On a Sunday night at Watkins College of Art, Design and Film, Steven Berryessa is feeling a filmmaker's version of labor pains. After an 18-month gestation, just one final test screening stands between his debut feature, Falls the Shadow, and its premiere Thursday, Nov. 17, at the Belcourt. The inclination toward endless tweaking is familiar to anyone in Nashville's creative class, but Berryessa knows it can't go on forever.
"If you don't say 'it's done' at some point, you'll never make another film," he says, before he and the assembled cast and crew settle in for one last look.
The just-about-finished product combines a post-apocalyptic tale of good vs. evil like The Book of Eli with the threat of zombie infestation. As if the end of the world weren't distressing enough, Falls the Shadow imagines a scenario where few more than the cockroaches among us remain. (The point man for evil in the film is a Rev. Phelps, if that gives you any idea.)
Although it was entirely shot in and around Nashville, the director offers a word of reassurance to city boosters and those with a stake in the tourism industry: Shooting a post-apocalyptic film in Music City was a challenge.
Berryessa, who wrote and directed the film — and by his count, performed approximately 13 other jobs — says he's wanted to make a feature since his first day of film school. In many ways, he grew up on sets and in theaters, as his family helped start and run Smyrna's popular Lamplighters Theater. Partly out of his childhood love for Kenneth Branagh's Shakespeare adaptations, Berryessa joined the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's apprentice company in the summer before his senior year of high school. There he met his fiancée, Christy, who did costumes for Falls and makes an appearance as one of the infected undead.
The film features most of the Berryessa family (including grandparents and cousins) in one role or another. Steven's father, Ron, co-stars and also served as a location scout, set designer and producer. His mother and sister both make appearances, in addition to other contributions, and the film is the first release under the banner of the family production company, Dangerous Muse.
The small budget made a big-name star impossible, but the Berryessas were able to draw some experienced local acting talent by making sure the production met Screen Actor's Guild standards. Among the names (or at least faces) you might recognize are Sam Dalton (from Footloose '84) and Wynn Reichert (Secretariat). You may soon be seeing more of Annie Thurman, who plays a kidnapped innocent in Falls the Shadow and landed a role in the highly anticipated adaptation of The Hunger Games. (As a result of Thurman's big-time gig, the trailer for Falls the Shadow has turned up on MTV's movie blog.)
Reportedly the first feature completed by a Watkins student before graduation, Falls the Shadow started out as an idea for Berryessa's junior-year short film. It's to Berryessa's credit that his movie demands to be judged not as a student project but as a theatrical-grade release. By those higher standards, the movie has the same flaws as many bigger-budgeted genre films — uneven performances, some flat dialogue and one-dimensional characters.
But its strengths deserve to be measured by the same bar. The well-paced thriller gets better with each act, leading to a strong, impressively staged climax. Its greatest asset may be Kevin Eslinger's cinematography, which gives the post-doomsday South a bleak, haunted beauty.
When the lights go up at Watkins after the test screening, cast and crew surround the writer-director to tell him how much they liked what they saw. Steven Berryessa nods thanks, but it's clear he doesn't really hear what they're saying. He's got other things on his mind — a few tiny little changes he needs to make that he noticed while he was watching ...
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