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Film festivals next step for Mullis feature-length debut
For anyone embarking on a film career, Anthony Mullis has a very specific piece of advice:
“Don’t make your first film about a bulldozer because logistically, it’s a nightmare,” Mullis said with a laugh Wednesday afternoon. “Make it about a bicycle or something.”
The local filmmaker — better known for now as a singer/songwriter — was at The Inn at DePauw for the weekly meeting of the Greencastle Rotary Club. The subject of his talk was “Buldoser,” the feature-length debut of Mullis’s Painted Moon Film Co.
After more than two years of work, production work is complete on “Buldoser” (which is the Filipino spelling of the word), but the film isn’t ready to see the light of day for general audiences just yet.
Instead, the next goal is to get “Buldoser” into film festivals, where it can get in front of people with money to make more movies. However, public screenings of the film would make it ineligible for the festivals.
“The goal is to make another movie and do it with some funding,” Mullis said. “I want to make more — and I’m going to — but I’d like to make more with other people’s money.”
Mullis has previously called the long process of making the movie his film school. Perhaps that makes this phase his promotion school.
So while private screenings may be on the horizon, the thought of buying a ticket to see the movie at a theater or streaming it online is probably still a year away.
At the moment, though, Mullis is happy to talk about the process, share short clips and some of his experiences. He is effusive in his praise of the Putnam County community and the support it showed this native son.
“It’s neat to see that a movie can be made in this community,” Mullis said.
He also referred to a pair of men from the Bainbridge area who served as some of the inspiration for Dig Murton (played by Jonas Vance), the main character of the film. Mullis remembers Marvin Broadstreet and John McMurtry as larger-than-life figures to his young eyes.
For his part, the fictional Dig also comes with a lot of baggage. Mullis describes him as “a volatile, veteran bulldozer operator who becomes friends with a much younger female drifter.”
This all happens just days before Dig’s wife is set to arrive from the Philippines.
That plot, though, was the result of revisions as they filmed. Mullis had originally written a much larger part for a young Filipino woman, but as production time came, he didn’t have her cast.
Add to this that production could not be delayed, as much of the movement of the vintage bulldozer used in the film was done by local farmer Jeff Cantonwine, who needed to be in the fields when the time came.
Mullis kept rewriting and rewriting, and the film took on a life of its own.
“The movie became this organic thing,” he said. “It was a lot of fun, but I never want to make a movie that way again.”
“Buldoser” hasn’t been the only project on Mullis’s docket, either. Back in April, he took part in the Solar Eclipse Challenge conducted by The Film Race. The challenge was to make a short film centered on the solar eclipse.
Mullis’s submission, “Strange Occurrences” starring Andrew Lewis, wife Abbey Prather Mullis and himself, wound up taking home top prize.
The brief psychological thriller is currently available to view at www.thefilmrace.com/.
What comes next for Mullis and Painted Moon is not clear, but he says it’s definitely more filmmaking.
“I think I speak for a few of the people involved when I say we want to do it again, and we are going to do it again,” Mullis said.
