Interview (Written): Sam Patton
The director of Desolation, a project discovered on the Black List website.
The director of Desolation, a project discovered on the Black List website.
The indie drama thriller Desolation debuted on June 21st at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Written by Matt Anderson and Michael Larson-Kangas, the script was discovered on the blcklst.com website by first-time director Sam Patton. It marks the 6th fully produced feature film originally found on the site since its launch in 2013.
IMDb plot summary: A mother takes her son and her best friend on a trip into remote wilderness to scatter his father’s ashes; they must confront their fears when a lone hiker begins following them.
In this interview with Kate Hagen, Director of Community at @theblcklst, Patton describes the process of making the movie from discovering it through its 14 day production and now its debut as a feature film.
When did you start using The Black List? How has the website been helpful in your work as a director?
I first joined the site when I was a development assistant — this was in 2013, so it was still kind of new at the time. And it was such an exciting platform, for all of the obvious reasons…but when I stopped being a development assistant, I could stop reading all of these scripts that weren’t going to get made, so I started looking in earnest for a script in the spring of 2015. I had this opportunity — I had investors who were interested, and they wanted to make a movie — and I’d been working in and around Blumhouse for years, so I had this idea that if you’re going to make a small movie, it better be genre. So, I had this idea of the kind of movie to look for, and I’d been meeting with writers and friends, but nothing was sticking, so I went on The Black List and narrowed down the search and came to DESOLATION — when I started searching for this kind of movie, that was the first script I read. And I loved it, it was perfect, but I also thought “that’s crazy, you’re just excited to be making a movie,” so I read twelve more scripts and kept coming back to DESOLATION. [The site] helped me narrow down exactly what I was looking for, and I knew this was the movie.
I reached out to the writers to see if it was available, and we started talking — they were excited to talk with someone who really liked the script. But at the same time, some other people had also found it and really liked it, and asked if they could do something with it, show it around. I was actually a little frustrated — it was “[they’re] going to show it to Blumhouse,” and I was like “I can show it to Blumhouse, I know everybody at Blumhouse, let me take it to Blumhouse!” So we were negotiating, but [the other folks] didn’t go anywhere, so they circled back and said: “okay, we’d like to option it to you.” Matt and Mike — who I’ve actually never met, something that’s made possible by a service like The Black List — told me after the movie was done, that they finally realized I was serious about directing this movie, even though I’d never directed a feature before. And I’d told them: “this movie is so small, there’s a way to make it for $30,000, I don’t want to make it for $30,000, but it could be made, we could make a version of this movie no matter what.” So that’s how we did it — we set the date, and we held ourselves to it. We had to reduce our budget a little bit because we didn’t hit our ideal goal, but the union agreement set our limits on what we could spend, so, we made a movie. And it was awesome — Matt and Mike did a pass with some of our notes as producers, and then eventually, we took it on ourselves — I did a little tweaking. And then when we cast, we had to rework some scenes to accommodate them — how they work, how they act.
It was exactly how it should work: we went and looked for a specific kind of script, took the [Black List] recommendation seriously, read it, loved it, optioned it, made it, and got into a festival. It wasn’t that straight and narrow, but it certainly looks that way looking back.
You’ve worked in a variety of production roles in film and television prior to making the leap to director on a full feature. What about DESOLATION made you know that this was the project that was worth making the jump?
It was the characters that Matt and Mike wrote.Their draft would change — it was 119 pages, but the draft that we ended up shooting was about 90 pages, so structurally, a lot went, but at the core, I think these characters remain true to who they are on the page in that first draft. [Matt and Mike] understood on a deep level the need to have the internal story reflect the external story and vice versa. I liked that it was part allegory, but not full allegory: the external story mirrors the internal story. We got this really well-written screenplay that hit all the boxes for the producing aspect — when I read it, I could see actors reading these lines. The producer in me said “we can make this movie and it’ll be good,” and the director in me said “I love these characters and I want to help get them out of the woods” — they became real over time.
For the rest of the interview with Sam Patton, go here.
For Kate’s interview with screenwriters Matt Anderson and Michael Larson-Kangas, go here.