Comic-Con can be a fantasyland where people go to indulge their dreams. So in that sense, the presence of the cast and crew of Bellflower fits perfectly.
A low-key slacker drama with a dollop of post-apocalyptic menace, Bellflower is at its core about a boy who gets his heart broken by a girl. But then there’s this fantastic car, Mother Medusa, outfitted with amazing tail pipes that shoot flame, and a realization that Woodrow (played by writer/director Evan Glodell) may not be all that keyed in to reality in the first place.
Causing a stir at both Sundance and SXSW this year, Bellflower will unsettle many. In contrast, the cast and crew are upbeat and enthusiastic about the film’s reception and the chance to visit events like Comic-Con, where Glodell and producer Vincent Grashaw let Mother Medusa rip near the South Park Experience.
We sat down together on the Thursday of Comic-Con, happy to be there, and excited about the attention Bellflower had brought them.
Naturally, the conversation circles around Glodell, the triple-titled creator of the film. “I don’t have any formal training,” Glodell avers, “Just making tons of short films, projects with friends, trial and error.” Some of those friends are in the room, laughing along with him when he says “I didn’t choose them; they were the only ones around.”
Sometimes our friends choose us, and this cast displays a clear (and long-time) affection for Glodell. And some of them had been there for the genesis of Bellflower.
Glodell explains, “I went through the end of a relationship that was the most intense and terrible. The second half of it was the most intense and terrible thing that I had ever been through. ” And out of that came the script for Bellflower, but not the film’s unique visual style, the result of tinkering with existing cameras and jury-rigged add-ons of Glodell’s own creation.
Some of the film looks like a standard video shoot, but occasionally it bursts into an oversaturated palate of ambers and yellows, with darkness creeping into the edges of the frame. Though heightened, it’s almost like looking into someone’s memories of old Kodachrome photographs.
“It’s a hobby I’ve had for a really long time now,” Glodell offers. “There’s four cameras that were used, three of which I built. Two of the three that were used to the first half of the movie, the default look of the movie, those were the ones that I spent time trying to get the way that I thought was right. The other camera was built just to be used for certain scenes in the movie.
“It had real unusual specs. It’s a large-format camera and there’s no other large format motion picture camera in the world. And so we got to use lenses that no one else has used. It was meant specifically to set apart certain parts of the movie.”
And yet the look may not have been one hundred percent on purpose. Glodell continues, “It was pretty intentional, but with limited resources there’s always going to be a wild card.”
When directing, actors can also be a wild card, but Glodell clearly felt comfortable with his cast. “I met Jessie (Wiseman, as love interest Milly) when I first moved to L.A. a super long time ago. As an actress. I saw her in a play. I was making a lot of films that were way more abstract, but were about the same subject matter, that me and her were in.”
“When I got the idea for Bellflower, it was always going to be her.”
But for the film, Glodell needed someone to inhabit the puckish Aiden, best friend, possibly bad influence, but the guy you’re going to need at your back when the apocalypse comes. Tyler Dawson fit the bill.
Dawson laughs thinking about their first meeting, after Glodell saw him in a play. “I was charming,” he offers, and Glodell leaps in — “YES! There’s a certain mix. He walked outside and said something really rude to this group of girls and they all blushed. You could tell they liked him, and I thought, that’s a special kind of man.”
Dawson laughs, short sharp and loud.
“I went and talked to him,” Glodell continues with a grin, “and he was excited, but it didn’t happen for four or five years. But we worked on tons of other projects. By the time we started shooting Bellflower, we’d become super close friends. We were roommates at one point. I guess there’s a story like that for everyone.”
Producer and actor Vincent Grashaw chimes in, “I had seen the short films that they’d been in together. They’d posted them on line. One in particular was so outrageous, it’s ridiculous. And he played like, five people, all in a room just doing crazy s***. He basically rapes himself at the end of the short, and it’s so awesome, I contacted him. You could tell there was talent. ”
Actress Wiseman laughs at the awkward turn of this conversation. She points at me and notes good-humoredly, “he’s turning off the recorder.” In person, she gives off exactly the same gleam that her character does in the film, hopefully without the dark turn.
Glodell sews the connection with Grashaw together. “I’d known Vince for years. I’d always known him more as a filmmaker than as an actor. But I had all these people that I’m so close to playing all the main parts, and I was like, f***, I have this one character and I really want to find someone that could be as close to us as everybody else.”
Grashaw argues, “I’m not an actor.”
Glodell responds, “I can’t do that to him! I can’t have him playing that part! Then I called him.”
With mock gravity, Dawson puts his hand on Grashaw’s shoulder. “And then Vince took full responsibility. He showed up on set. We were all just out of control.”
But with this being years gestating in Glodell’s head, what finally pushed Bellflower into reality?
Glodell sighs and thinks. “For me, it might have been almost a panic attack, leading to suicidal thoughts.”
A look of mock horror crosses Wiseman’s face. “OR?” she shouts.
Glodell reassures her. “No, no, there’s something there. I was trying to make this movie in 2003 with a camcorder but I didn’t have the resources. Then I got offered a job doing production. I worked doing that for a couple of years, and at some point, I realized I was insanely unhappy and that the last time I was on track was when I was working on the short films that I was making, and the next one was supposed to be Bellflower.”
“So I needed to get back on track.” Glodell smiles ruefully. “Life was going by, and dreams weren’t happening.” Wiseman nods, “Kind of nobody’s going to help me, so I just have to do it.”
