French actress Elsa Zylberstein is making her directorial debut with "My Best Life," a comedy-drama inspired by her viral lockdown sketch series "Mytho du soir." Rather than adapting the sketches directly, she and co-writer Michael Pierrard kept only the central fantasist character and built an entirely new story around her, drawing on the huge online response the original videos generated to explore themes of imagination, family and self-invention.

In the film, Zylberstein plays a failed actress whose mother suffers a stroke and wakes believing her daughter has become an international film star; rather than correcting the misapprehension, the heroine sustains an increasingly elaborate fiction to protect her mother. Zylberstein, who co-directs with longtime collaborator Michael Pierrard, cited Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy" and films by David O. Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson as influences, and said the roughly 60 original "Mytho du soir" sketches averaged around 80,000 views each on Instagram.