Kyle Cassie is a writer-director based in Los Angeles, drawn to tragic human stories: underdogs and anti-heroes, impossible situations, the darker side of fairy tales — always with a playful, slightly tormented lens.

His debut short ANTi-SOCiAL, a tragicomic thriller he wrote, directed, produced, edited, and colored, world-premiered at Indie Short Fest Los Angeles. The film earned a long list of nominations and wins, including Best Director, Best Fantasy Film, Best Actress, Best Young Actor, and Best Cinematography. The screenplay placed in the top eight worldwide at the Slamdance Screenplay Competition and was a semifinalist in two other prominent screenplay competitions. His 2024 music video 17, shot in Copenhagen, takes a female-led perspective on the quiet violence of relationship abuse, and the strength one woman finds in rebuilding herself afterwards. Currently in post-production: B M X, an unconventional love story about hopeless hearts in Copenhagen, releasing in 2026; and Hashtag, a vertical-format elevated horror told through the language of TikTok feeds.

Cassie spent two decades as a working film and television actor, including a supporting role in Marvel's Deadpool, before moving behind the camera in 2012. He directed and produced 50+ commercial productions for a New York-based global beauty brand's in-house studio, shooting in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Berlin.

Two feature films are in active development through his production company Mr. Hyde Films: Riot Tempo, a contained psychological thriller about four estranged bandmates pulled to their late frontman's wake and trapped at his mansion for a week as ten years of quietly rewritten histories begin to come apart; and You Only Live Twice, a psychological thriller drawn from his own experience, having briefly died before spending weeks in a coma at nineteen.

At nineteen, I was a passenger in a car T-boned by a truck. My heart stopped on the table. I spent three weeks in a coma where I lived an alternate life I thought was real — beautiful, bizarre, terrifying, vivid. I came back with a brain that didn't quite accept where its boundaries used to be.

That's where most of the work comes from.

I want a viewer to leave with something they didn't walk in with. A feeling, an image, a question that doesn't go away on the drive home. Also, a film should misbehave a little.

Right now I'm closest to a feature called You Only Live Twice. A young man wakes up inside a coma he doesn't know he's in, and has to find his way back. The story is about the lies we tell ourselves, the truth we have to chase, and learning to let go. It's the version of my own experience I've been carrying since I was nineteen.

— Kyle