Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Storytelling for the Screen:
The Weight
- Tuesday, October 6, 2026 / 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (115 minutes)
- With Padraic McKinley (filmmaker)
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Director: Padraic McKinley
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe, Julia Jones, Austin Amelio
The Weight (2026) is the debut feature from filmmaker Padraic McKinley. When Samuel (Ethan Hawke) is torn from his daughter and sent to a brutal prison in Oregon, Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe) offers him a high-stakes proposition: smuggle gold out of a remote mine with a dangerous crew of prisoners in exchange for his freedom. But as the group journeys into the unforgiving wilderness, the real threat isn’t the terrain—it’s the betrayal and violence festering within their ranks. Surrounded by greed, suspicion, and danger, Samuel must risk everything to reunite with his daughter. Influenced by the introspective action cinema of the 1970s but set against a stark Depression-era landscape, The Weight explores the lengths one is willing to go for family and freedom.
Padraic McKinley (filmmaker) will join moderator Ross Melnick (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center) for a post-screening discussion of The Weight.
This event is free but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee a seat.
Biographies
Padraic McKinley (filmmaker)
Padraic McKinley found his first opportunity in the film business through his uncle, acclaimed film editor William M. Anderson, whose work includes such iconic films as The Truman Show, Gallipoli, Tender Mercies, and Dead Poets Society. Starting out as a music editor on Anderson’s films, McKinley went on to become a film editor in his own right, cutting nineteen feature films and more than 200 episodes of television. McKinley later expanded into directing and producing, beginning with DirecTV’s Kingdom, where he served as co-executive producer and director of four episodes. McKinley went on to executive produce three high-profile cable series: American Gods for Fremantle Media and Starz, Hunters for Amazon Studios, and Showtime’s Golden Globe-winning The Loudest Voice, starring Russell Crowe. He subsequently served as an executive producer on the award-winning Showtime limited series The Good Lord Bird, starring Ethan Hawke. McKinley collaborated again with Frank Grillo, the lead actor from Kingdom, on the Netflix original documentary series Fightworld, which explores cultures around the globe through the lives, triumphs, and hardships of their fighters. In 2021, McKinley worked as producer-director, co-executive producer, and director of the NBC series Debris. In 2022, he served as a producer on Russell Crowe’s Poker Face. He made his feature directorial debut feature with The Weight, which premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
Moderator Ross Melnick (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center)
Ross Melnick is Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, Presidential Chair in Media Studies, and Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He was named an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for his book Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (Columbia University Press, 2022). He is the author of American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry (CUP, 2012), co-editor of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (AFI/Routledge, 2018), and co-author of Cinema Treasures (MBI, 2004). His research has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film History, The Moving Image, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and in numerous other journals and edited collections.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
Storytelling for the Screen
Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.