fact, in the original ending, Jill literally bumps into Rhimes in an elevator before getting her big break.

“[The character] was in this all-male CW soap where all these men were telling her what it is to have a period and what it is to go through labor as a mother,” McKendrick recalled. “But her dream was to get to Shondaland. And now, I’ve finally met Shonda. It’s so crazy. That is how full circle this is.”

That version of “Voicemails for Isabelle” may always remain fantasy, but McKendrick’s recent meeting with Rhimes was very real. A Hollywood titan of almost mythic proportions, the creator of “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal,” and more sat down with McKendrick to discuss a potential future collaboration, per the filmmaker. And the anecdote isn’t just exciting for McKendrick; it also reveals something important about her unique talents as a filmmaker.

Across movies as varied as the revenge thriller “M.F.A.,” the fertility-focused comedy “Scrambled,” and now a major Netflix romance, McKendrick has built a career out of transforming deeply personal female experiences into accessible genre stories. Whether she’s exploring sexual violence, reproductive anxiety, or the fierce protectiveness of an older sister left behind, her work is united less by style or subject than perspective. At one point, McKendrick reluctantly called herself “the Taylor Swift of filmmaking.”

“I think of what Frida Kahlo said: ‘I am my own muse,’” she explained. “If I’m always pulling from a well of pain or embarrassment or triumph or insecurity and the difficulties of being a woman in this day and age, then I know that whatever is going on screen is real and true.”

It’s tempting to interpret the Swift comparison as a playful reference to McKendrick’s presumably woman-centered appeal as a writer and director. But listening to her unpack her time as a multi-hyphenate in the film industry, it’s clear that McKendrick, much like Rhimes and Swift, understands the extraordinary commercial power of specificity above all else. Moving beyond self-expression, the goal for McKendrick has become mastering the art of turning private experiences into universal ones.

“The cure to shame or the antidote to shame is empathy,” she said. “And that’s coming from a girl who spent a lot of time in her bedroom feeling very alien and lonely at times. I think all of this, every movie, is my own antidote to my shame.”

That philosophy might explain why viewers so frequently respond to McKendrick’s work by recognizing themselves within it.

“The biggest compliment I’ve ever gotten in any of my work is when people DM me and they say, ‘We’re the same person,’” she said. “Like, ‘You and I get each other. I see you, you see me, and there’s an exchange that has happened.’ That’s special.”

Ironically, maintaining that sense of authenticity can become significantly harder when independent filmmakers enter the broader studio and streaming system. Although she debuted both “M.F.A.” and “Scrambled” at SXSW, McKendrick wrote “Voicemails for Isabelle” nearly a decade ago and sold it remarkably quickly.

“I was like, ‘Wow, being a screenwriter is so easy,’” McKendrick said. “‘They’re just going to pay me all this money and I have this movie star and this big director and now I’m just going to go make a movie.’”

Reality proved more complicated.

“I did not have thick skin,” she admitted. “Because so much of my work is so self-referential, in the beginning, it felt that I was losing pieces of myself.” The process ultimately forced McKendrick to confront a question familiar to many independent storytellers: How do you make a larger, more commercial movie without sacrificing the qualities that made people care about you in the first place?

“There were moments where I thought if I go through this, I’ll lose myself,” she said. “But I never did.”

Instead, the increasingly seasoned writer/director discovered that authorship has less to do with defending plot details than the emotion underneath them.

“You can keep it exactly the way you want,” she said. “But you don’t get to make that movie. It doesn’t work like that.”

That maturity is visible throughout “Voicemails for Isabelle.” It’s a surprisingly complex film that understands the core mechanics of a Netflix rom-com — while refusing to let them overwhelm the honesty that made McKendrick the filmmaker she is today. And the onscreen relationship audiences are asked to invest in while watching it isn’t Robinson and Deutch’s meet-cute so much as the unspoken bond McKendrick’s audiences share with her, whether they already know it or not.

“Me and my little sister and my little two cousins, Nina and Sheila, those are my ‘little brothers,’” McKendrick said with a laugh, explaining one of the film’s more memorable quirks. “That’s what we call each other. The brothers.”

That kind of irreverent intimacy runs throughout the screenplay, helping distinguish McKendrick’s self-professed “‘Lovers’ album” from more interchangeable streaming romances.

“When I see films and artists that I love — ‘Notting Hill,’ ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ Nancy Meyers, Nora Ephron — I think rom-coms can be so elevated and so character-driven and so voice-forward,” she said. “I think we’ve lost sight of that at times, that it becomes more about the concept or the trope or the conceit.”

One of the funniest moments in “Voicemails for Isabelle” arrives when McKendrick casts herself opposite Robinson (effectively functioning as her film’s Tom Hanks) as a friend explicitly acknowledging what many viewers will already be thinking: this dude’s behavior is really, really weird.

But rather than undercutting rom-com fantasy, McKendrick delivers a brilliant scene exhibiting just how deeply she understands the subgenre. She loves the language of cinema too much to mock it, and instead elegantly interrogates the category’s shortcomings from within.

The same confidence extends to her collaboration with Deutch. “She is the GOAT,” McKendrick said. “I think she’s one of the best who has ever done this.”

The admiration between McKendrick and Deutch is obvious in the final film, and so is the lesson that made their collaboration possible. Movies have the potential to become much bigger than the people who imagine them, and that can be genuinely hard to experience.

Speaking with IndieWire, McKendrick also spoke excitedly about writing and directing an upcoming Shania Twain biopic, (“It’s the most surreal experience,” she said), and praised the support that she received from horror heavyweights like James Wan while working on last year’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Even still, “I don’t want to look down the mountain right now,” McKendrick said, noting that she also recently married cinematographer AJ Mester. “I want to keep climbing.”

It’s another simple sentiment, but one that feels remarkably well-suited to this moment in McKendrick’s career. Also working on a Netflix holiday movie and dreaming of an action project, she no longer sounds like an emerging auteur. She sounds like someone preparing for a much larger stage.

“Honestly, I just want to make movies until I die,” McKendrick concluded.

That makes the release of “Voicemails for Isabelle” feel strangely precious. Not because the release represents the culmination of its creator’s ambitions, but because it may capture the precise moment before those intentions properly took off. In that sense, like the recordings at the center of her film, McKendrick’s third feature feels destined to become a keepsake.

From Netflix, “Voicemails for Isabelle” starts streaming on Friday, June 19.