Buried in snow
Filmmaker gets wintry setting she hoped for on Houston-born project.
Katie Cokinos worried about the snow.
More specifically, the filmmaker worried about the absence of it as she began shooting her first feature-length film in Saugerties, N.Y., two years ago.
She’d been developing a story about a young woman named Dora, just out of college and carrying more enthusiasm than direction. The character was to undergo a transformation but not a four-season transformation. More a winter-to-spring evolution. And the winter Cokinos envisioned for her film “I Dream Too Much” required a lot of snow.
“I’d started raising money, and suddenly I thought, ‘Oh my god, what if we don’t get any snow?’ ” Cokinos says. “My mom lives in Houston and goes to the Greek Orthodox church downtown. She asked me what she could light a candle for. And I told her, ‘Mom, we need snow.’ So this poor woman, every Sunday, was lighting candles in church for snow.”
Whether it was the candles or just winter’s will, the plan worked. From early February to March 2014, the snow fell, almost without interruption, providing the necessary atmosphere for the film, which will be screened Tuesday evening at River Oaks Theatre, ahead of its June 21 release.
When Cokinos’ friend Richard Linklater, one of the film’s producers, visited the set, he was unprepared for the conditions.
“Rick’s from Huntsville, and I’m from Beaumont,” she says. “So with those backgrounds, it was like we were doing ‘Doctor Zhivago.’ We had to scrounge through wardrobe to get him a hat.”
Linklater laughs at the memory. “It was mighty cold,” says the director known for films including “Boyhood” and “School of Rock.”
In that white and blue setting, Cokinos set about building a modern coming-of-age story sprouted from her affinity for the works of Jane Austen.
The film follows Dora (Eden Brolin), who has just finished college and wants to spend a bridge year with a friend in Brazil. This doesn’t sit well with her mother, who has law school in mind for her daughter. To buy time away from home, Dora volunteers to care for great-aunt Vera (Diane Ladd), “I Dream Too Much” comes to iTunes and Video on Demand on June 21. who had injured her foot. Dora slowly comes to recognize her relative has lived a life far more interesting than the marginalized version that cornered her as merely the spouse of a late, famous writer.
In an early scene, Dora runs an errand at the local pharmacy. A young man stands nearby as an employee hollers at another about the location of suppositories. Clearly, he’s to be theth love interest — just not in Cokinos’ film, where he’s never seen again.
“Instead of a falling-in-love, coming-of-age story, I wanted it to be more of an inward self-discovery,” Cokinos says. “She’s not ready to fall in love. I worked on the script for a year and a half, and never at any point did I see her falling in love. She needed to be more grounded in who she is. That informed in how I shot the film.”
“You see so many stories about women that revolve around them seeking a man,” LinklaterL says. “It’s like filmmakers can’t help themselves. It was so refreshing to see a movie about a young woman based on her interior world, her dreams and aspirations and what happens when they hit the reality of the world. It’s almost like ‘The Graduate’ from a subtle, indie, female point of view. But it’s not based on sex, it’s based on where’s your place in the world.”
Thus the snow. Stasis and frustration gradually warm into inspiration.
Though her roots are in Texas, Cokinos now lives in Saugerties with her family. Her husband, Alex Rappaport — a director of photography on projects such as TV’s “Swamp People” and “Yukon Men” — served as her cinematographer for “I Dream Too Much.”
A few parallels between her life and Dora’s bring the story back to East Texas.
Cokinos’ effervescent voice gives away her ties to Beaumont, which she left as a teen to attend Texas A&M University, where she studied history and philosophy. There she became deeply interested in cinema, and she started a film society at the school. Her family thought she’d steer toward a career in law.
“I knew when I graduated I wanted to make movies or somehow be involved with films,” she says. “My dad was pretty upset.”
She moved to Houston in 1986 and started working at SWAMP, the Southwest Alternate Media Project. There she met and collaborated with Eagle Pennell, a pioneer of independent film and creator of the influential 1978 film “The Whole Shootin’ Match.”
“He was like a big brother to me,” she says. “I learned so much from watching him work and from the filmmakers he turned me onto — John Huston, Sam Fuller, Nicholas Ray, John Ford. All those manly-men filmmakers, whose work I love.”
She met Linklater at a conference in 1989 and ended up doing some marketing work on his feature-length debut, “Slacker.” Cokinos relocated to Austin, and from 1990-95, she was the managing director of the Austin Film Society, taking over for Linklater, who co-founded it. During that time, she’d host filmmakers such as Alexander Payne, who crashed at her home while scouting “Citizen Ruth.” She also worked on projects including “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” for which she was a location manager.
She made some short films in the ’90s, and in 2000 wrote and directed “Portrait of a Girl as a Young Cat,” a well-received hour-long short feature, parts of which she shot in Beaumont.
Eventually, Cokinos moved to New York and married her director of photography. “I write and direct, he shoots and edits,” she says. “We started a family. My sister calls me a stayat-home filmmaker.”
Rappaport encouraged her to develop a feature-length project they could shoot near home. Even then, though, the film tied back to her youth.
Her producers (Linklater, Jay Thames and Ed McWilliams) are from Houston, as are her investors, which included the local organization Pantheon of Women. “It’s very much a Houston-born film, even though it’s buried in 4 feet of snow,” she says.
There will be no snow for her next film. Cokinos is working with another Beaumont native, author Lisa Sandlin, whose gritty 2015 crime novel “The Do-Right” earned strong reviews. Cokinos plans to adapt the book.
“I’m so excited to be thinking about another story,” she says. “I’ve been working on ‘I Dream Too Much’ since 2012. I tell you, you better love the story you’re creating because you live with it a long time. And I love the idea of shooting in Beaumont. When we finally get started, it’ll be in the summer. Beaumont in August is the exact opposite of New York in February.”