One cigarette can make all the difference.

When a teenage runaway is unexpectedly confronted by her father on her smoke break, she gives him the length of a cigarette to convince her to come home.

I have always found myself fascinated by characters that have a tendency to make all the wrong choices and are then forced to clean up their own mistakes. For me, "The Last Cigarette" is a story of redemption and forgiveness. A father and daughter, both consumed with guilt and regret, must forgive one another in order to ultimately redeem themselves. When I read this script, I felt a sense of loss as I imagined each character’s respective back-story. Both are so burdened by the past that they can’t see one another other in the present light. For me, finding and earning a connection between these two distant characters was my challenge as a director. I knew that if I could make the tension between father and daughter palpable, and later, if I could make the connection between the two believable, an audience would viscerally feel that final moment of forgiveness, which I believe to be the spine of the film.