Philly-shot film "Dare" opens Friday

The movie, which opens Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse (4th & Ranstead), casts Emmy Rossum and "Friday Night Lights" actor Zach Gilford as two-thirds of a teen love triangle, and also features "SNL" alum Ana Gasteyer, Alan Cumming, Sandra Bernhard and Cady Huffman. Bernhard and Huffman appeared in "Twenty Dollar Drinks," which Brind directed.

Brind, who attended Yale after graduating from Friends Central in 1996, attended Columbia University's film school after realizing he wanted to be a screenwriter. As his senior project in film school, Brind wrote "Dare" as a short, which was shot by fellow student Adam Salky in 2005. Salky also directed the feature-length version.

"After we shot the short and it went into the world, the characters took on a different life for me," Brind said.

Though Brind, like the "Dare" character Ben, was "closeted and gay" in high school, he says that he was far more outgoing and that Ben is not based on him. Interestingly, Brind has a cameo in "Dare" as a guy who hits on Ben at a coffee shop, filmed at Milkboy Coffee (2 E. Lancaster), in Ardmore.

"The goal of the film was to create adolescent characters that were all psychologically complex," Brind told us Monday. "There aren't that many roles for high school characters that aren't all stock characters," he said.

The 32-year-old is now working on a few television pilots and scripts, and hopes to shoot in his hometown again. Brind, who now lives in New York, will be here this weekend hosting Q&A sessions after the Friday and Saturday 7 p.m. screenings of "Dare."