Filmmaking brothers set movie in LR area

Producers, crew mostly Arkansans

Miles Miller (from left) talks with his brother Josh Miller, cinematographer Gabe Mayhan and Nathan Meade during filming of All the Birds Have Flown South on Thursday in Benton. The Miller brothers, from Arkansas, wrote and are directing and producing the movie. More photos are available at arkansasonline.com/galleries.
Miles Miller (from left) talks with his brother Josh Miller, cinematographer Gabe Mayhan and Nathan Meade during filming of All the Birds Have Flown South on Thursday in Benton. The Miller brothers, from Arkansas, wrote and are directing and producing the movie. More photos are available at arkansasonline.com/galleries.

Two native Arkansans and a cast and crew - most of whom are also from the Natural State - began filming this past week in and around Little Rock for a feature-length film set in the region’s suburbs.

All the Birds Have Flown South was written by and is being produced and directed by Josh and Miles Miller, affectionately referred to as “the brothers” by film friends. Also producing is Kathryn Francis Tucker, daughter of downtown Realtor Rett Tucker of Moses Tucker Real Estate.

Kathryn Tucker recently returned to Little Rock after16 years away, eight of which she worked as an assistant director in Los Angeles on films such as Oblivion with Tom Cruise and Just Go With It with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler. This will be her first full-length film set and shot in Arkansas.

“This is a film that is happening because people believe in the Miller brothers and believe in the script. Everyone’s working for reduced rates. It’s totally a passion project for everybody that’s on set. And on set, everyone’s so positive and excited just because they are so happy this movie is getting made - not because they are making tons of money,but because it’s a great product,” Tucker said.

All the Birds Have Flown South is about a sheltered man who, after the death of his overbearing mother, attempts to win the affection of a degenerate waitress by caring for her terminally ill and abusive husband. Obsession and disease consume the characters as their lives begin to unravel.

It’s inspired by real places in central Arkansas that the brothers experienced while growing up in Bryant.

When asked to describe the film, the brothers fire off descriptive elements that normally don’t go together. It’s a project of “our environment - the life and things we’ve seen throughout the years,” said Miles, 37, adding that it takes place in Southern diners and the rural urban area.

Josh, 35, adds that it’s a “contemporary, Southern, Gothic, psycho-thriller set against the frigid winter of the American South.” And then Miles chirps in again: “There’s elements of magical realism involved, too. It’s very different.”

The duo first showed that they could carry out a cinematic vision by writing, producing and directing the short film Pillow in 2010, which won the 2011 Oxford Film Festival’s Best Narrative Short award and a number of other film awards in the following years.

“Pillow is the first short film I saw where I kind of realized there was something bigger going on here than a bunch of college kids making movies with video cameras,” Tucker said.

She quickly signed on to co-produce All the Birds Have Flown South, and it’s taken the group four years to get to the filming stage.

The full-length film features actress and North Little Rock native Joey Lauren Adams, who has starred in such films as Chasing Amy, Dazed and Confused, Big Daddy and The Break Up. Also acting in the film are Paul Sparks - who plays Mickey Doyle in Boardwalk Empire and had a role in Mud - and Dallas Roberts, who played David Wayne in Dallas Buyers Club and Milton Mamet on AMC’s The Walking Dead.

The Miller brothers say they are committed to filming in Arkansas.

“Arkansas has a special energy, plus we like what we know. And the locations - we have everything here. We have mountains, the Delta, plains, everything,” Miles Miller said. “We have everything that we need and the people that we need. And it’s great. It’s beautiful.”

Tucker added that making movies in her native city “is so much more meaningful than working on some Hollywood movie in LA.”

The title - All the Birds Have Flown South - is also a reference to Arkansas, the producers say.

“It’s sort of this idea that in the wintertime in the South, when the birds have flown, it’s sort of that cold, everything’s dead [feel.] So, it sort of sets the tone for the story we are trying to tell,” Josh Miller said.

“That isolation, feeling alone,” Miles added. “What do you do when the sky is empty?”

Tucker, too, gets the vision.

“Having lived in LA where there are no seasons, there’s just nothing like the frigidness of the South in the winter - the sky with the trees with no leaves. This whole film sort of has that feeling. It’s not a feel-good romantic comedy,” Tucker said.

“But it is sort of a love story,” Miles added.

Last week, the crew filmed at the recently closed Country Diner in Benton across from a Waffle House. About 30 scenes in the movie take place in the diner. A good portion of the film takes place at night, so the crew has been working 12-hour days from about 3 p.m. to 3 a.m.

Filming is scheduled to end Feb. 21, and they hope to have the movie edited by the start of summer. Then they’ll enter it in film festivals, where they hope to win a few awards. The main goal, of course, is to sell it. The producers wouldn’t reveal the exact budget of the independent film but said it’s under $500,000 and all of the funds were raised in Arkansas.

“I’ve worked with so many different directors and writers, and these guy’s know exactly what they want,” Tucker said of the brothers. “I’ve worked on movies where it takes 37 takes of flushing the toilet, and these guys do four or five and they know what they want. And they know how to direct their actors. … This entire team is so incredibly talented and as talented or even more so than any people I have ever worked with in Hollywood.

“And the artists that would win Academy Awards from this film are all from Arkansas. That is the thing that is so inspiring to me,” Tucker said. “This is a seminal moment for Arkansas filmmaking.”

Arkansas, Pages 13 on 02/02/2014

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