Barstool Cowboy director Mark Thimijan
Have you ever wondered if love and relationships were a worthless endeavour? That's the position of the hero of Mark Thimijan's film Barstool Cowboy, but a vow to stay wedded to his barstool instead goes awry when he spots an attractive young woman hanging round outside the pub. Could things be different this time? I caught up with Mark to ask him what drew him to this subject.
"First and foremost I was depressed with love and relationships," he says. "I was in an introspective time period and I took a look back at five or six casual encounters and questioned why they had ended so badly. What I noticed was similar patterns in both myself and the girls I was dating, so I set out to explore and examine the notion of two people in a relationship where both of them have very different ideas on how it should proceed."
Music was also an important factor, as he explains.
"The Cowboy lead just kind of happened and seemed an appropriate character to go on this journey with. I started listening to country and western music and I found many similarities in most of the songs. They sang about the same depressing things and I fashioned the screenplay wanting to show a three minute allegory country song over the course of an hour and a half. I wanted the character to be sympathetic in a pathetic kind of way. He’s a man lost in time, stuck back in a generation long gone and he has not progressed. He’s an everyday man and I see him everywhere I go. Sadly, lonely characters such as this are overlooked and not often showcased. I hope some people will watch the film and really relate to who he is and his plight."
So how did he find the country musicians who provided the film's soundtrack and contributed so much to its story?
"I was searching on Myspace for musicians in Nebraska and all of the sudden a voice - Natalie Illeana's - flooded the air," he tells me. "The sound, lyrics, everything was perfect. One song in particular - Bored - caught my attention. It was uncanny how close it was to the overall theme of the film. It was almost as if she already wrote the song for the soundtrack. I contacted her and we met after I was probably 80 percent finished with the final cut. She introduced me to her boyfriend Greg Kincheloe who was also a musician. My original idea was to have both a female and male voice for the film's music and I really scored by meeting the two of them. We used a few songs previously recorded and the rest they created just for the film and did most of the work, but they weren’t involved in the development of the story. It was one of the easier parts of the process."
As for finding the cast, he says "Mick the Cowboy [Tim Woodward] I met at a film festival one year before the film was shot. I starting writing it a month later and immediately thought of him for the part. I sent him the script and it didn’t take too much negotiating for him to accept. Almost all the rest of the cast came from a few auditions I held where I live and anything I had left I asked family and friends to jump in and fill the role."
It was a practical approach for a man who has forged his own course through the industry, as he explains.
"I do not have a formal education. I started writing screenplays in my early 20s and had a desire to see what they would look like as real movies. I relocated to California and immediately found work on feature films where I eventually became an assistant director. I learned every aspect of how to put a film together from scratch and see that it was done on time and on budget. It was invaluable experience. When I set out to make my own films I was able to become my own producer, assistant director, writer and director and shuffle around all positions with relative ease while being able to complete a project without spending a lot of extra time or money. I also started watching 500 films a year which I still do to this very day, and I discovered the voice of personal cinema - simple stories about humanity, struggle and the human condition. This influences my work today."
It's an impressive story, but finding finance these days is tough. How did he pull it off?
"Barstool Cowboy cost $10,000 U.S. dollars to make," he explains. "I took out a $7,000 loan and put the other $3,000 on a credit card. My hopes were to show it in a number of film festivals and win a few awards with the ultimate goal of selling it to a distributor. I have reached these goals and the film will officially be released on DVD on September 15, 2009. My goals for the future are to continue making features on a small budget with the hopes of finding investors interested in financing my low risk projects.
"Advice I would have for filmmakers just starting out is to volunteer on movie sets as a production assistant. You don’t have to move away, chances are there’s a film being shot close to where you live. Watch and learn how they do it. Study the medium but also read books, look at paintings, any artform etc. and learn what excites you and ultimately what you want to say through your work. Make a few short films because you will learn so much through the process but remember a short film is only a short and will most likely not change your life. You have to make a feature at some point, that’s when people will start to take you seriously. The reality is most people never make a feature and give up, that’s bad for them but good for you because if you really pull it off the competition is far less in the feature world than it is in the short world."
So what projects is he working on now?
"I am currently writing a feature called The Downtown Rebel about a guy in his mid 20s who feels his generation has been cheated. He’s convinced that all passion and romance have been sucked out of the air and we are living in the most boring of times. 'The hapless new century' as he calls it. His plan is to incite revolution by breaking absurd laws and holding a mirror up to society showing how complacent people's lives have become. As he puts it, 'It’s intelligent rebellion.' There’s a sidebar romance and lots of fun, danger, surrealism and truth."
Mark is still looking for investors for this project so if you're interested in helping, drop us a line and we'll put you in touch.
Barstool Cowboy will be available from September 15 at DVD Empire.
