Take me to your theaters

By David Maurer

Published: October 26, 2008

Autumn leaves were starting to drift to the ground as Sissy Spacek and her husband, Jack Fisk, hauled furniture into a large farmhouse on Route 5 near Richmond.

The couple hadn’t decided to pull up stakes to move from their longtime Albemarle County home. What was taking place was an example of Spacek’s dedication and commitment to her craft.

The Oscar-winning actress was moving personal items and furniture into the house that served as a centerpiece in the new film “Lake City.” In the movie, she portrays a beleaguered mother forced to fight for her farm, family and ultimately her life.

“Sissy’s devotion to this movie was so intense,” said Perry Moore, who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Hunter Hill. “It went so far as to loading up a truck with all her childhood furniture and bringing it to the house.

“She is a very sensory actress. Like the bed Troy [Garity] crashes on in the house. She said when she was a child she would walk across the end of it like a balance beam.

“She also brought in all these pictures of her family to make it homey and warm. She had a memory about every item in the house, and it would help her get to that place she needed to be emotionally in each scene.”

“Lake City” will help kick off the 21st edition of the Virginia Film Festival, which opens Thursday and runs through Sunday. The theme this year is Aliens: Immigrants! Outsiders! Extraterrestrials!

The festival will feature some 80 films and 100 guests who will explore many aspects of the theme. There will be movies about scary creatures from outer space, like the 1953 sci-fi thriller “War of the Worlds.” Also being examined will be films that address the topics of immigrants and outsiders.

“It was around this time last year when I started hearing all the politicians talking about illegal aliens and the invasion from south of the border,” said Richard Herskowitz, artistic director of the festival.

“I started thinking, ‘Why do we call them aliens? Doesn’t that automatically make us think of immigrants as invaders?’ I soon discovered I wasn’t the only one asking that question.

“Then it turns into the perfect film festival theme. It would allow us to ask serious questions and have a dialog about a social issue that is relevant and topical, which is something we always look for. And it would be fun, because it would give us a pretext to show some terrific sci-fi movies,

and that’s a prescription for a great film festival.”

Herskowitz recently got a taste of what it’s like to be a stranger in a new place when he moved to Eugene, Ore. After 15 years at the helm of the festival, he will be stepping down to teach and design exhibitions for the film studies program at the University of Oregon.

Earlier this year, Herskowitz’s wife, Jill Hartz, former head of the University of Virginia Art Museum, was named executive director of the school’s Jordan Schnizter Museum of Art.

Herskowitz also has taken on the duties of curator for a new festival for the Cinema Arts Society of Houston.

During his watch Herskowitz has used the Virginia Film Festival to promote filmmaking in Virginia and to inspire people to get involved in the industry. The film “Lake City” epitomizes both of these goals.

The picture was filmed entirely in Virginia, with Louisa standing in for Lake City. The cast, which includes Dave Matthews, was predominantly made up of people who live here. And three of the major players responsible for the film being made — Moore, producer Mark Johnson and executive producer Weiman Seid — are all UVa alumni.

“We have a tradition of trying to feature films on opening night of the festival that have Virginia connections,” Herskowitz said. “ ‘Lake City’ is almost overdetermined in its Virginia connections, so it’s a perfect opening night film for us.

“I love the film visually, and I also like its Southern gothic qualities. There’s this deep tragedy in the mother-son relationship that informs every moment of the film, but it takes a while to unearth it.

“That to me is part of the Southern-gothic dimension to the film that really makes it cut deep.”

The movie lends itself to the alien theme in that it revolves around Billy, portrayed by Garity, who is compelled to return home when he runs afoul of ruthless drug dealers. Reuniting with his estranged mother, Spacek, forces them both to face a family tragedy that had driven them apart.

Spacek is partially responsible for Moore choosing filmmaking as a career. He was an Echols Scholar at UVa in 1990 when he saw Spacek’s performance in the 1973 film “Badlands.”

Widely considered a classic, the film is loosely based on the 1957 killing spree of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. With a paltry production budget of a reported $300,000 the film proved that talent, not tons of cash, is the ultimate determinant of a movie’s quality.

“I saw that movie in a film class, and it really moved me,” said Moore, who graduated from UVa in 1994. “It made me feel for these two almost unrepentant souls.

“At the time I was seeing the dulling of the universe taking place with fat kids and their video games, and people who didn’t care and a world that was becoming a scary place to live in.

“Seeing Sissy and Martin Sheen in that special Terrence Malick movie taught me that you can move people in all sorts of direction through films.

