Andrew Wilson is the Wilson brother we don't hear that much about. There's Owen who is the big star and Luke who's kind of struggling more on the acting side, but Andrew just kind of does cameos. He made his directorial debut on the latest family collaboration, The Wendell Baker Story, codirecting actually with Luke.
Andrew Wilson on The Wendell Baker Story
"There wasn’t the kind of auteur effect where you had a director with a vision of what it should be and a writer with a different vision and then a big star that wanted to do something else that only benefited him," said Wilson. "We were all trying to do the same thing which was get the script, which we all really liked, shot in the amount of time we had. That was really a very simple goal."
The indie film stars Luke as the title character, a con man who gets caught and tries to go straight with a day job after a stint in prison. Shot in 35 days, even the indie producers thought it was an impossible task.
"Also I think when you also have a short amount of time, and I’ve worked on some bigger movies where there is a ton of money and a ton of time, you find that there isn’t the kind of creative tension that we had on this. When you know you only have a short time with a limited amount of money, it helped us come up with some kind of good creative solutions. Things we came up with quickly and on the fly that we knew made it better."
The Wendell Baker Story
Without studio bosses interfering, the brothers could be flexible with some of their veteran actors as well. "I think since it was our first time also, we were more open to kind of doing things differently. Sometimes with Harry Dean and Seymour [Cassell], sometimes it takes a little while to get them rolling in the morning. Harry Dean is sort of nocturnal, stays up all night and sleeps all day, so it would take him awhile. So, we had the flexibility to do things a little differently. We wouldn’t be locked in to a certain way of doing things and I hope that made it better."
It might have helped to have a studio legal department on their side. The Wilsons had to cut some of their celebrity references, namely photoshopped pictures of movie characters with celebrities, for fear of clearance issues.
"Basically every picture they said, ‘No you can’t use that. You can’t use Herve Villechaize.’ J-Lo was one of them. They said, ‘No, you can’t use J-Lo,’ but we just kind of steamrolled them and said we had to. It’s kind of funny, it’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie. But, that’s one of the things that they tried to scare [us with], that they were going to shut down the production. If J-Lo found out we were making fun of her, she was going to shut down production."
The Wendell Baker Story opens to theatres today, May 18th.
For the trailer and more movie info, go to The Wendell Baker Story Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
|
Add to Heffee!
