Think back to your favorite family vacation. Did it involve making a feature film like Pilgrim, now making the rounds on the festival circuit? Probably not. Unless you’re the Purdy family, a clan I first met years ago at Cinequest after seeing their beautiful comedy Quality Problems.
In that film, Brooke and Doug Purdy fictionalized themselves and their kids to put an intimate face on grappling with the tragedies of life. Now father Doug has teamed with daughter Scout to write, direct, and star in Pilgrim, in which Scout plays Jo, a 15 year old girl who wants to hike the California coast to honor her late mother. The film also features Brooke in two roles, neither Jo’s mother, along with son/brother Maxwell Purdy as, naturally, Jo’s older brother. Just for good measure, Max composed the score. Pilgrim makes its debut at Cinequest in March.
Though it wasn’t exactly the life plan, “…the work turned into the Von Trapp family of filmmaking,” Doug joked when I visited them at their home last week. Still, Scout hadn’t exactly planned on climbing every mountain of film production.
“For the longest time, I didn’t want to be a filmmaker. I was set on being a baker,” she said (and indeed, our conversation was punctuated with a plate of chocolate chip cookies). “But I think that was just me saying, hey, this family is full of film makers. I don’t want to just be a filmmaker because of that. Then I realized, I’m in it. So I just started making scripts and it came naturally to me. I was having fun writing sketches and shorts. I think it was probably quarantine that did it.”
Doug had wanted to a father-daughter project, and it had been a few years since the family had worked on a film together. He deferred to Scout to light the fire that got it going.
“It started as a girl and a gay uncle,” she explained, knowing that they didn’t want to play too close to their real lives. At which point mother Brooke laughed and confirmed that she herself was dead in all the scripts.
“There was always something to do with the woods. At a certain point we said let’s just keep it simple and tell a story that’s going to play off our dynamic,” Scout offered. “We have a good dynamic. We like each other.”
Doug smiled. “Why not use that?”
But I had to ask horror film fan Doug how this ended up not being a horror movie, if it always ended up in the woods. Both he and Scout laughed.
“People who see our Instagram page ask that a lot.”
On paper, the challenge wasn’t just avoiding writing a horror film. It was keeping from writing scenes that would have cost too much. As family vacations go, they knew that Pilgrim needed to come in costing less than a trip to the Galactic Starcruiser at Disneyworld.
“We would take turns writing,” Doug offered. “It was almost like an improv, all that yes anding. She’d write 5 pages and I’d come in and write for a while and as we went through it, we’d realize oh, that’s going to be expensive and we’re not going to have the people to do that. We just kind of kept on going with that in mind, but at the same time we also didn’t let it stop us too much.”
One way around that was to be true guerilla filmmakers. Doug noted that they’d fallen in love with using a pseudo-documentary aesthetic, with a “floating” camera that allowed for quick set-ups and take-downs as needed. Also, it added to the fun. Though they didn’t get caught, they almost got kicked out of the library. (“I got mad dogged by a librarian,” Scout laughed.)
As most filmmakers will tell you, it really does come back to the writing. “I think we (father and daughter) have similar taste in what think are funny, and neither of us like to do very over the top dialogue,” Scout explained. “And yet we also like opportunities to take things a little bit weirder.”
“I will say that 60% of the script was written by her,” Doug added. “She definitely did more of the heavy lifting with that.”
“But Dad,” Scout interrupted,” you were responsible for stitching it all together and making it make sense. Because there were a lot of random scenes that were great standing alone, but you helped us put it all together and make it resonate.”
Another plus in working with family? The chemistry onscreen already has a lifetime to spring from. But it isn’t just the four Purdys, or family friend/producer/playwright Colette Freedman, who’d invited me to this small gathering.
“A lot of it was like, who can do this and are they easy to work with?” Doug said. “It’s like we’re just running and gunning and we just wanted to work with people that we hung out with a lot. We knew their vibe and that they could vibe when we’re acting together.”