“I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller, and the film made me realize you can make people feel and be moved. I thought, ‘If you can move people, then there is hope for the world.’ ”

Hope is the thing that enables many filmmakers to keep pushing for a picture they believe in. The trick is often to get others to believe in it, too.

“Lake City” had many believers, including producer-actress Allison Sarofim, who financed much of the film and has a small part in it. Top-notch acting and beautiful cinematography bely the fact that it was shot in 20 days on a no-frills budget.

“This film gestated in Hunter and I for about five years,” said Moore, who made his directing debut in the picture. “It’s half Hunter’s personal story and half mine.

“We wrote the script with a picture of Sissy taped to our wall for inspiration. I’ve been in this business for awhile, and I know it is so rare, almost impossible, to get your first choice for an actor.

“But our wonderful producer, Weiman Seid, who is from Richmond, read the script and said it would be good for Sissy. He’s the one who got it to her. She read it and was intrigued and said she wanted to meet with us.”

Moore, who did much of his growing up in Virginia Beach, said Hill originally wanted to film in Texas. Spacek convinced them that Virginia would make an ideal location.

“Mark called up the Virginia Film Commission, and they really made it worth our while to make the film in Virginia,” said Moore, who was an executive producer of “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”

“I really hope ‘Lake City’ puts Virginia in the same echelon as Texas and North Carolina as far as movie crews go, because I think they’re really underrated. Another obvious advantage of filming in Virginia is that you can get everything there.

“You can get mountains, beaches, city skylines, capitals, anything you want. And as a native Virginian, it helped me, because I knew things like what time the geese would fly and exactly what weekend the leaves would turn.”

The directors and producers also were able to tap into a reservoir of talent, such as production designer David Crank, who grew up in Richmond. He recently won an Emmy for his work as supervising art director for the HBO miniseries “John Adams.”

Crank is familiar with the alien theme, having been the art director for the 2005 movie “War of the Worlds.” More recently he was the art director for 2007’s “There Will Be Blood,” which won a best-actor Oscar for Daniel Day-Lewis and garnered another for Robert Elswit for best cinematography.

“There’s a scene in [‘Lake City’] where Sissy is in a diner that’s near the Richmond airport,” Moore said. “We didn’t have to do a lick of production design there, because it was perfect.

“In fact, that was the actual place where David Crank went and had limeades when he was a kid. In the film, my mom and dad are in the back of the diner, and I can’t tell you how much they enjoyed all this.

“I was born in Richmond, and it was such a sincere pleasure to do the first movie I co-wrote and directed there. And, of course, to be able to do it with one of our idols, Sissy Spacek.”

Matthews is likely to expand his rock idol status into the movie realm on the strength of his performance in “Lake City.” His portrayal of Red, a mid-level drug dealer, will show his music fans another dimension of his talent.

“I think when people see Dave in this film, they will actually regard him as a fine actor for the first time,” said Moore, who lives in New York City. “He’s done basically cameos in other movies, not juicy parts.

“When we were looking for someone for the part of Red, we knew we wanted someone who wasn’t going to be your stock villain. What he brought to the role was this incredible ambition to prove himself as an actor and to bring something a little different to the table.

“We met with him in New York when he was in town for a concert. We hadn’t expected him to do an audition, but he loved the material and did the opening scene.”

The scene lasts just a few minutes, but that was time enough for Matthews to impress the filmmakers. After conferring with Spacek, they unanimously decided to give the singer-songwriter a shot.

“Dave made some deranged choices for his character that I don’t think any other actor would have made,” Moore said. “I think he was inspired, and I’m proud we went with him.

“I think people will look at him in a new light after they see this film. Sissy thought the world of Dave, and always wanted to help him. She’s the type actress where I would say, ‘Sissy, you did great in that scene.’

“Then she would be like, ‘Yeah, but did you see Dave’s shot? Did you get the reverse angle on him?’

It’s hard to pay her a compliment, because she’ll turn it toward someone else.”

Herskowitz thinks Matthews came of age as an actor in “Lake City.” And he knows enough about the Grammy-winning singer to know he isn’t just dabbling in the profession for the fun of it.

“The thing is, Dave Matthews regularly performed in Live Arts productions before he became a big rock star,” Herskowitz said. “I think acting is something that’s not just a sideline for him.

“He’s a good actor who takes it very seriously, and I think this film shows that. It’s a character-acting role, and those can be some of the toughest, but I think he really pulled it off.”

Moore, Hill, Johnson, Spacek and Garity will introduce “Lake City” at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Culbreth Theatre. For tickets, information and a schedule of events visit http://www.vafilm.com or call (800) UVA-Fest.