Houston is heaven for director of indie film ‘Playing God’
On the surface, Houston director Scott Brignac’s new thriller/dark comedy “Playing God,” opening Aug. 6 in theaters and digital platforms, is about two sibling con artists who attempt to pull off the swindle of their lives by duping a Jeff Bezos-like moneybags into believing he’s talking to God. But, beyond that, Brignac says it’s a heart-shaped box for Houston.
“I consider the movie a little bit of a love letter to Houston,” Brignac said recently at a coffee shop in the Heights. “It’s funny. Our production designer, who lives in Austin, we were taking her to all the locations, and she’s like, ‘I didn’t know Houston looked like this.’… And then when people see the movie, they go, like, ‘Wow, your locations are amazing.’ ”
Houstonians will recognize much of what’s on screen, from the Hotel Alessandra downtown and the Metro line to the late, lamented Fitzgerald’s club in the Heights (the film was shot in 2018). “I wrote with the idea of Houston,” he said. “I said ‘I’m going to make this in Houston’ from the beginning … I’m not saying I’m only going to shoot (my films) in Houston, but it’s definitely a great place to shoot.”
They will also recognize at least three of the main actors: Michael McKean (“Better Call Saul,” “This Is Spinal Tap”),
Alan Tudyk (“Arrested Development,” “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”) and Marc Menchaca (“Ozark,” “The Outsider”). McKean is “God,” or, rather, the bowling-alley-operating ex-con whom Micah (Luke Benward) and Rachel (Hannah Kasulka) recruit to help pull off their scam. Tudyk is the lonely billionaire, jetting around the world on a quest for spiritual enlightenment. And Menchaca plays one of the reasons Micah and Rachel are staging this stunt; they owe him a lot of money — and he’s a very impatient man.
Brignac says much of the credit for the casting goes to his casting director Lindsey Weissmuller, someone he had met at Sundance. McKean’s name came up, and Brignac immediately was intrigued. “I was like, ‘Oh, man, if he would do it.’ And sure enough, I was at Memorial City Mall and Michael McKean called me. … We had a conversation about it. He actually has family in Houston … And then I FaceTimed with Alan, and I loved it because he kind of hit it on the head. He said, ‘So, you’re just over there in Houston making movies.’ I said, ‘Man, we’re trying.’ ”
Moving to Houston
Brignac, originally from Houma, La., went to Louisiana State University, where he was “just making short, fun videos with my friends or roommates or whatever.” He ended up moving to Houston, where he met Cody Bess, who’s the cinematographer and a producer on “Playing God.” Along with two other partners, Aaron Benward and Cliff Young, they formed Watershed Motion Pictures.
The director also helped out on other projects, such as editing Menchaca’s directorial debut, 2013’s “This Is Where We Live,” the Hill Country-set family drama that’s one of the best Texas-set films of the past couple of decades. It was a very personal project for Menchaca, who resides in New York but is originally from San Angelo, and ultimately led to him being cast in “Playing God.”
“We hit it off, and pretty much any chance I get to work with him, I’m going to take it,” Brignac says. “He came to mind for this role.”
Menchaca says he was attracted to the part because it offered a break from the straight-up bad guys he often portrays. “It was a little over the top, not the usual villain that I play, which I’m always happy to step away from that,” he said in a separate interview. “I thought it was a sweet, little script.”
“Playing God” was inspired by a conversation Brignac had with his then-5-year-old daughter. “One night I was tucking her in, she said, ‘Hey, if you ever got to talk to God on the phone, what would you ask him? And I said, ‘Oh, you can ask God questions all the time.’ She was like, ‘No, he’s on the phone.’ ”
But Brignac didn’t want to simply reimagine, say, “Oh, God!,” the 1977 film with George Burns as The Big Guy. “I’m not really interested in doing that, but I do find (interesting) how people can get duped and scammed in different ways,” he said.
Not a faith-based film
He doesn’t want “Playing God” to be considered a faithbased movie. “I look at faithbased movies as the same as horror movies. They are in their own genre,” he said. “We’re men of faith, but we didn’t want to make that genre movie. We wanted to just actually create something that a lot of people can relate with. That it doesn’t feel like it’s some sort of subculture that you don’t know about but that you’re seeing universal themes that can then spark conversation.”
Brignac’s next project, “Chasing Oslo,” tells a very different story. It revolves around a girl who becomes obsessed with a social-media influencer named Oslo Green. And it, too, was shot in Houston, a fact that sometimes prompts remarks from outsiders.
“You talk to people in Dallas and they have their opinions but, in LA, everybody’s like, ‘Oh, interesting. What’s going on in Houston?’… They say, ‘Oh, I flew through the airport once’ or ‘Oh, NASA.’ It’s funny. They don’t understand that there’s so much, such a good arts and culture scene here. And it’s such an international city and diverse,” Brignac says. “If it just weren’t so hot.”