Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
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Martha Stephens, the writer and director of the independent film Passenger Pigeons, will be in the spotlight next week during the awesome SXSW festival/conference down in Austin. Her film is about how a small Appalachian town deals with the death of a coal miner.
Stephens, a Kentucky native, is a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts, and she did most of her casting while she was living here in Asheville. Bryan Marshall is one Asheville dude I know of who has a prominent role in the movie. He plays Moses. Check this clip:
Passenger Pigeons is Stephens’ debut feature, after directing shorts at the respected North Carolina School of the Arts School of Filmmaking. Stephens made Passenger Pigeons with her friends from the Asheville, NC arts collective Papercookie Productions and took some time out recently to talk about what it was like making the movie, and what she’s excited about doing during SXSW.
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SXSW: The Papercookie site talks about you all working two jobs, living in your cars, and eating peanut butter sandwiches to save money to make movies. What kind of hardships did you undergo to get Passenger Pigeons made?
Stephens: Papercookies, the arts collective, Joe Chang started up with our two friends. I wasn’t really in the mix. He made a feature film, Neutral, a few years ago. He shot it on film and lived in his car. I did the whole crowd funding thing. It went okay. I just think I didn’t know enough people. [The funding] mostly came out of friends and family. Our budget was only $8,000 and we shot the movie in three weeks. We slept on couches in my relatives’ homes. There were four of us who did it – Joe [Chang] was the producer but he also boomed. We made the movie by ourselves. We couldn’t afford to have anybody else there to feed.
SXSW: A really tight budget can sometimes help a filmmaker create a better movie, but is there anything about the low budget you regret?
Stephens: I secretly wish we could have shot on film and I wish we could have paid everyone. Everyone worked for free. It made it so much more intimate with just the four of us.
Martha Stephens, 25, a 2002 graduate of Raceland-Worthington High School, is writer and director for “Passenger Pigeons,” the story of a small Appalachian town dealing with the death of a local coal miner.
Stephens said the movie was filmed in the Tri-State, with scenes at the Auger Inn in Ironton, Jimmie’s Spaghetti House in Huntington, near W-Hollow in Greenup and the Hillbilly Flea Market, as well as downtown Paintsville and Letcher and Pike counties.
“I did most of my casting while I was living in Asheville, N.C.,” she said. “A majority of the actors are either from North Carolina or are friends from college. The movie is compiled of an ensemble cast, so there were lots of people involved. My cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson, who is a plastic surgeon in the Ashland area, actually played this sort of larger-than-life character. He did a great job.
“I’m really into using non-actors. I feel like in many cases non-actors can provide you with a much more naturalistic performance.”