Grashaw adds, “the only way to get it moving was just to start. We almost figured it out after the fact. Let’s just get it rolling, we’ll make a schedule after we start production.”
When asked if making the film felt cathartic, even Wiseman has to exhale sharply, “Yes!”
Glodell probes back, “You mean about relationships? About ambitions? YES. Very much so.” Clearly this is a man grateful for his success. “Even in the last month, from the time the movie got to Sundance — we got to Sundance, I was more stressed. I got crazy, and now I’m like, my god, we’re actually going to get a shot at something happening. And then at Sundance it actually sold and it got even crazier. Now it just has to go well. And then about a month ago I was like, all right, you can chill out. I’ve been much chiller.”
“More than anything,” Grashaw speaks as Producer, “for everyone involved, we’d put so much into it, to just have It out there, finished, it’s being received well, it makes us incredibly happy, it’s great. We’d put so much time into it, just the fact that we finished it was like a big deal. There were times, you know. We’d been shooting this movie for five years!”
“It wasn’t that long!” protests Glodell.
Grashaw volleys back with a laugh, “We’d been shooting for three years! Which I think goes back to what you were saying about dreams. We can all now, especially Evan, go forward and make more films. Not in the way we made this one, where we were struggling to eat.”
Actress Rebekah Brandes enters the room, adding an interesting energy. Of all the cast, she is the one with the most mainstream work on her resume, popping up on a variety of television shows and a few horror films. And, it seems, the newest addition to this tight-knit group.
Following up on Grashaw’s comment about going forward, I ask if Bellflower has already opened doors for any of them. Brandes agrees, “I’ve already booked a movie straight off my performance. They just called me up.” Keeping it close to the vest, Glodell will only offer, “There’s definitely been tons of opportunities in many different areas.”
As Glodell had pulled his cast from seeing them in theater, the question has to be asked. Which do they find more satisfying?
Dawson jumps in. “For me, the biggest thing is having a live audience. It’s an essential part of acting in a way. The performance side of it. There’s something awesome about being in theater because it’s immediate. It forces you to have that spontaneous creativity that makes acting enjoyable to me.”
“Transitioning to film, it’s important — even if it’s the crew or extras or whoever’s around — it’s always important to have that sense of immediacy. Be alive on camera as opposed to being on set with a lot of distractions. It could be easy to get lost in that. It’s really important to feel on the spot, not pressure, but that’s what allows you to have those weird spontaneous things that happen to make a performance interesting.”
Wiseman laughs, “I’m the opposite. I respond to film as opposed to theater because it allows you to be real, I guess, really subtle. There’s things the camera can pick up, one look, and if your face is totally still and you’re thinking something, the camera can pick that up. I’m more drawn to that.”
But it’s Brandes that may have the best attitude about the vagaries of the business. “I did a lot of community theater when I was a kid. I’m not a triple threat; I can’t dance or sing very well at all. But acting – people always told me, ‘oh, you’re so darling,’ but I was like eight, so it didn’t mean anything.”
Glodell has mulled it for a while. Despite starring in his film, acting really isn’t what he wants to do. “I want to move forward as a writer/director, definitely. In all honesty I don’t think that I had the resources to find someone (to play himself) that I would have been satisfied with.”
“Being that I had no money, and I had very little experience, even if I had been able to find that person, without paying him, to get them to come and put the time in to be the lead character, I don’t think I was skilled enough or experienced enough to get them to understand it.”
He struggles with the thought. “Or that I even know if I understood it on a subtle enough level. Putting myself in was like putting in the X Factor , the wild card, I knew there were things that I didn’t understand consciously that subconsciously I did understand. If I got lucky, some of those things would come across.”
“After all this time has gone by, and seeing people’s reactions to it, and starting to get some distance from it, I think I got a ton of that. Stuff that I did as an actor in the movie that I had no idea I was doing, portraying stuff to the point that it makes me uncomfortable.”
Clearly a fan of his friend, Grashaw offers support. “But you just knew it so intricately.”
The easiest actor to direct must have been the car, Mother Medusa. Taking up half the film’s $17,000 budget and possibly not street legal, the image of that car dominates the film and gave it the hook for a Comic-Con event.
Glodell nods, “To me, the car is like God to the characters. It becomes everything that’s falling apart, they put all of their hopes into Medusa. Somehow, if they can finish this car, then all of their lives are going to be okay. Everything is going to be awesome.”
Grashaw continues, “I think you get that when you watch it, because when it starts getting destroyed, when my character starts breaking it, you know it’s not just some random car. This is the only positive thing they have. Everything is dark, except for the car that is theoretically God.” He laughs, realizing what he said. “Theoretically.”
With this Mad Max influence, were all of you Mad Max fans?
Deadpan, Wiseman stares me down. “I’m a girl.” Then she bursts into laughter. “I am (a fan) NOW!”
Clearly, we’ve gotten to the heart of everything with this question. Glodell reminisces, “When I was a kid and I first saw Mad Max, I thought it was unbelievably cool. I wanted to be Mel Gibson’s character and have this car that made him indestructible, it seemed like. And then the Lord Humongous character scared the piss out of me because he was so huge.”
“So would I rather be clever or huge? And he was both. He was super-smart AND he could crush you. As time went on and the older I got, even when I was still young, I realized that my focus and interest had moved to Lord Humongous.”
Wiseman laughs, “This has been a good therapy session.”
And a perfect note to end the interview, as the group’s long overdue lunch arrives. Grashaw looks relieved. These filmmakers no longer have to struggle just to eat.
