Adam Hoelzel and Farrell Ingle Thrill with ‘Tender’ Dances With Films LA’s Closing Night
Director Adam Hoelzel and producer Farrell Ingle on Tender, Dances With Films LA 2026’s Closing Night psychological thriller about a marriage collapsing under debt, betrayal, and buried gold.
A couple finds gold bars hidden in their walls, and has to decide whether to work together to sell it.
Yhat logline undersells what Adam Hoelzel and Farrell Ingle actually built for Tender, the psychological thriller that closed Dances With Films LA 2026 at the Chinese Theatre; because Mick and Billie aren’t a stable couple facing an external windfall. Their marriage is already failing under debt and Mick’s affair with another woman before a single gold bar turns up. The discovery doesn’t rescue the relationship. It weaponizes it.
That distinction matters, and it’s the first thing worth understanding about how Hoelzel built the script.
He and Ingle talk in this conversation about constructing the story with the couple’s crisis first, letting the gold discovery escalate the existing rot rather than manufacturing it. That’s a harder, less commercial choice than it sounds, it would have been easier to write two sympathetic people corrupted by sudden fortune. Instead, Tender is about people who were already lying to each other before the money showed up, which makes every subsequent decision they make together read as more suspect, not less.
Casting a Couple Who Already Knew Each Other
Jesse Garcia and Jess Weixler anchor the film as Mick and Billie, and Hoelzel and Ingle discuss the specific advantage of casting two actors who already had a rapport going in, a shortcut to the kind of lived-in, worn-down intimacy a film like this needs, especially on an independent schedule that doesn’t allow for months of chemistry-building rehearsal. Weixler also narrates the film, which is a structural choice that puts Billie’s perspective — and by extension her reliability — at the center of how the audience is meant to read everything happening around her.
Writing Against Type: David Koechner Goes Dark
One of the more interesting swings in the film is casting David Koechner, an actor most audiences know for big, broad comedic energy, in a register that leans frightening instead. Hoelzel and Ingle get into what it takes to write a “large, imposing” comedic performer into a role built for dread rather than laughs, and why that inversion works precisely because audiences arrive with the wrong expectations already loaded in.
What a Producer Actually Does
Ingle’s portion of the conversation covers ground a lot of festival interviews skip entirely: what producing an independent film actually requires day to day, from raising the money to simply being present on set every single day of the shoot. It’s a useful corrective to the version of “producer” that exists mostly as a title card, Tender’s production credits list more than half a dozen producers, which is its own testament to how much assembly an independent film like this requires before a single frame gets shot.
Reverse Engineering: Writing to What You Can Actually Make
Hoelzel and Ingle also discuss writing the script in reverse, starting from what was actually achievable on an independent budget and schedule, rather than writing an ambitious script and hoping production could catch up to it. That’s a Coen Brothers-adjacent instinct in more ways than one: character-driven tension over car chases and explosions, restraint as a budget strategy that happens to also be the better artistic choice.
Life After the Film Locks
The conversation closes on a part of independent filmmaking that rarely gets discussed honestly: the work doesn’t end when picture locks. Promotion, festival Q&As, being the public face of a film you spent years building — Hoelzel and Ingle are candid about that ongoing second job, and they tease distribution news without fully tipping their hand, which tracks for a film that had only just had its world premiere as Closing Night selection.
Tender closed out Dances With Films LA 2026 as one of the festival’s marquee selections — a fitting bookend to a lineup that also opened with Yale, another character-driven, festival-first drama built on hard family truths rather than genre spectacle.
Watch the full interview for the complete conversation on Films Gone Wild YouTube channel with Adam Hoelzel and Farrell Ingle.
FAQ
Q: What is Tender, the film that closed Dances With Films LA 2026?
A: Tender is a psychological thriller written and directed by Adam Hoelzel, marking his feature directorial debut. It had its world premiere as the Closing Night selection of Dances With Films LA 2026 at the Chinese Theatre.
Q: What is Tender’s plot about?
A: The film follows Mick and Billie, a married couple struggling with debt and Mick’s affair, who discover a cache of gold bars hidden in the walls of their inherited home. Their plan to secretly sell the gold spirals into suspicion and paranoia that threatens both their marriage and their safety.
Q: Who stars in Tender?
A: Tender stars Jesse Garcia and Jess Weixler as the central couple, with a supporting cast including David Koechner, Robert Longstreet, Sonja O’Hara, Shakira Barrera, and Mark St. Cyr.