Kat Candler's long journey to overnight film success

Photo by Joe O'Connell

I sat down to talk to Kat Candler for The Austin Chronicle about her adventures along the way to Hellion, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and screens at South by Southwest in the next few days.

I was the first person to ever interview Kat back in 2000. It's an honor to interview her again now. Hellion is a fine film. Check it out.

Texas Sundance entries have Dallas pedigrees

(From today's Dallas Morning News. Stories are behind a pay wall, so I present it for you.)
 

Texas Sundance entries have Dallas pedigrees

BY JOE O’CONNELL

Special to The Dallas Morning News

            Austin gets the Texas indie-film buzz, but the Lone Star State contingent at the upcoming Sundance Film Festival is full of North Texans.

            Yen Tan worked in marketing for Neiman-Marcus in Dallas until he trekked to the Capital City in 2010 with a plan to make a living as the go-to graphics guy for indie film poster art. His third feature film Pit Stop, the parallel stories of two blue-collar gay men in small-town Texas, premieres at Sundance later this month. Tan co-wrote the script with Dallas’ David Lowery, whose feature Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is in dramatic competition at Sundance.

12-year-old Elise Gardner, star of Spark poses for
a film blogger as her mother Mary Catherine watches.

            “It’s like winning the lottery,” said Tan of Sundance in Park City, Utah, which carries the mystique as a magical place where independent film dreams come true. “I’m scared to have expectations. I don’t want to be disappointed.”

            Tan said he quietly flew under the radar in the North Texas film scene with Lowery and Fort Worth’s James Johnston, a Pit Stop producer, before decamping to Austin.

Indie film proves a small Texas world with Austin-based Kelly Williams—yet another Pit Stop producer—programming Fort Worth’s Lone Star International Film Festival while keeping his hand in seemingly every independent movie of note, including Kat Candler’s latest Sundance short Black Metal about a rocker/dad who must deal with the guilt when a killer’s actions are linked to a love of the rocker’s music.

“We’ve all grown up together,” Williams said following a press screening in Austin of Pit Stop clips, Candler’s film and two shorts set to premiere at Sundance satellite festival Slamdance. Williams, Tan and Candler and many others share space at an Austin film production site where relationships bloom and ideas tumble back and forth.

“It’s so incestuous,” said Candler whose short Hellion played at Sundance in 2012 and is being expanded into a full feature. “There’s not a competitiveness about the community, yet everyone’s voice remains unique to them.”

Part of it is the shoestring nature of independent film that require the wearing of many hats to make a living. Candler’s two Sundance shorts were crowd-funded with donations through Web site IndieGoGo. Both star Jonny Mars, arguably the most intriguing actor in Texas indie film. The former Dallas resident also produced Black Metal and directed the 2012 documentary America’s Parking Lot about rabid Dallas Cowboys fans.

Andrew Irvine is Candler’s teaching assistant in the University of Texas Radio-Television-Film program. His frank and funny short Hearts of Napalm, about a young couple’s sexual miscommunication, will screen at Slamdance. Irvine, 30, is seeing a dream forged as a Plano teenager come to fruition.

“I’m old enough now to realize that since this is the first time it will probably never be this good again,” he said of his upcoming Park City adventure.

UT film student Annie Silverstein, whose background is solidly in the documentary form, will see her fictional short Spark screen at Slamdance as well. It’s a touching story of a boy left to deal with the daughter of his father’s love interest and some tempting fireworks.

“Sometimes using fiction you can say things that are more true than in a documentary,” said Silverstein who founded a program that taught Native American youth to use film to tell their stories.

“I’ve lived in many different cities before, and I’ve never felt so accepted so quickly,” she said of Austin. “I feel lucky. That’s not normal in artistic communities where anxieties and egos can get in the way.”

These filmmakers mark a second Texas indie film wave. The first will also be represented this year at Sundance with Richard Linklater premiering Before Midnight and Robert Rodriguez screening his 1993 debut El Mariachi. Austin’s latest “it” film director Jeff Nichols’ Mud starring Matthew McConaughey also is slated, along with works by newish Austin transplants Andrew Bujalski (Computer Chess) and David Gordon Green (Prince Avalanche with Paul Rudd).

           

Bryan Poyser does 'The Bounceback' with new film

If you're wondering what that indie movie is shooting in Austin for the next few weeks, it could be Bryan Poyser's The Bounceback. He recently left a pretty cushy gig at the Austin Film Society to get busy making more of his own flicks. He's got the able assistance of cinematographer P.J. Raval and producer Megan Gilbride. We're talking three stars of the Austin film scene here. Shooting started yesterday.

I haven't a clue what the film is about, but Poyser's films (Dear Pillow, Lovers of Hate) have been regulars at the Film Independent Spirit Awards and Sundance, so expectations are high. Break a leg, Bryan. No, I didn't mean literally!

David Lowery poised for film big time

As reported by Deadline, Texas indie auteur David Lowery is on the verge of jumping into a whole new level of filmmaking. He will direct his own script of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which is sort of a modern Bonnie And Clyde. Rooney Mara, Ben Foster and Casey Affleck are attached to the cast. A film shoot is set for this summer in Canada.

Lowery and producing partner James Johnston been toiling as the Dallas/Fort Worth indie filmmaking names in recent years, most notably with St. Nick, which premiered at Sundance and then won the grand jury prize at the 2011 South By Southwest Film Festival.

And, of course, credit must be given to Lowery's magnificent mustache, which now must never be removed. Congrats, David and James!

Jeff Nichols' 'Take Shelter' sold to Sony

Even before his film Take Shelter is to bow at the Sundance Film Festival later this month, Austin filmmaker Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) is celebrating its sale to Sony Pictures Classics.

In the film, "Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, Boardwalk Empire) and Jessica Chastain (The Tree of Life) star as two parents living in Ohio with a six-year-old deaf daughter. When Shannon starts to have nightmares, he keeps his fears and anxieties to himself and obsessively erects a storm shelter in the backyard. His concerned family and community come second to his unspoken fears of what his dreams signify."

Bryan Poyser's 'Lovers of Hate' in Sundance

A big congrats to Austin's Bryan Poyser (Dear Pillow), whose Lovers of Hate, which shot both in Austin and near where Sundance is held, was selected as a dramatic competition film for this year's Sundance Film Festival.

To understand what a big deal this is for Poyser, read the opening of this Austin Chronicle article I wrote a while back.


Here's the skinny from Variety:

Lovers of Hate - Directed and written by Bryan Poyser, about how the reunion of estranged brothers is undermined when the woman they both love chooses one over the other. With Chris Doubek, Heather Kafka, Alex Karpovsky, Zach Green.