Natural Selection
Local filmmaker gets a Cinema Arts Festival moment — with mom riding shotgun
A scene from "Natural Selection"Natural Selection/Facebook
Robbie Pickering
Robbie Pickering — arguably the most accomplished indie filmmaker ever to graduate from Jersey Village High School — will return to H-Town as a conquering hero Sunday, when he presents the Cinema Arts Festival Houston screening of his debut feature, Natural Selection, just eight months after the film generated deafening buzz and collected multiple prizes at Austin’s South by Southwest Film Festival.
And he’s proud to say that his mother will be right alongside him when he introduces his offbeat comedy at the Edwards Greenway Grand Palace.
Which seems only fitting when you consider that she helped inspire him to write and direct Natural Selection in the first place.
“I started writing the film six years ago,” Pickering said last spring at SXSW, “when I received a barely-intelligible-through-the-sobs call from my mother telling me that her husband — my stepfather, Bill — had terminal cancer. I took the news hard. Very soon, my mom would be alone for the first time in her life. It was almost impossible for me to conceive of the depth of isolation and solitude she would be feeling.
“Everybody was telling me not to do it. My agent, my manager — everybody was telling me: ‘Don’t do it!’ Because I was making a pretty good living writing screenplays for studios with my co-writer."
“I realize now that though my concern was for her welfare, I was also dealing with my own fear of death for the first time.”
Writing Natural Selection, Pickering said, “was a way of coping. I didn’t want to write about those emotions in a didactic or literal way. Rather, I tried to capture the essence and form of what I was feeling, and funneled it into a story that bears little resemblance to the literal situation my mother or I was living through.”
Actually, no resemblance whatsoever, unless you count the fact that both the situation and the scenario involve a Jersey Village housewife.
In the alternative universe contrived by Pickering, the focus is on Linda White (Rachel Harris), a devoutly Christian fortysomething who resides in Jersey Village with Abe (John Diehl), her slightly older husband. Because Linda was diagnosed years ago as barren, Abe — who’s even more devout, if not downright fanatical, in his religious beliefs — always has refused to have conjugal relations with her. His reasoning: Fornication without the possibility of impregnation is a sin.
Given Abe’s deeply held convictions, Linda is deeply shocked — and more than a mite peeved — when she discovers, shortly after Abe suffers a debilitating stroke, that her husband has been making regular donations to a sperm bank for more than 20 years, and that he suffered his stroke during the course of his most recent, ahem, deposit.
But Linda remains a dutiful wife, and figures that, if Abe truly is knocking on heaven’s door, he should see some return on his investment. So she drives off to Tampa, hoping to track down one of Abe’s biological offspring.
What she’s hoping for is a miracle. What she gets is Raymond (Matt O’Leary), a grimy, cranky, mullet-coiffed ne’er-do-well who looks and sounds like a bit player from Cops. Raymond reluctantly agrees to accompany Linda back to Jersey Village — but only because he’s being hunted by authorities after his recent and entirely unauthorized departure from prison.
“The actual plot really is far different from my mom’s life,” Pickering reiterated when he phoned from Los Angeles on Friday. “But, yeah, the movie is infused with the humor and the pain and the sadness and, ultimately, the rebirth that my mom had to go through when my stepdad died — and I think I had to go through as well, as her son.”
Pickering graduated from the Film Production Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2003, where he was awarded a Lew Wasserman Screenwriting Award and a Warner Brothers Production Grant for what ultimately became Prom Night, a critically acclaimed short that should not be confused, under any circumstances, with the 1980 slasher flick (or its 2008 remake) of the same title.
He subsequently moved to LA, where he was one of only four students to graduate with thesis honors from USC’s Graduate Screenwriting Program in 2006.
More recently, Pickering and his writing partner have completed several scripts that have been purchased, though not yet produced, by major studios. But when he finished the Natural Selection screenplay on his own, he decided not to wait for anyone else to green-light it.
“It took me six years to make the movie,” Pickering said, “because we kept looking for more money. And finally, I just said, ‘OK, we’ve got to make it now.’ So me and my producers decided we just had to make it with what we had, which was only around 135 grand.
“Everybody was telling me not to do it. My agent, my manager — everybody was telling me: ‘Don’t do it!’ Because I was making a pretty good living writing screenplays for studios with my co-writer. And they were just scared for me, because they knew I’d be making this movie for no money. Because usually movies like that turn out just terrible.
“But I told them, ‘Look, I don’t think I can wait to make this movie. I have to make this movie while these feelings are still fresh in me. While I still feel what this feels like. When I can still feel that fear I had for my mother, and I can still touch that emotion. I have to make it while that’s still fresh within me.
“It’s like David Gordon Green said when he and Paul Schneider wrote All the Real Girls. He said they wanted to make a movie about being young and having your heart broken while they still could still touch what that was like, and not be looking back on it in a nostalgic way. They wanted to make a movie about being in that feeling. So they just had to go out and make it quickly.
“It took me a lot longer to make my movie. But I’m glad I made it with that urgency. I’m glad I didn’t wait longer. Because with feelings like this — you do move on, and you do change. And you’re not mired in grief forever. That doesn’t have anything to do with the actual plot of the movie.
"But there are times when you’re ready to tell a story — and that’s when you need to tell it.”
(Robbie Pickering’s Natural Selection will be screened by Cinema Arts Festival Houston at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Edwards Greenway Grand Palace.)
