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.
