MAKING ‘WAVES’
Filmmaker Shults overcomes qualms of telling black family’s tale in authentic, compelling way
AUSTIN — Trey Edward Shults was nervous.
The 31-year-old director was going to be showing his latest film, “Waves,” to a predominantly African-American audience in Washington, D.C., many of them students at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Granted, the native Houstonian’s movie — which kicks off the five-day, 11th annual Houston Cinema Arts Festival on Thursday before opening its local theatrical run Nov. 29 — has been widely lauded on the film-festival circuit, with the Los Angeles Times calling it “emotionally shattering and thrillingly unpredictable.”
But Shults wasn’t quite sure how “Waves,” his story of a middle-class South Florida African-American family in the throes of crisis, would play in D.C. After all, he’s a white guy from Spring whose first film, the gripping, highly personal and shot-in-Houston “Krisha” (2015), starred friends and family, including his aunt in the title role as an unwelcome holidaydinner guest.
“Waves,” featuring fellow Houstonian Renée
Elise Goldsberry (“The Good Wife”), Sterling K. Brown (“This Is Us”), Lucas Hedges (“Manchester by the Sea”), Taylor Russell (“Lost in Space”) and rising star Kelvin Harrison Jr. (“Luce,” “12 Years a Slave”), is something else entirely. It’s the story of a family, bracketed on one end by the high school wrestler son, Tyler (Harrison), whose self-destructive behavior corrodes his relationship with his demanding dad (Brown), and on the other by a younger sister, Emily (Russell), who’s fighting to make her own way outside of Tyler’s long shadow.
“With Ty’s trajectory, if it’s handled wrong, it’s a disservice,” Shults says recently in an interview seated in his publicist’s office the morning after a screening at the Austin Film Festival, “and it’s perpetuating a cliché.”
But any remaining anxiety Shults had about telling this particular story melted away that day in D.C.
“One young man took the mic, and he was talking about how he had lost his friend, his best friend, to violence in the neighborhood and how he’s been engulfed in grief. Now he wants to break down some barriers with his dad and try to talk about how he’s feeling and communicate in a new, healthy way. His hand was shaking the whole time,” Shults recalls. “And this young woman with her mother, she was like,
‘Me and my mom are going to have a long talk after this.’ This other girl came hugging and crying to me after, saying she wants to connect with her sister in a new way.”
‘All about that collaboration’
“Waves,” in its current form with a loving, if troubled, black nuclear family at its heart, wasn’t the movie Shults had been intending to make. After his last film, the claustrophobic, arthouse horror-thriller “It Comes at Night” in 2017, he had said he wanted to make a movie about a family under pressure, but there were no details, only “broad strokes,” he says now. “It was just a family, brother, sister, this tragedy. It was images. It was Florida and music … (But) any time I tried to write anything, it didn’t click.”
It was only through long conversations and a growing friendship with Harrison, who starred in “It Comes at Night,” that things began to gel. What if it were an African-American family? A family that believes it has to be twice as good as everyone else to be perceived as equal, for whom a slip and fall from the rungs of hard-won success would be twice as devastating? Shults wasn’t sure at first.
“It’s a big responsibility,” Shults says. “Especially setting a movie in today, contemporary time, with a black family. We wanted it to feel real and authentic. I’m white, so it’s all about that collaboration. … I made my first movie literally with my family in that way. (This) felt like (Kelvin) was the closest thing to family who’s not blood that I had for an actor and collaborator. That’s what made it feel OK to start from that place. It was built with trust.”
Shults says he also received help and input from the rest of the cast. Goldsberry, who plays Tyler’s mother, concedes she had concerns initially about the movie’s portrayal of black men.
“I thought it was a terrible idea to cast the character Kelvin Harrison Jr. plays as a black man, even though it would have cost me a job,” she says in a separate phone interview. “I have a young son, and I didn't want to put another image in front of this world that shows a young black man as somebody that would be capable of anything violent. I did not want to add to all of that misrepresentation.
“I talked to Trey about casting it this way, and he told me that he was very aware of the danger of casting the film this way, but he also felt he should be able to cast the best actor for the role. That was just so powerful for me, I couldn't resist it,” she continues. “He knew so clearly what the challenge was, what the pitfall was, and I trusted him to make the right choice because the reason he was casting the actor and casting the film the way he was was for the right reason. He wanted to cast the actor he wanted to cast, and he shouldn't not be able to cast him because he had a challenge on his hands of making sure he represented us correctly.
