BH: There’s an ethereal quality that I really like. Oddly, that scene was the only one where I used any artificial lighting, and that was to use a reflector to bounce the natural light back into the barn. Other than that, the whole film was natural light.
NM: And the story is pretty engaging, too. A descendant of Jesse James, in recent years, comes to a remote farm searching for Jesse’s lost safe, where she meets the current tenants. They’re not exactly a welcoming pair.
BG: It all evolved naturally from things we saw at the farm during the test shoot. There just happened to be a young woman with a friend doing some shots for a photography class, and I kind of just tagged along. And I directed the woman to walk along as if she was looking for something, and it was compelling seeing her expressions as she walked through the fields and through tree limbs. An old safe had been found out in the woods there some time before, and they dragged it out with a tractor. It looked like something Jesse James would have had, it looked that old. So I got this idea of an ethereal, mysterious theme of the end of the Old West tied to modern time.
NM: That was Danielle Estopare, who played the young woman in the film?
BH: Yes, and her friend was Peggy Sue McCloskey. I needed Peggy Sue for a kind of threatening character. We only had three weeks before the film festival, so I added a little “crazy” to her, which made it easier. It was kind of a Southern, rural scene, so we had her obsessed with Patsy Cline, she even had a Patsy Cline shrine, and it worked with that music reverberating in the barn. It really worked with Peggy Sue’s character accusing Danielle’s character of unsuccessfully impersonating Patsy Cline.
NM: You also wanted Eric O’Neill’s character to appear somewhat threatening, and you captured his wary, suspicious look so well when Danielle pulled up into the driveway.
BH: It looked real. I thought it was how someone would react when a stranger pulls into your driveway. You’ll stop working on your tractor or whatever and ask what this black BMW is doing in my driveway in Sikeston, MO, or wherever. I liked the shot with the tractor and the BMW, with them shaking hands in the middle, tying the two worlds together.
NM: The story is largely a visual clash between past, present and future. It turns out Danielle’s character is narrating the story from years later, as the great-granddaughter of Jesse James. I also liked the voice-over as she’s pacing off what turns out to be a memorized map that leads to the old buried safe.