(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Post Cards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by, Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms.

A retreat and conference center in a Prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

On the web, at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions.

For memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar, an Arts and Cultural Heritage Funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West central, Minnesota on the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits, 96.7kram.

Online at 96.7kram.com.

(gentle music) (lighter striking) - Can't get this thing done.

- Nothing worse than a sticky zipper.

- I appreciate that.

(gentle music) (rock music) - You're Going to dream yourself to death son.

You got to live in the real world.

- What brings you to Tuscaloosa?

(bright Rock music) - That young lady, It's not what she's seeing on the faces up very stable.

- Billy, you know what the word Tuscaloosa means?

- It's a new time now.

- You either part of the problem, or part of the solution.

(engine roaring) - Should that staff going for a day.

- You don't have to figure out what sudden line you stand on.

(fire explosion) - What do we have?

- [Female Announcer] All, informing code red.

(engine roaring) (glass cracking) - Are you crazy one or crazy about me?

- I'm a director mainly known for music videos and commercials.

I started in music videos, Super Eight music videos for Punk Rock bands from Minneapolis, Chicago eventually fanned out to New York and LA and started shooting all around the world.

It was back in the heyday of the big budget music video.

So I've made music videos for Food Fighters.

(Rock music playing) Corner Shop, the Cranberries, Matchbox 20.

(soft Rock music playing) Local bands like Babes and Toyland Low.

(soft Rock music) And as I was working my way up, I got to make a music video for another local musician, Prince.

It was a very political music video about racism against middle Eastern people after 911 and Prince had a song called "Cinnamon Girl" which was about that.

And he wanted me to write a story about it and depict it.

We spent the whole summer working on a music video together and some of those ideas, I actually was trying to use in Tuscaloosa.

Tuscaloosa set an Alabama 1972.

And oftentimes people ask me like, what's the movie about?

And I tend to say, it's about Alabama in 1972.

And it stars Natalia Dyer from Stranger Things.

And they kind of go, "Oh, I think I get it."

I don't know, Alabama's kind of a, a code word, especially at that time for a lot of really difficult issues.

George Wallace was the governor of Alabama.

He was running for president, 1972 was a very progressive time, anti-war protests against the Vietnam War.

Women's liberation was a huge thing.

Roe v. Wade was just coming in, Black Rights Movement.

It's very similar to our times right now.

And all those things come into our story.

It's kind of the background of our story.

And even though it's about these fictional characters we can't help look at history and feel that as a backdrop to this world of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

When I first read the novel for Tuscaloosa, it's by Glasgow Phillips, I thought this would be a great film.

- Hot, damn.

- What I really liked about it was the adventure of the love affair between Billy and Virginia.

I thought Virginia was a really great character.

She's the one person who's thrown into Tuscaloosa against her will.

- I need you to rescue me?

- Why is that?

- Because I'm not crazy, you dumb [-].

- And I thought the novel went beyond just racism is bad.

It really talks about some of these issues and not to mention it's got this amazing adventure.

And I really have always kept that story in my mind.

Like this would be a tight little movie but it also says something about the issues that I think are important to me.

And a lot of people that are on our team.

- When I sold my business in 2016, that's when Phil who I've known for many, many years probably about 20 years he showed me the script of the film Tuscaloosa.

- I said, I've got this script that's sort of seems to accidentally fall right into the many of the issues we're dealing with right now.

And he read it and he was like, Oh my God this is like an activist movie.

And it just, the timing was right on multiple levels just in terms of it being a story that was really relevant and really cool, two, I was looking for my next big challenge.

And then I just said, "Hey I'm just gonna produce this movie for you."

And I was able to pull together some investors and we put together a very modest budget and then we just hit the ground running really fast.

I suggested, you know, well, we could shoot it in Alabama.

I know we have to do it on an independent budget but we could also possibly do it right here in Minneapolis and in Minnesota, for our amount of time we had to shoot in our budget.

I knew the familiarity of what that's looked like and felt like.

We didn't go to someplace where we had to learn everything.

And what I really liked also was so much of the crew were from Minnesota.