Scout added, “They were mostly friends and people that we found funny. Like Jenica Bergere, who plays a therapist, is like basically my aunt and Ryan Bollman, who plays Derek — I’ve known him for a lot of my life. We’ve had a relationship that was predetermined with all of them and sort of a set dynamic.”
“It’s very similar to our dynamic in real life,” Doug continued. “A little more heightened, but I think that people just kind of slipped into their normal routines when we were shooting. There weren’t a lot of people on set, you know? You’re talking about a 2-3 man crew, you know, and everyone’s juggling different hats and things like that. It wasn’t as intimidating as where you have like 50 people standing around. It’s pretty easy.”
I had to turn to Max, who added one more hat, that of composer. His film score for Pilgrim is solid and memorable.
“There’s not really a route I’ve chosen in my musician versus film,” the college student said, “but on this one it was kind of like, you know, we’re very much about using the resources we have at our disposal.” He joked, “Luckily, they’ve known me.”
Max continued, “I’ve started to get into music on my own and they’ve heard my style and they saw that it fits very well with the film. I also have a lot of influences that Scout and Dad liked. So we were able to merge what’s my style of music with those influences to put a score together. I think it represented the film really well and I was glad to have their support on that.”
With both Quality Problems and Pilgrim delivering solid film experiences at a microbudget, and with Pilgrim depending on the talents of two young people at the start of their careers, I had to ask Doug and Colette what’s changed in teaching the art to the next generation?
“I think the Purdys need maybe like two more films and then I’m going to teach a class on them as their own genre.” Colette the film teacher was only half-joking. “Because the reality is so many people write but they don’t do anything with their scripts. And what’s so beautiful about this family, and in particular, why this film works is so much more than what they’ve already said about their collaboration. This is a structurally perfect film. It works.”
Colette was one of the many friends who stepped in front of the camera, as another single parent alongside Doug’s widowed father character. “One of my favorite parts of being on this film is it was just joy. It was so comfortable. There was so much respect on the set. And respect only starts with the directors and I give Doug and Scout full credit for that because they respected each other so much. Everyone wanted to be in on that action.”
Doug demurred, “for my two cents, I never studied film I. I was an English major. But it was really during Quality Problems that we just learned by doing. I’d worked on a bunch of independent films as an actor. But then in the past, I would guess, say 5 or 6 years like during COVID, we made a few shorts. We got a camera and we just picked it up and started just learning by doing and also watching a lot of Ed Burns’ films, especially Newlyweds. If you ever get a chance to check that out, it’s a great one. Watch a lot of low budget film makers.”
But it isn’t just the example of other filmmakers, Doug admitted. “YouTube is an amazing resource, you know, in terms of just OK, what is this? What? You know, you just take a night and just learn all about lenses and like, OK, I’m going to learn about some lighting tonight, you know? And then you just start getting out there and making a lot of mistakes. But then you start kind of figuring it out and it’s not rocket science.”
He paused and smiled. “I assume it would be kind of rocket science to make a Christopher Nolan film, but for what we’re doing, I just like keep it as simple, you know? Don’t get too crazy. We don’t have to show off amazing camera work or anything. I think it’s just gotten easier and easier for people to do this.”
As for the next generation, Doug offers that both his kids have a great sensibility. “Being a different generation, some stuff they have a little better bulls*** detector. You know what I mean? I can sometimes tend to get a little wacky and Scout will pull me back.”
Both Doug and Scout had to offer credit to an absent member of the crew – editor Tom Flynn. “He just knows his stuff,” Doug enthuses. “He was so great in just piecing everything together.” Doug admitted they had so few people working on set they’d failed to “slate” each take. So they’d had to go back and label the takes manually. “That was so Tom wouldn’t run away from us. Because we can’t just give him (a bunch of footage and say) ‘make gold!’”
Yet it is gold. On camera and off, when you’ve spent time with the Purdys, it just means you want to spend more time with them. To paraphrase from their earlier film, that’s a quality problem.