“I’m so glad that he was so brave and Kelvin was so brave and that they were all so talented. (In screenings) from this country all the way to London, I heard white people, mothers and all different ages of people feel so much empathy for this young man in spite of what happens in the movie. That lets me know we made the right choice and they got it right.”
Kendrick Lamar to Tame Impala
The film was also a change for Shults in other areas as, unlike “Krisha” and “It Comes at Night,” which were all very interior films set largely in one location, “Waves” utilized 50 locations with sunny Florida as a backdrop for its stormy relationships. “Honestly, it felt liberating,” Shults says. “I love Florida. I love the expanse. … We’re not in a house anymore. We’re breaking free!”
It wasn’t just the racial ramifications nor the different setting that were risky though. “Waves” is meant to be a full-dunk immersion into a contemporary teenager’s fever dream. The cameras swoop and glide, the colors pop like Starbursts, the aspect ratio changes, and the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is accompanied by booming tracks from Frank Ocean, Tame Impala, Kendrick Lamar, Animal Collective, SZA, Radiohead, H.E.R., Kanye West and A$AP Rocky, among others.
There are parallels to the works of Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight,” “If Beale Street Could Talk”), Xavier Dolan (“Mommy”), Wong Kar-wai (“Chungking Express,” “In the Mood for Love”), Harmony Korine (“Spring Breakers”), Andrea Arnold (“American Honey”) and Sam Levinson (the TV series “Euphoria”), where music is as much a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood character as any of the stars.
One false move though and the whole thing could seem contrived. Shults wanted to make sure it all felt real and rang true to the characters.
“I was starting with the feelings that I had at that age, personal stuff I was going through. I was talking to my girlfriend about a lot of stuff that she went through and trying to be honest with that. But then you’ve got to make sure it still works for kids today,” he says. “So, I was doing a bit of research online like an old man and then talking to kids. We were having a few select kids read the script to get feedback. It was like a constant evolution and being open. Even when we were shooting (in Florida), all the kids on the team are real wrestlers at a high school, and Kel would hang out with them and hear more from them.”
Moving to Florida
Based on the critical reception to “Waves” so far, the film could bump Shults to the next level, putting him on a trajectory that should soon see him joining the ranks of fellow Houstonian filmmakers Richard Linklater (“Boyhood,” “Dazed and Confused”) and Wes Anderson (“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “Isle of Dogs”).
He’s feeling better about the reaction to “Waves” than he did for “It Comes at Night,” which disappointed some who were expecting a traditional horror film instead of the exercise in claustrophobia and paranoia it turned out to be. Like all of
Shults’ films, it was at heart about family and the ties that bind, not monsters, viscera and jump scares.
“I think the main trailer was selling a big horror movie, and I never made a big horror movie and that wasn’t my intention,” Shults says. “I was really depressed and you scroll Twitter … and the hardest thing about it is it felt like the people that the movie was meant for didn’t see it, and then the people that it was not meant for did, and didn’t like it. So, that just hurt and was frustrating. But I believe with time, hopefully, more people will find it.”
But Shults also shares with Linklater and Anderson something beyond encroaching celebrity: He no longer lives in Houston. Linklater long ago decamped to Austin — though he returns regularly, sits on a Houston Cinema Arts Society board, judges the festival’s NASA-related CineSpace competition and has said he wants to make a movie set in the Houston of his childhood — and Anderson is more likely to be found in New York and Europe.
Shults now calls central Florida home because his girlfriend, a flight attendant, is based there. And “Waves” was conceived, in part, as a love letter to the Sunshine State.
“Culturally, it’s fascinating,” he says. “There’s a lot of different cultures, and it’s like a big melting pot. … I also love the landscape and the wildlife. I love the ocean. I love kayaking. I love manatees, gators, iguanas. I wanted to get all of that into the movie, but I could only do so much.”
He doesn’t rule out the idea of making another film in Texas though.
“Yeah, why not? Currently, I’m like a blank slate because I put everything into this movie,” he says. “I’m just trying to get this movie out here as we much as we can. I have to figure it out.”