And these are people I worked with my entire career, people I could trust.

And this is my first narrative feature.

And it's really good to surround yourself with people you know and trust because we're going to be a family for two weeks.

So I could totally rely on everybody.

We had a long history.

We didn't have to re-explain everything.

We just knew what to do.

We knew we had to be really efficient to get this in in two weeks.

And it was the only way we could make this movie work.

- Here we go.

Ready and background action.

- Ready, Let's roll camera and sound, please.

- Rolling.

- [Director] Ready, and action.

- We got a great casting director in New York and got the script out to Tate, read it and got back to us like literally within a day or two and said this is great.

I want to make this movie.

And we only had him for like five days here in Minneapolis.

So we actually built the schedule around him.

We said, "When can we get Tate?"

And then let's build the rest of the movie around that.

Tate Donovan is an incredibly experienced actor.

He's been around for many, many years, but Tate is like one of the most down to earth guys, those hard working actors, most recently with in films, he was in "Argo" he was in "Manchester By The Sea."

- I'm gonna search for 30 seconds, all right?

Could you give me a break?

I can't breathe in this house.

- This movie got made because Tate was attracted to the script and then Tate was also an executive producer.

So he, he brought that to the project as well.

And that means he's been really supportive of the project from beginning to end.

And I know as an actor, this role was of interest to him because it was such a complicated character.

- Hello boy, keep this place looking good.

Nigel could learn a thing or two from his granddaddy.

Nobody knows more about horticulture than Latham.

(Rap music) ♪ Welcome by Billy don't talk to me ♪ ♪ For sure don't talk to me.

- So we were shooting in Anokaa, And this is where YG had a lot of his scenes.

And YG is a very famous Rap star.

And there's a bunch of extras, you know, and YG shows up, he's got a driver, he's got a body guard.

He meets these guys.

So the first time he starts doing his line and he sees this guy and he goes, "You were in the front row of my show last year in St.

Paul."

He's like, "Yeah, I was, how do you recognize me and man?"

So they got to see each other.

- Over there it was like black men fighting yellow man for the white man.

- Yeah, that's it.

- To turn Minnesota in Alabama, first and foremost it was about locations.

We couldn't have made it work here.

If we didn't have those locations next is just sort of access to everything you want to put in front of the cameras or between the camera and the locations aside from only having about two weeks to shoot the movie, we had about two weeks of pre-production.

So this is a period movie set in Alabama 1972 shot here in Minneapolis.

So we had to secure all of these vintage cars all the wardrobe, all the props on a very, very low budget.

And like, literally we went from just like, "I think we're going to make this movie to we're making this movie."

- Our line producer, he actually owned the 1968 caddy convertible.

And I was like, we need that car because that's the car of the movie.

- Nice car.

- It's my dad's.

Torque's week a little when it rains.

- We just brought in car after car, after car what we could afford the doctor drives a new 1972 station wagon.

I knew we needed cars.

We need clothes and we need some buildings.

And after that, we're good to go.

(bright rock music) - Locations were really key to making this movie work.

And we worked with a woman named Anne Healey here in town.

She's on kind of a go-to locations expert.

She helped us find many of the locations.

Another key to the puzzle was shooting in Northville, Jessica Paxton, she worked for Carleton College.

She ended up being incredibly instrumental and helpful in helping us unlock that one key thing which was finding a location for the institution.

- One of the main settings I need is an institution where our lead character, Billy is the groundskeeper at his father's mental institution.

With the old photos, we found the perfect replica, Laird hall at Carleton College in Northfield.

This stuck in time building that actually looks like a real institution that was in Tuscaloosa Alabama called Bryce hospital.

Not only that, they had this really great house that was kind of stuck in time that the university owned and they have downtown Northfield for us to recreate downtown Tuscaloosa.

We actually took some of the landmarks through post effects and put them in downtown Northfield.

- The moody Tuscaloosa, I think there's 125 or 150 special effects shots that we did, almost all of them were trying to make it look historically accurate.

So the whole period of doing visual effects took us probably six months.

(soft music) - With all these things we thought, "Well, Northfield is half of our movie and it was really friendly to shooting, is just perfect for us.

