Five Questions

No bull: Texas filmmaker Dan Jackson's Open Gate features rodeo, relationships &crime

Writer and director Dan Jackson, center, with lead actor Tyler Hoechlin, right.
Open Gate is now available on Video on Demand.

Houstonian Dan Jackson learned that Hollywood isn't too interested in rodeo films, but that's no matter — he went ahead with his debut feature film, Open Gate, anyway. CultureMap sat down with Jackson to get the scoop on the challenges and triumphs of making it.

CultureMap: How did you get into making movies in the first place, and how did you go about making your first one — Open Gate?

Dan Jackson: I first became interested in making movies while I was living in Austin, going to school at St. Edwards. I studied psychology and business, but I knew pretty early on that I wanted to do something with film.

Shooting in rural Texas is so different than in LA. Everyone wants to help, and wants you to shoot at their houses and their properties, and they don't expect a kick-back.

I wrote the script for Open Gate in 2008, and then it was a two year process of raising funds and meeting with donors. Once I got backing, I got in touch with Jonathan Hall, a cinematographer friend of mine who had just finished shooting for MTV's Teen Wolf, and we got to work on it.

When I was a kid in Lufkin, I loved watching these great bullfighters [also known as rodeo clowns] — Leon Coffee and Quail Dobbs — and I knew that I wanted to make a film about it, so I started writing a script around that.

CM: So what is the story about?

DJ: It's about a guy named Kasey, who is a bullfighter in East Texas, struggling to get by and stressed about work and marriage. He starts finding these weird scars on the bulls and he uncovers a huge drug plot.

It's a little about rodeo, but more of a crime and relationship drama.

CM: What about your cast? How did you select the actors?

DJ: Tyler Hoechlin is our lead — he's best known for his role as Tom Hanks' son in Road to Perdition, and he also plays Derek Hale in Teen Wolf. Then we have Agnes Bruckner, who plays his girlfriend. Agnes is getting big in the indie world. William Sadler, who plays Kaleb's dad and the town sheriff, was in The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. It was just fortuitous that we got all of these guys. Everything happened at the right time.

I feel like everyone who worked on this film is on the point of making it big, but isn't quite there yet.

CM: What was it like making the film?

DJ: We shot the film in 18 days — which is basically all that we could do with the money that we had — in Atlanta, Tex., and in Linden. Shooting in rural Texas is so different than in LA. Everyone wants to help, and wants you to shoot at their houses and their properties, and they don't expect a kick-back.

Working with a small budget really forces you to be creative in other ways. We really had to focus on the acting and the writing, not on getting a good crane shot — because we didn't have a crane. Kaleb's house is my grandma's house, and the wood paneling on the walls is what I grew up with.

CM: Working with animals has to be really difficult. Any good stories there?

DJ: My favorite story is when we were shooting a scene in the middle of the night, around 3 or 4 a.m. We had a corral all lit up, but otherwise it was pitch black outside. This bull was circling around inside the pen and acting really weird, and suddenly he just jumped this six-foot fence. We all panicked because we couldn't see anything — we were waiting for an attack like a scene out of Jaws. Nothing ever happened.

We found the bull nesting in the woods a couple of days later.

Open Gate is available on Video on Demand through Comcast, Cox, CableVision and Insight cable subscribers — in the "Movies" section, "Digital Premieres" folder — and will expand to all cable companies in the U.S. and Canada on July 1.

unspecified series568664023

Movie Review

Star TV producer James L. Brooks stumbles with meandering movie Ella McCay

Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Emma Mackey in Ella McCay.

The impact that writer/director/producer James L. Brooks has made on Hollywood cannot be understated. The 85-year-old created The Mary Tyler Moore Show, personally won three Oscars for Terms of Endearment, and was one of the driving forces behind The Simpsons, among many other credits. Now, 15 years after his last movie, he’s back in the directing chair with Ella McCay.

The similarly-named Emma Mackey plays Ella, a 34-year-old lieutenant governor of an unnamed state in 2008 who’s on the verge of becoming governor when Governor Bill (Albert Brooks) gets picked to be a member of the president’s Cabinet. What should be a happy time is sullied by her needy husband, Ryan (Jack Lowden), her agoraphobic brother, Casey (Spike Fearn), and her perpetually-cheating father, Eddie (Woody Harrelson).

Despite the trio of men competing to bring her down, Ella remains an unapologetic optimist, an attitude bolstered by her aunt Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), her assistant Estelle (Julie Kavner), and her police escort, Trooper Nash (Kumail Nanjiani). The film follows her over a few days as she navigates the perils of governing, the distractions her family brings, and the expectations being thrust upon her by many different people.

Brooks, who wrote and directed the film, is all over the place with his storytelling. What at first seems to be a straightforward story about Ella and her various issues soon starts meandering into areas that, while related to Ella, don’t make the film better. Prime among them are her brother and father, who are given a relatively small amount of screentime in comparison to the importance they have in her life. This is compounded by a confounding subplot in which Casey tries to win back his girlfriend, Susan (Ayo Edebiri).

Then there’s the whole political side of the story, which never finds its focus and is stuck in the past. Though it’s never stated explicitly, Ella and Governor Bill appear to be Democrats, especially given a signature program Ella pushes to help mothers in need. But if Brooks was trying to provide an antidote to the current real world politics, he doesn’t succeed, as Ella’s full goals are never clear. He also inexplicably shows her boring her fellow lawmakers to tears, a strange trait to give the person for whom the audience is supposed to be rooting.

What saves the movie from being an all-out train wreck is the performances of Mackey and Curtis. Mackey, best known for the Netflix show Sex Education, has an assured confidence to her that keeps the character interesting and likable even when the story goes downhill. Curtis, who has tended to go over-the-top with her roles in recent years, tones it down, offering a warm place of comfort for Ella to turn to when she needs it. The two complement each other very well and are the best parts of the movie by far.

Brooks puts much more effort into his female actors, including Kavner, who, even though she serves as an unnecessary narrator, gets most of the best laugh lines in the film. Harrelson is capable of playing a great cad, but his character here isn’t fleshed out enough. Fearn is super annoying in his role, and Lowden isn’t much better, although that could be mostly due to what his character is called to do. Were it not for the always-great Brooks and Nanjiani, the movie might be devoid of good male performances.

Brooks has made many great TV shows and movies in his 60+ year career, but Ella McCay is a far cry from his best. The only positive that comes out of it is the boosting of Mackey, who proves herself capable of not only leading a film, but also elevating one that would otherwise be a slog to get through.

---

Ella McCay opens in theaters on December 12.

movies film