Local director’s ‘Pools’ puts North Shore on the silver screen

When filmmaker and Los Angeles resident Sam Hayes began writing “Pools,” a coming-of-age film that debuted in 2025, he knew that he wanted to make it at home. 

The Highland Park native used the North Shore as the setting for the film, which served as his directorial debut.

“Pools” stars Odessa A’zion (“Marty Supreme,” “Until Dawn”) as Kennedy, a grief-ridden college student on a scholarship who begins lagging academically after the death of her father. When given a final chance to show up to class, or lose her scholarship, Kennedy opts to party — and pool hop through Lake Forest with her friends.

“Lake Forest is such a unique part of the country, with these old-money mansions, and it’s such an elaborate place,” Hayes said. “It feels so magical; it’s such a magical place for pool hopping. It feels like another world. Having pool hopped a bit myself there, I really couldn’t imagine [the film] set anywhere else.”

The movie was filmed at four different houses — and their pools, of course — in Lake Forest’s Green Bay Road Historic District, including the Cudahy Estate on Green Bay Road.

“That mansion is the main shooting location, both inside and out,” Hayes said. “It’s absolutely gorgeous.”

“Pools” was also filmed on the Lake Forest College campus, which was renamed Lake Forest University in the film.

“They were so gracious to let us film there,” Hayes said. “It’s cool to show the world that part of the country, in the form of a movie.”

Hayes said that some of his biggest inspirations while writing and directing the film were John Hughes’ movies like “The Breakfast Club” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” which were set in the North Shore, among other Chicagoland locations.

“It felt like the story needed to be set in the North Shore of Chicago, not in some suburb of New York or LA,” Hayes said. “It just felt like that’s where it tonally needed to be, and live within the spirit of John Hughes’ movies.”

Making the film allowed Hayes to return to his roots in several ways, by filming “Pools” in areas he frequented throughout his adolescence and by being able to collaborate with old friends on the project.

The film’s composer, Cody Fry, is also a North Shore native, and is a longtime friend of Hayes. Fry, a singer-songwriter, composer and musician, grew up in Northfield, and graduated from New Trier High School in 2008.

“‘Pools’ was his first movie that he composed, and it was a really cool process to get to work together,” Hayes said. “I knew he was a musical genius, but he’s never done the score of a movie before. It was also my first time directing, so we were just figuring it out together.”

Hayes said that he believed that the music in the film came together “really well.” His opinion was supported when “Pools” was nominated for a Guild of Music Supervisors Award.

“Music supervision is just all of the music in the film, the whole cohesive thing,” Hayes said. “It’s all the songs, and how they come in and out, the score, and we have a few original songs in our movie, too. One was written by [Fry], and two were written by [A’Zion.] It was a huge honor to be nominated.”

Hayes wrote and directed the film, and specifically set out to do both roles when he started writing “Pools.” He also produced the film.

“I was writing something that I wanted to direct from the get-go,” Hayes said. “When I was writing it, I thought ‘This is going to be my project.’”

This wasn’t Hayes’ first experience with writing. The filmmaker wrote his first novel, “The Weather Man,” which was published by Amazon White Glove, in 2017.

While Hayes said that his “first love is fiction,” the filmmaker moved to LA out of a desire to get involved in filmmaking as well, taking part in a one-year screenwriting program. He started writing screenplays from there.

“It’s just a different format of writing, and once you learn it, it’s not so different from writing a novel,” Hayes said. 

The experience of having already written a novel helped to make writing a screenplay less intimidating for Hayes, as he said screenplays are typically far fewer words than novels would be.

“I think both styles can benefit each other,” Hayes said. “Writing a screenplay, it’s way fewer words than a novel. It’s like, one-third of the amount of words, or less, so it made it seem less daunting to begin with.”

“Pools” premiered at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago on Aug. 22, 2025, and kicked off the theatrical run for the movie. The film ended up playing in 100 theaters across the country.

To help promote the film, the team behind “Pools” held pool parties at several locations throughout the country, including at Soho House Chicago, where the movie would be playing on a projector near the pool.

“You want to create an event that’s bigger than the movie itself, and build a community around it,” Hayes said. “I think people are hungry for those kinds of in-person events, they’re tired of the digital world.”

Hayes said that he feels like he’s grown up with this project, as it’s been such a major part of his life since he started writing it in 2018. Now, he said his goal is to continue “trying to get the movie out there.”

“This movie has been my whole life for six years,” Hayes said. “It’s changed my life. You work with so many different people, and these communities, friendships and new career paths have formed out of it.”

“Pools” is available for rent or purchase on both Apple and Amazon.

The Record is a nonprofit, nonpartisan community newsroom that relies on reader support to fuel its independent local journalism.

Become a member of The Record to fund responsible news coverage for your community.

Already a member? You can make a tax-deductible donation at any time.