The love affair between Virginia and Billy begins at the Black Warrior River.

- Virginia, what brings you to Tuscaloosa?

- Near an old train bridge, an old rusty, authentic, hundred year old train bridge.

We did a lot of research and found that if you look at the black warrior photos of it and images of it it looks so much like the Mississippi up here in Minneapolis during that time period.

And we also had almost an exact replica of the train bridge, right in Northeast Minneapolis.

I live on the Mississippi river.

In fact, this is where Devin and Natalia first met when we started our production and they stayed right at my house.

There's only this block in all of Minneapolis has about six houses on the Mississippi river.

I mean, there's a lot of places on the Mississippi that have a road between the homes and the river, but this is a leftover from the 1800s.

And it's just kind of part of my life now.

We've got boats, we've got a houseboat.

We live in this one little like country in the city, right in Minneapolis.

And I thought, man, I know this river.

I know where we can find those locations.

And for some of that footage we just went in my backyard almost and shot right there under the Railroad bridge.

- So feel worth the actual kissing scene.

Is that right?

- I think it's right about there.

- I was talking to the cinematographer Theo Stanley and the one thing I said is I always had in mind when reading the book was when they're kissing on the banks of the Black Warrior river, I was just imagining the camera really low, Dalian cross from the fish up their feet all the way across to the making out.

We've got this guy, Jeff Billers, he's an old pro, he can build and do anything.

We're like, "How do we get the camera low?"

And he goes, "I could dig a hole, put the track in the hole."

And we're thinking, "Oh man, that's such a big deal, that'll take so much time."

And we kept discussing it and he's just starts digging.

And he was done with it in about two minutes.

(laughing) He goes, "All right, stop talking, do it."

- See, first of all, (chuckles) I'm not crazy.

- It doesn't seem so.

- No, I can keep me here a few months.

If you don't get me outta here.

I will go crazy.

- So that really became a great place to stage their their first outing.

And we also used it for a night shoot where they catch a turtle - Nice boat.

- Thank you.

- And I wanted the feeling of this young love to have a lot of, ah- - This river is kind of spooky.

- Adventurous spirit, you know.

- Hold on, I think I got something.

- At first when we shot the movie I didn't wanna tell people we shot it in Minnesota.

I just didn't want that to be a distraction to the story but it kind of became quite interesting when we were doing the test audiences, they'd go, "Where did you shoot it?"

And I'd say, "Alabama, of course."

And they're like, "Oh, okay."

And I'm like, "No, just kidding, I didn't want to distract you, it's Minnesota."

And they're like, "I would've never known."

- The best part about shooting in Minnesota is just having our network here.

And just having things just more accessible and things are just a lot easier and you get to sleep in your own bed at night.

And I've enjoyed that through this, I mean, not only just in the making of the film and shooting here, which is just great, it's just so cool to be able to literally shoot in our backyard, you know in this area, Northeast Minneapolis and then going down in Northfield just so cool to be able to just bring our neighborhood to life and then turn it into someplace else.

Like just, that's just so magical.

It's just so cool to kind of be working in Hollywood.

But you know, right here in Minneapolis.

(soft music) - Grumpy's bar was a place that we just hung out after our shoots and often Devin, sometimes Tate we'd go there and have beers.

- Good to se you guys.

- Hey, this is Pat, he owns Grumpy's - With the crew, with the cinematographer with Patrick.

And we've just talked about our next day.

- Bye.

- Nice to see you.

- End of the day usually we talked about like, "That scene, man we got to do this and ..." you get really heated debate, you know.

That was the idea.

A lot of us were musicians and artists but I wanted literally a public house where people could come together and talk about what we're building that deck.

I wanted that.

- Sample Room, another place we always went to for food after a shoot.

During those two weeks, we ate drank and breathed Tuscaloosa.

Everything we did was Tuscaloosa.

It was kind of like our office.

It's always good to have an office in a bar with a bunch of pints of beer.

- So, the timeframe of Tuscaloosa, our story takes place from late August into the election of early November, 1972.

So Virginia spends about three months at this institution and we wanted to show that timeframe, but as movies, you don't shoot it in order.

