Four Texas directors worth watching as the state and its image evolve
AUGUSTINE FRIZZELL
Though the work of Linklater and Anderson has brought the angst of Texas youth to the masses, they are films that are definitely from a guy’s point of view.
Augustine Frizzell turns these themes upside down in her feature debut, the comedic drama “Never Goin’ Back,” which was shot in Fort Worth and Grand Prairie, premiered at Sundance this year and has been picked up for a summer release by A24, the company that turned “Moonlight” and “Lady Bird” into Oscarworthy hits.
In Frizzell’s world, girls aren’t just accessories or props but central characters, the stars around which the film’s universe revolves. That the girls at the movie’s heart — waitresses/high school dropouts trying to scrape together enough cash for a beach escape to Galveston — are based on Frizzell’s teenage experiences growing up landlocked and cash-strapped in the Dallas suburb of Garland makes it all the sweeter.
“I came from a place that you don’t see that often,” she said in an interview during the South by Southwest film festival, where “Never Goin’ Back” screened. “I mean, you do see some poverty porn, and you see people coming from not much money and smaller towns, but you don’t see it in a way that’s comedic … I love teen comedies, I love ‘Superbad.’ I love Judd Apatow films. I love gross-out humor … . So I wanted my version of that.
“If I’d been a teen and I’d seen this movie, I would have been like, ‘Yes, that’s me. Those are my people.’ ”
Though this is the Dallas director’s first feature, she’s no stranger to filmmaking. She has made short subjects and is married to David Lowery, who, in addition to last year’s “A Ghost Story,” directed the “Pete’s Dragon” reboot for Disney and is now working on the studio’s “Peter Pan” update. But it bothers her that sometimes observers view her as Lowery’s wife, not as Augustine Frizzell.
“The very first article that came out was from Variety, and I’d gotten (on) the ‘10 Directors to Watch’ (list), which was amazing … . But we had a long conversation on the phone, (and) the way they framed it felt like, ‘Augustine was a single mom struggling, and then she met indie superstar (Lowery), and he rescued her from poverty.’ I’m like, what? No.”
Her 19-year-old daughter, Atheena Frizzell, who has a small part in “Never Goin’ Back,” is a director, too. Her shorts have won prizes at SXSW and Dallas’ Oak Cliff Film Festival.
With three filmmakers in the family, Frizzell says it’s brought a sense of communal empathy. “It’s great,” she said. “My husband is grateful for my newfound understanding of his emotional issues concerning filmmaking.”
YEN TAN
Yen Tan was born in Malaysia but, at the age of 19, moved to Dallas and subsequently to Austin. It’s not a surprise then that he has a different take on Texas, especially since he’s also gay, an element that makes his work so distinctive.
His most recent film, “1985,” which made its world premiere at SXSW in March, stars Michael Chiklis and Virginia Madsen as conservative Fort Worth parents of a young gay man coming to grips with the AIDS crisis and the mortality of his friends. Tan’s previous film, “Pit Stop,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Dallas International Film Festival in 2013, told the story of two thirtysomething, blue-collar gay men in small-town Texas.
Tan thinks what he’s adding to the Texas cinematic mix is essential. “The sort of white-man contingent is always going to be the baseline,” he said, referring to the work of Linklater, Malick and others. “I feel like the new films that are coming out, especially in Austin, there are more diverse voices coming up. Whether it’s from people of color or queer people or queer people of color. For me, it’s important to know each of those voices.”
Tan says being a gay Asian man hasn’t hobbled him as a filmmaker in Texas and that he’s run into more resistance in California. “In the sense that there’s a lot of the kind of micro-aggression that you usually experience from people who identify themselves as progressive and liberal,” he said. “That was interesting for me to sort of go through that … because, when it would happen, it was definitely confusing for a while.”
Back home, he wants to see more variety in the “white lens” of Texas filmmaking. “I know a few people who live in Texas who are trying to explore those kinds of stories,” said Tan, who also works as a graphic designer. “I know one filmmaker who’s trying to do (a film) set in the black rodeo scene in Houston … . It’s one of those things where I have a feeling that scripts have been written, it’s just that they haven’t been made. I have a feeling it was just impossible to find money to make those kinds of films. It’s the same for me. It’s really hard to make LGBT films set in Texas, even though my films, budgetwise, are not expensive.”
DAVID BLUE GARCIA
Garcia knows what Tan is talking about. It’s been a long, tough slog to get “Tejano” made.
While making a living as a director of photography and cinematographer on a variety of commercial projects — including such clients as Macy’s, Verizon and L’Oréal — he wanted to tell a story that was more personal to him.
“The No. 1 struggle with any independent filmmaker is always time and money,” he said. “I went through a couple of resources over the years and tried to figure out how to raise money … . None of that money ever came to fruition, so I decided the only way to do this movie is to do it by myself. I read Robert Rodriguez’s book, ‘Rebel Without a Crew,’ in which he champions DIY filmmaking and doing everything yourself.”
Now that Garcia’s film is done, the next step is to find a distributor, and then “Tejano” can take its place in the lexicon of Texas films.
“I feel like Texas has a mythology that’s been built throughout the history of the U.S. and the history of Hollywood. There’s a certain mythology constructed by Hollywood people, people who don’t live here,” he said. “In ‘Thelma & Louise,’ or one of those movies, there’s a scene where it’s set in Texas, but it looks like Arizona … I feel like maybe Texas filmmakers also buy into that mythology sometimes and end up in an echo chamber, continuing it.”
YA’KE SMITH
Smith’s “The Beginning and Ending of Everything,” about a woman just out of prison in search of her missing baby, didn’t start out as a movie in the traditional sense. Instead, it was a web series that earned Smith two awards at Austin’s Revolution Film Festival.
The associate professor in the University of Texas Austin’s radio-TV-film department views TV and the web as a way to explore issues and themes that might be more difficult to make as a standalone film. “I’ve been wanting to get into TV for a while now,” he said. “So, I decided to take a short film that I had done and adapt it into a longer piece by making it a web series.
“There’s so many TV shows out there right now with Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and every other streaming network you can think of … but breaking in is difficult … . By having your own web series, or even creating your own pilot, you can prove to networks that you actually are capable of producing, directing and writing for television.”
This is a lesson that may be especially appropriate for those who want to see different views of Texas on screen.
“My stories are personal and, with them being personal, (it’s) an alternative story because my life is so completely different from what you would expect from someone in Texas,” said Smith, who would like to turn his latest short, “Heavenly,” which deals with sex trafficking, into a feature as well. “I grew up in urban Texas. I grew up in San Antonio at a time when it was the drive-by capital of the United States. So my experience in Texas is very, very different than what most people think and experience in what Texas looks like or feels like.
“For me, I want to put that experience on screen and show people that, you know what, we have cities. We have issues just like any other major metropolitan city or state.
“People already have this idea of Texas, and they want to see that idea of Texas. I hate to say it, but it’s the farmland, the cowboy boots and the cowboy hats … . If you’re working outside of that, it is just so difficult to get your stuff made.”