By Making films is a mysterious business. The process of taking a script and turning it into something that wins Oscars and sells lunchboxes is, to most of us, so opaque as to be basically magic. But a new indier-than-indie film out this week shows that it's actually pretty doable for anyone with a decent camera, a decent laptop and a decent idea.
Jim Cummings, a 33-year-old from New Orleans, has written, directed, starred in and written the theme music for the brilliantly funny and desperately sad Thunder Road, which was made for the stringiest of shoestring budgets - $190,000 (£150,000), a figure so small traditional production companies told Cummings they didn't know how to make it - in just 15 days.
Thunder Road started as a 12-minute short shot in a single long take in which Alabama police officer Jim Arnaud gives a rambling, jittery, heartbroken eulogy at his mum's funeral before doing an interpretive dance to Bruce Springsteen's song of the same name. It hoovered up festival awards, from Sundance to South By South West.
This feature length version starts with that eulogy and expands to follow Jim dealing with the death of his mum, picking through the wreckage of his marriage and fighting a creeping estrangement from his daughter. Cummings is brilliant as a man desperately scrambling to cling onto what's left of his dignity and integrity while unintentionally shredding both, a man trying to do the right thing but trapped by circumstance and his own flaws into getting it wrong. Despite his many, many shortcomings, though, you still root for him.
"He’s just a little boy who lost his mum, and I think that’s one of the harder things to go through on this planet," Cummings tells Esquire. "I forgive him a huge amount."
It sounds bleak, and it is. But Jim's plight is very, very funny too. Cummings says the scene in The Office where David Brent begs not to be made redundant and Alan Partridge's revealing monologues ("you get to see how his brain works from what he says – you kind of have to parse out why he’s an idiot... he's constantly revealing his demons") are touchstones. A scene outside the police station where Jim has a complete meltdown, ranting and taking off his uniform, melds the two in another long, unbroken single take. Cummings rehearsed by going to a golf course in the middle of the night to "do it at, like, quarter volume or half volume, but just do it a thousand times." On the day of the shoot, he sat in his producer Natalie's car and psyched himself up.
"I just looked at really sad photographs of, like, Prince William and Prince Harry at their mum’s funeral," Cummings remembers. "I thought about those kids a lot – the movie’s about this love letter to a mum and following in her footsteps and bringing her back through the nice things that you do in life. I thought about those two boys a lot." The princes get a thank you in the credits.
The story of how Thunder Road came to be is nearly as fascinating as the film itself though. Despite winning the awards and plaudits, Cummings become frustrated with a lack of progress with the studios and took matters into his own hands.
"It got to a point where it was just five or six months of talking about doing the thing, and I was like fuck it – why don’t we just do it? Everybody talks about making movies, nobody actually makes them. The vast majority of Hollywood has never edited a YouTube video before. I think if we just fucking start, something will come of it."
A Kickstarter Cummings set up raised $10,000 (£7,900) in seven hours and hit $36,000 (£2,800) after three weeks. Cummings chucked in $50,000 (£40,000) from his savings and money from making Kahlua adverts, and his producer matched him. That still left them short though, and at times Cummings was downbeat about Thunder Road's chances of ever happening.
"I was making short videos that weren’t any good that couldn’t find an audience, I was producing stuff that was fine and mediocre and, I don’t know... I was really down and out for a long time, and discouraged," Cummings says. "There’s this global discouragement toward anybody pursuing film. You can feel it, you can taste it sometimes."
Individual investors kept coming forward, though, putting in money for percentage points of the film and eventually getting the budget up to $190,000 (£150,000). That still meant taking a lot of shortcuts. "Not going through the established channels is the only competitive advantage that we have," Cummings says.
There was no money to pay someone to paint a boom microphone out of a shot, so Cummings learned how to do it on Adobe After Effects using YouTube tutorials. To streamline the rehearsal process, Cummings recorded a one-man audio play version of the script in his wardrobe, surrounded by jumpers. That was partly so everyone involved understood exactly how he wanted it, and partly as "a really wonderful way to get people engaged with the film so I can send that to a financer and they can listen to it on their commute to work instead of having to sit down and engage with a script."
Even the distribution was DIY in the end, due to the "shitty deals" they were offered to get the film shown around the world. "We had a bunch of offers for like $25,000 (£20,000) globally for 15 years," Cummings says. "That’s basically separating us from the movie for peanuts. Why would we take this deal that doesn’t pay back our financers? So it wasn’t really even a choice to do it ourselves." The team used a $33,333 (£26,361) Sundance grant open in France in September last year, and were vindicated when they, as Cummings says, "made a killing" - about $200,000 (£158,000) from 67 cinemas, making back their budget in a week.
The seven-year gestation was gruelling, but Cummings reckons circumventing the system is going to become more and more normal.
"If we can create this highway towards global distribution everybody else can," Cummings says. "We just kept doing it ourselves. And now that’s all I wanna do."
Thunder Road is in cinemas from 31 May
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