Plus we're shooting it in a two week period.

So we actually did a lot of posts effects that turn the early part of our movie more green.

So it's a very subtle thing but I wanted to show the passage of time as their relationship grows in these three months.

And by the end of it, where there's a showdown at the barbecue hut, you look out into the woods and they're so beautiful, orange and reds and yellows.

And I think it adds to the tension of that scene.

(soft music) - My favorite scene in the film, it's the scene at the driving.

And there's a moment with Billy and Virginia where they're in the car and it's this really sweet moment when they're driving and playing in background.

And it's kind of when they're really falling in love.

I love the way we shot it, just has such a 70's feel, you know, camera's right in the backseat.

You know, the cameraman's kind of right there with them.

It's got this intimacy, it's got this awkwardness to it just builds really real to me.

And I'm also just amazed that we managed to pull off a drive in theater.

- Thank you.

- Two minutes.

(car doors closing) - We built a drive-in theater at a location North of the Twin Cities.

There's a farm up there.

We did a day where we shot the barbecue hut party scene.

And then that was like the first half of the night.

The second part of that night was the drive in And that's, I mean, that's how we shot this movie in 12 days.

- Take your time, Marty, Virginia via a little delay, Greg, Greg, Greg.

- That's really the principle of photography.

That's the 90% of the movie.

And as we started working through the edit we realized at some point that the characters kept talking about something that had happened to this character, Antwan.

The fact that he'd been chased by the police but we realized it was just too much talking about it and not enough kind of seeing it.

So we decided let's take another two days bringing some stunt drivers and like shoot the scene so we can actually show it to the audience and to help kind of raise the stakes in the movie.

So we shot over two nights and one of the nights we shot right here in Northeast Minneapolis at North of King building.

And in order to do that, we brought in our stunt car driver we brought in a stunt motorcycle driver and we brought in a stunt coordinator.

These three guys all came in from Los Angeles because you can't find these kinds of drivers here in Minnesota.

And they were just amazing.

So they came in, we figured how to choreograph the whole scene.

- They guided us through how to do this.

And one thing I thought, well, I want Antwan.

Who's played by YG, I want him to crash his motorcycle somehow.

I thought, well, could it fly through the air and hit a tree?

And the stunt guys are like, "Eh, I don't think you can afford to do that, that's really complicated."

Could the car, hit it, you know and run it over or something.

It's like, "Again, come on, man you've got one night to shoot this.

And I'm like, "Well, you tell me what to do."

- So our motorcycle stunt driver.

His name is Jay Lynch.

And he was actually one of the lead motorcycle drivers in the film, "Black Panther."

He did all the motorcycle stunts for that.

He's like one of the best motorcycle stunt guys in the country.

I managed to get him to come and do this.

So when we shot this, one we had to wait for when trains were actually coming past, because we just needed a couple of shots in this motorcycle, kind of doing a donut and then kind of tearing off alongside the train - With any train, unless you're a bazillion dollar budget you cannot control freight trains.

They just don't even give you the schedules.

They don't want anybody knowing when those trains run.

And so we're at the mercy of, is there a train coming?

And when it does, are we ready?

- So the whole crew we'd be doing other little pickup stuff shooting over here in North.

But as soon as someone would see the train coming cause we couldn't predict it, then someone would say train.

(engines roaring) And then we keep running the scene.

As many times as we could, before we lose the train.

(train moving) Working with famous actors, it's great because they just bring so much skill to the project.

We never could have done this movie in the timeframe we did without extremely skilled actors.

- A young lady Virginia, I'm afraid, she's not very stable.

- And we were just so lucky with that because you know through filmmaking, as you're doing your different setups and moving the camera around, you want to know that the actors hit their lines every time.

- A lot of times we'd have to do oners meaning it would be one shot to cover the entire scene.

We set up here, we found the one shot leading up to here.

We had it lit so you could see inside - I'll be seeing you Virginia.

- Don't be a stranger Billy.

- We did that all the time at the end of our shoot days because we always ran out of time.

And so I say, "Hey, Devin, Natalia, we're doing a oner."

