Any good producer will tell you that finding an out-of-town
location with friendly locals and a minimum of red ape is half the
battle on an indie road shoot. But once the script's in place and
the budget's locked down, where and how does the search for those
far-off locations really begin?
For the last decade, American indie features have been defined by
their urban and suburban settings, the films' creators typically drawing
strength from the many hometown stories Hollywood has chosen to ignore.
Indie efforts like Slacker, Clerks, She's Gotta Have It, The Brothers
McMullen, The Unbelievable Truth, and anything by Gregg Araki, all
reflect a personalized, "let's shoot a movie in our own backyard"
reality that has pushed many low-budget auteurs on to glory at the
national level. But increasingly, as American audiences get pounded
by grassroots tales from mass-entertainment forms as diverse as the
Internet and MTV's "Real World", independents have begun
to look to more distant, even exotic locations for their inspiration.
Recent projects like Tony Bui's Three Seasons or Hirotaka Tashiro's
Mr. P's Dancing Sushi Bar traveled all the way to Vietnam, where
very few American crews have dared to tread, to satisfy their muses.
Other films, like Kasi Lemmons' Eve's Bayou, Bart Freundlich's The
Myth of Fingerprints, Tim Blake Nelson's Eye of God, Jesse Peretz's
First Love, Last Rites, Billy Bob Thornton's Slingblade, and Harmony
Korine's Gummo, uncovered pockets of small-town Americana rarely
visited on the big screen. And still others took a cue from their
big-budget TV cousins, who have been using Canada as a stand-in
for the high costs of New York or Chicago for many years. The more
rural, offbeat, dangerous, strange, and heretofore unseen locations,
the better is the war cry of many indies these days.
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