“It’s a relationship I went through that collapsed my entire view of the world in a very extreme way.” – Evan Glodell
Evan Glodell made Bellflower on a budget of only $17,000. He’s a first time feature writer and director who just so happens to also star as the film’s lead character, a man who meets a girl over a cricket eating competition and soon finds himself road-tripping with her from Bellflower, California to Texas. Just as quickly as their romance blossoms, it all falls apart as she is caught cheating and he is left to pick up the pieces of his broken heart.
Yes, while the image above may not suggest it, Bellflower is a love story, a love story that also features a flame-throwing muscle car and a girl that blows her brains out with a handgun. How Glodell got from point-A to point-B was one of the first questions I asked him in a telephone interview a few weeks ago.
“It’s a relationship I went through that collapsed my entire view of the world in a very extreme way,” Glodell told me. “In trying to reassemble it, to figure out what happened to me, the idea for the movie came into my head.”
Upon hearing it was partially autobiographical, I immediately turned to a quote from a review of the film I’d read and wanted to get his opinion on, even more so after learning how personal the film was to him. The quote read: “After a point, Bellflower becomes a film about men who hate women, and it comes awfully close to endorsing their point of view.” Suffice to say, Glodell sees it as a dramatic misinterpretation.
“For me, the entire movie is my journey of learning how to forgive someone. That’s not entirely what the movie is about, but it’s the top layer, that’s what the Lord Humungous quote at the beginning of the movie means and it’s kind of what everything is talked about at the end. It’s not direct, so I think a few people have misinterpreted it.”
He continued, “I went through a break-up where I got my heart broken and it caused a lot of confusion and anger, and I had to go through a really intense and long process to sort all of that out and came out the other end. It’s a subject matter that is addressed at one point in the movie, but it’s not where it’s left and it’s not supposed to be the point of it.”
There have been very few reviews taking a negative aim at the film, but it wasn’t always a rosy path for the low budget feature. In taking Bellflower to Hollywood, producers and execs hated the film. “It was just mass hysteria,” he said of the experience. “In the industry they start to have a very critical view on things and they can’t just take them as they are. So it seemed like one of those things where people couldn’t just sit down and enjoy the movie, they’re too busy worrying about the movies they’re making and the projects they’re working on and the rules they think they’ve learned and I think [Bellflower] violated too many of those and they just sort of didn’t know what to think.”
I guess that will happen when you mix a romantic drama with ideas of the apocalypse, a flamethrower and a ’72 Buick Skylark converted into a Road Warrior-esque fire-breathing machine. Experiments like that don’t sound like something Hollywood would immediately jump at from a first time feature filmmaker who, on top of making the flamethrower and converting the car himself, also designed the camera he used for the film from the ground up dubbed Coatwolf Model II.
“I don’t even know if people have a word for what I’m doing yet,” Glodell challenged. “It’s an extremely customized camera. The sensor, the electronics and all the recording stuff are all from the Silicon Imaging SI-2K and a lot of the rest of the camera, like the optics, the focusing mechanism and everything else is stuff that I built.”
“Speaking for me, personally on this one, I hoped it was going to get out there and be seen and that people were going to like it,” he told me. “As far as what I know about life, or whatever I think I know, I just needed to do whatever it was I thought I should do and hope that it worked out. For the experimental stuff, we just thought it would work, which was why we were doing it.”
There’s something of a “take charge of your life attitude” I got from Glodell and it bled through his comment when I asked what lessons he learned after making his first feature film. “I think the biggest lesson I learned on this was to not wait on someone else,” he said. “If you’re supposed to be doing something just go out with whatever you have. You don’t deserve to have someone give you millions of dollars on your first movie. You deserve whatever you probably have around you. Just go for it.”
You have to respect the confidence and after you see the film I have a good feeling you’ll appreciate the results. Looking forward, Glodell has another script finished though he wasn’t prepared to talk about it. “That is something I do need to get to work on, because I am super excited about it and I’m incapable of telling people when they ask.”
And as far as those Hollywood execs are concerned, the chilly reception his film received the first time around is no longer felt. When I asked him how things are now he said, “Like night and day. There was a point where I didn’t know anyone I could go to and now I’ve got a huge number of options and people that are interested in what I have.”
I, for one, am interested in seeing what he has next.
You can read my review of Bellflower here and get more information here. You can watch the trailer directly below and be on the lookout for it to be pulling into your city soon.