And they're like, "Why didn't you tell me earlier?"

- For the most part, I had a real good time.

- But they were so pro they could handle oners.

And this was the first oner that we did.

And I realized I could do this a lot to save time.

And in the end, I actually love those oners.

(Rock music playing) (fire sparkling) - Hey Billy, pass that joint man.

- In terms of like, you know, star status.

I think that was the beauty of shooting here in our backyard.

This is our turf.

As soon as our cast came into town they just kind of fell into our lifestyle here.

They loved the crew.

They loved everything about what we were doing and just made it like a family.

- When I went into it, I thought we could do anything.

I've made so many music videos.

We've begged, Burl, stole everything my entire adult life as a filmmaker.

So if we can do that, we can do Tuscaloosa.

But what I quickly learned was you cannot buy time no matter how much money you have you can't buy enough time.

Normally movies shoot one page a day more or less, some days we were doing 13 pages a day.

So that's the challenge right there.

We always ran out of time.

They were going way beyond what they normally would do.

We'd always run out of time.

We'd run out of daylight, always.

So we ended up shooting on our day off and a lot of these scenes were scenes we just didn't quite have time to get to.

It's the end of the movie and Devin who plays Billy had his face all mashed up and it actually took us two hours to do his makeup each time.

So we never quite got to it.

But then on his last day, last morning we got one extra half day out of him.

We came here, he went through two hours of makeup because all we needed was his face and a bumper of the car.

And he just needed to do the scene where he picks his head up and we were done, finished.

Devin's ready to run to the airport 'cause he can barely make it in time.

And I said, "Wait, wait, wait, that last scene where he's in the car moaning and groaning and Virginia looks back at him.

We don't really have his face.

Devin, do you mind?

Just get in the backseat.

Fiona Stanley, our DP got in the front seat and I literally took the car and I drove it around the yard up to that fence up there with the dappled trees shining down on Devin.

Fiona goes, "Okay, I got it, it's a wrap."

And Devin just jumped out of the car and ran, wiped off his makeup, car was waiting off to the airport.

And that was the end of the movie.

(soft music) - My favorite part of filmmaking is it's just the joy of the creative process with an incredible team.

That's to me that's just the best.

There's just nothing better in life than when you get to do that.

On the kind of budget we had, everything was impossible.

Every day was impossible.

So when we would achieve a great scene or we'd figure out some solution to an impossible intractable challenge like that was the moment where, yeah you have that sense of wow, we did it.

- When I started out in filmmaking in my early twenties I was really into Punk music.

I was in bands, I was traveling around.

But I come from a farm.

I had no filmmaking experience.

But once I bought a super eight camera and I met all these bands that were my heroes, bands like Naked Raygun and see they'll be in these big black and instantly I was taken, I fell in love with it.

I was like, this is all I want to do.

And that journey of starting with that super eight camera, DIY, shooting these bands that I knew, it was such a bad-ass attitude that all the bands had and all of that beginning through the whole journey of my music career, right through Tuscaloosa, it kept that ethic, that punk Rock DIY ethic.

And that's the only way we could have made this movie.

And that's, I mean, I felt like we went back to that time all the time when we were shooting Tuscaloosa.

- What I love about filmmakers is it's such a collaborative art and the experiences that you get to have together not just the director and the actors, but every single person on the crew, how you're problem solving is one towards an outcome.

It's just such a beautiful thing.

It's very life affirming.

And when I get to have those experiences to be part of a team and feel like we've accomplished the impossible, it's just one of the most rewarding things I can ever imagine.

- That was a good one you guys.

- Cut.

(indistinct chatters) (soft music playing) - [Director] Good, cut.

- [Camera Man] Cutting.

Let's get some coats on this people.

(beep) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] Have an idea for postcards?

Send your story suggestions to Post Cards at pioneer.org.

(upbeat music) Post Cards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by, Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms.

A retreat and conference center in a Prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

On the web, at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions.

For memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar, an Arts and Cultural Heritage Funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West central, Minnesota.

On the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits, 96.7kram.

Online at 96.7kram.com.

(upbeat music)