Leah McKendrick, who grew up in the Inner Richmond, wrote and directed Voicemails for Isabelle — a Netflix rom-com released June 19 — and fought to bring production home to San Francisco for three days, even as costs pushed the bulk of the shoot to British Columbia.

Not every director's homecoming fits in three days, but Leah McKendrick had to make hers work.

McKendrick grew up in the Inner Richmond and attended Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory before leaving for film school and, eventually, a directing career. Her latest project, Voicemails for Isabelle, dropped on Netflix globally on June 19 — a rom-com starring Zoey Deutch as a pastry chef who inherits her late sister's phone number, with Nick Robinson, Nick Offerman, and Harry Shum Jr. rounding out the cast. Produced by Escape Artists, the film was shot primarily at Martini Film Studios in Langley, British Columbia, where principal photography ran from July into mid-September 2025.

The San Francisco portion lasted roughly three days — SAG-AFTRA background casting called for tour bus riders, Tai Chi practitioners, joggers, and pedestrians around September 8 and 9. The shoot touched Fisherman's Wharf, Pier 39's carousel, Union Square, Lombard Street, the Haight, Ghirardelli Square, Chinatown, the Palace of Fine Arts at 3301 Lyon St., and Golden Gate Park — a sweep that reads like a tourist's checklist but is, from a certain angle, the geography of someone who knows where the fog actually sits on a September morning.

McKendrick fought to include the sequence. "That's the problem with San Francisco," she told press after the film's release. "It's so expensive to shoot there." The economics steered the bulk of production to British Columbia; the three days were the result of her making the case that the city was irreplaceable. The emotional anchor she was after: a bench overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, where her lead character sits between grief and the living city below — somewhere between her dead sister and everyone still moving around her.

There's a particular irony in an Inner Richmond kid having to argue for her own hometown on a budget. The film's title character, Isabelle, never appears onscreen — she's heard only in old voicemails, a voice from somewhere else. The city got three days in September, the cameras went north, and Voicemails for Isabelle is streaming now.