Interview with Jane Clark of “Witchy Ways”

Witches may be portrayed as malevolent in most media, but in real life, most who identify as one are pretty innocuous. However, many still feel like they have to stay underground and unable to be their true self. Director Jane Clark saw how there’s a parallel to the queer community, and decided to write, direct, and co-produce a movie where a lesbian falls in love with a witch.

Described as a fantasy romantic comedy, the movie Witchy Ways is a charming romance about connecting with your family and yourself. I had the chance to interview Clark back in 2024, when the movie was still making the film festival circuit. (The movie hit streaming in 2026.)

I asked Clark where she got the idea. “It originally started just as… Marem and I wanted to work together,” she said. “The woman who plays the witch, Marem Hassler [note: she’s also one of the other producers], she’s an old friend of mine, and we’ve never worked as a director/actor. We’ve done other things together, but we really wanted to do something. And she said, ‘I bought a camera, I’ve got a DP, I’ve got a great producer. Let’s make something.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh God, then I have to write something’. I thought about it, and I just came off A Discovery of Witches, which I just loved. So, I had witches on the brain. And then I started writing.”

She continued the story. “I was kind of writing a darker type of movie, because I had been getting into horror a little bit more. And first I thought, ‘Oh, well, I’ll just stay in that vein.’ But when I finished the first 30 pages, I hated them, and I threw it all away. Then I just started watching every ghost movie I could find. And then I started watching every witch movie I could find, and I landed on Practical Magic. And all of it just started making sense.

“I’ve always wanted to do a rom-com,” she continued. “So, I was like, ‘Well, I could just combine all these things that I love into one movie.’ So that was the genesis of it. Once I started researching witches, I realized how big the community was today and how underrepresented they are. I thought [that] I had an opportunity to actually write a story about a real witch, a today witch, and maybe give that community a little bit of a voice that they don’t actually have right now.”

Not only is it a rom-com with two women (one of whom is a witch), one of them is poly. Additionally, one of the other actors is trans but not playing a trans character. I asked Clark what drew her to making the movie LGBTQ-friendly.

“Well, for one, I have a fan base in the LGBTQ community,” Clark said, “starting with a film that I produced called Elena Undone, and so it just seemed like a natural fit. For me, I don’t actually even look at it like an LGBTQ film. I look at it as a film about these two people who found love and then a lot of other stuff happens around them. For me, it’s as much a film about their relationships with their families. It’s about family, love, friendship, as well as romance. So it wasn’t like a conscious choice, like, ‘Oh, I’m going to now make a lesbian romance.’ It was just like, ‘Oh, I have fans in this area, and I have experience over here, and I want to do a rom-com, and I could do a straight one. But why?’ Because there’s a lot of straight rom-coms.”

“I don’t make a big deal of it, because I’m not going to change the world; I’m making a movie,” she said. “But I do think it’s hard to get things like this financed, and there haven’t been a lot of lesbian rom-coms. You see a lot of romance, and then they’re very funneled into a strictly lesbian romance. And they play to their base. They rarely expand outside of that, unless they have a really big star.

“So I just thought it was an opportunity to push a story between two women into a space that they don’t occupy often in film in genre terms,” Clark continued, “as well as into the sort of more I guess, you’d call fantasy, and it is a supernatural story as well. I just thought mixing all of those things and working towards creating a more global story that everybody could enjoy actually advances awareness and kind of assimilation in a way for the LGBTQ community. We’re at a place now where everybody should go see a film about two people who fall in love, and it shouldn’t matter who’s falling in love. That’s sort of my philosophy. So, part of me felt responsible, like I had an opportunity to do this, and I felt I could raise the money to do it, so I was going to do it.”

With that in mind, I asked Clark what she hoped audiences would get out of the film, what she considered the goal of the movie.

“To be perfectly honest, it’s hard to pick one thing,” she said with a slight laugh. “I really just want people to understand that the witch community is real and you don’t have to be scared of them. Maybe, as I like to say, they will have an opportunity to come out of the broom closet now—that maybe the conversation opens up a little bit. I see parallels between the witch community and the LGBTQ community in terms of being comfortable talking about who they really are and being who they really are in public, and they’re a little bit farther behind. So, I hope that it opens up awareness to that and makes it less weird and scary for some people.

“I hope that people that don’t normally go to see love stories between same sex couples will walk out realizing that it didn’t even occur to them,” she said. “Like they didn’t even separate from it when they were watching it. They just went. They just took the ride. I just want people to take the ride and then walk out, and then ultimately I just want people to feel good. There’s a million things in my head that went into this script that matter to me. So, in the end, watch the movie: there’s a lot of things that you could potentially take away. I just hope that you’re affected by it, you’re moved by it, you enjoy it, and at the end, somehow you feel a little bit opened up by the experience.”

So why should you see Witchy Ways?

“It’s fun. It’s a fun movie,” Clark said. “We’re in a time period right now where things are so dark and people are so mean to each other, and I just feel like this is a time for offering people a joyful movie, a movie with fun content where they can laugh, maybe they tear up a little bit, but it’s a hopeful tear and they just have a good time, because everything else is kind of not. We’re in an insecure period in time, I think, for most people. So, it’s if you can go and have a bit of entertainment and walk out feeling good about life or love or whatever it is, I think that’s a good thing, right?”

Since she mentioned she had always wanted to do a rom-com, I asked what her favorite rom-com tropes were.

“The classic one is the meet cute,” she answered. “It’s always an interesting thing to see how they come together.” She’s quick to clarify, “I think the best rom-coms: you feel like it’s real. You also realize you’re taking the more fluffy ride. The tropes hopefully don’t stick out as much. If you’re watching a good rom-com, you’re just aware that they’re hitting them because you’re comfortable with it. It’s one of the reasons tropes exist: they’re touchstones for a viewer.”

“So, I did do a lot of research on rom-coms,” Clark said, “because I’ve never written one. How is it broken down differently than another film [that] might be a sort of more standard script? But at the same time, I’ve also got a supernatural movie going on and I’ve got a bunch of other stuff going on. So, it was like, ‘How do those tropes fit with all these other things?’ If a filmmaker does it right, you don’t notice the tropes. You just know you’re comfortable with the ride. It’s reassuring, it’s familiar, and then hopefully they make it unique enough that you’re not bored.”

If you’re interested in learning more about Jane Clark, you can find her on Instagram.

As for Witchy Ways, it has a website and its own Instagram account.

I found it a sweet ‘Hallmarky’ movie that definitely deserves some love. It’s streaming for free on Tubi and YouTube, and available to buy on Amazon Prime and Apple TV: all links here.

Author: Angie Fiedler Sutton

Angie Fiedler Sutton is a writer, podcaster, and all-round fangirl geek. She has been published in Den of Geek, Stage Directions, LA Weekly, The Mary Sue, and others. She also produces her own podcast, Contents May Vary, where she interviews geeky people about geeky things. You can see all her work (and social media channels) at angiefsutton.com.

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