HOUSTON-MADE FILM BULL
PUTS ACRES HOMES IN THE FRAME
The physical distance between the Texas state capitol and Houston’s Acres Homes neighborhood is, as the Google Maps crow flies, about 154 miles, but the cultural distance is much further. Austin director/writer Annie Silverstein found that out while making her latest film, “Bull,” set in the universe of black rodeo riders who reside in the area north of Garden Oaks, Oak Forest and The Heights but live a world apart.
“It has such a deep history in black culture and is also an area that has this rural yet urban feel to it,” Silverstein says via phone from Austin.
The movie, which begins streaming on the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s new indie-film service April 29 before being more widely available through video-ondemand starting May 1, stars Rob Morgan (Officer Powell in “Stranger Things”) as Abe, an injured bull rider who’s slowly coming to the grim realization that he’s too old, too hurt and too emotionally exhausted to continue much longer. Then his troubled, white, teenage next-door neighbor, Kris (Amber Havard, making her film debut), who lives with her grandmother because Mmom is in prison, breaks into his life — literally, she and her low-life friends have a party in his place while he’s gone.
But, ultimately, confrontation turns to grudging acceptance — in lieu of arrest, she agrees to help him with chores around his place — turns to respect.
The result is one of the more celebrated films to be shot in Southeast Texas. “Bull” was a nominee for the Golden Camera and Un Certain Regard honors at Cannes, won the Louis Black/ Lone Star Award for Morgan’s performance at South by Southwest and nabbed the Houston Film Critics Society’s Texas Independent Film Award earlier this year.
When worlds collide
Silverstein, who had spent a decade as a youth worker in her native Seattle before going to the University of Texas at Austin for grad school, says the plot tied together two thematic strands in which she has been interested for some time.
“The teenagers I worked with were from rural, under-represented communities, and poverty was a big issue. Several parents were incarcerated,” Silverstein says. “Then I moved to Texas (to study film) and, during that time, I met a man from a black rodeo family while location-scouting for my thesis.
“I didn’t know anything about the history of black cowboys,” she continues. “That is so often left out of American history and also cinematic depictions of the West. And so, at that point, producer Monique Walton and Johnny McAllister, who’s the co-writer and my husband, and I started attending backyard rodeos and interviewing bull riders and spending time on the rodeo circuit.”
At that point, what would become “Bull” hadn’t coalesced into something coherent.
“It wasn’t a story (at first),” she says. “It happened really organically, based on my experiences for so long as a youth worker, and that’s the character of Kris. But then there were also the cowboys we came to know through our research. And then I was really interested in this intersection between those two characters, and that’s what I wanted to explore.”
Why Acres Homes?
Even though so many films set in Texas are, because of taxcredit reasons, filmed elsewhere, Silverstein was insistent “Bull” be shot in the Lone Star State.
“It was a Texas story,” she says. “While it wasn’t based on any particular person, so much of the story is an amalgamation of people that we’ve met through the years, and that was so important to me as a director, the fabric of it all, the community … So, we fought for it. Obviously, it came up in pre-production, ‘We should shoot this somewhere else.’ It was really important to us, so we fought hard to shoot it here.”
Alfred Cervantes, locations director at the Houston Film Commission, says that, even before “Bull,” Silverstein had long expressed interest in telling Texas stories.
“Even from her early short films, which were part of our annual Houston Film Commission's Texas Filmmakers' Showcase, Annie has told stories that are character studies of Texas and Texans,” he said in a Facebook message. “We're ecstatic that Annie and producer Monique Walton stuck to their guns and made their debut independent feature film where it would be most authentic to their vision.”
Though Silverstein did some shooting in Oklahoma as well — she filmed at the Roy LeBlanc Okmulgee Invitational Rodeo & Festival — she had no interest in making the entire movie there.
“We hadn’t written it in Oklahoma … We’d spent years building relationships and trying to figure out how to achieve this and also falling in love with these very specific Texas faces and experiences and folks who were sharing their life stories with us.”
Houston, and Acres Homes, came into the picture when Silverstein and McAllister went to see the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, a touring African-American rodeo, in Oakland, Calif.
“We met a man named J.W. Rogers, who was a bull rider there. We approached him after the rodeo was over and told him about the project, and he said, ‘Oh, I live in Houston.’ We said, ‘How funny. We live in Austin.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you guys come out and watch me next weekend at the Old William Johnson Arena?’ It’s a backyard rodeo in Egypt, Texas (roughly 66 miles southwest of Houston).
“We went to the Old William Johnson the next weekend and immediately knew that this was a special place and that we wanted to shoot part of the film there. J.W. ended up introducing us to a lot of the riders.”
But Silverstein’s base — and the site of the homes where Abe and Kris live — was in Acres Homes.
“Part of how I choose projects is basically where I want to spend time and explore,” she says. “I didn’t know much about it, but I was intrigued from the little bits that I knew, and I only learned more through researching for the project.
“Over time, we made friends, and it became clear that was how we were going to be able to shoot these scenes, by collaborating with the community,” she continues. “It became clear we wanted to shoot in Houston, in Egypt and Acres Homes was where we shot predominantly … People have one leg in each place (Egypt, Acres Homes), and so that was also very much a part of the world in the script. So it all just felt right.
“We felt so supported by the community that we worked with in and around Houston. It was really a joy, and we couldn’t have made that film without that community support.”
Delayed release
The release of “Bull” has been a long time coming. Silvestein submitted it to the Cannes Film Festival nearly a year ago. It was supposed to start rolling out theatrically in the U.S. in March, but the COVID-19 pandemic upended those plans.
Now, the director is starting work on her next film, though she’s not sure where she will shoot it. But she is considering shooting in Houston again, if not for this project, then something else.
“We all are enchanted with it,” she says. “If there’s an opportunity, we’d shoot there again.”