The first draft of Evan Glodell’s directorial debut didn’t feature the muscle cars or flamethrowers found in the finished film.
It was just another boy meets girl, girl dumps boy story.
Glodell insists “Bellflower” is “exactly the same movie” as that initial script. It just came out better thanks to the benefit of a few years under his belt.
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“I always thought I wanted to make the movie right now, but I couldn’t get it together. It ended up being a good thing in the end. I had to do a lot of growing up and learning,” Glodell says of a project which began after a rough break up. “No one tried to hurt me in this relationship … it was an extremely intense realization. Then, I was ready to go back to the script.”
What Glodell learned was to channel his emotional pain into a film blazing with both originality and actual flames.
“Bellflower,” coming to Blu-ray and DVD Nov. 15, casts Glodell as Woodrow, an arrested adolescent type making a flamethrower alongside his pal Aiden (Tyler Dawson).
The duo is preparing for the kind of post-apocalyptic world seen in the “Mad Max” films, and until then they’ll simply have a blast along the way. The pair’s friendship is tested when Woodrow falls hard for Milly (Jessie Wiseman), a daredevil blonde who warns him she may crush his heart.
And when that happens, this buddy picture takes a deep, dark turn audiences won’t see coming.
Glodell, who left a potential engineering career to make movies, says he first started writing “Bellflower” while working a minimum wage job.
“I was floating a bit,” he recalls.
He kept tinkering on his script and eventually surrounded himself with some of the same cast and crew members who would complete “Bellflower.”
“We spent most of our time talking about ideas [for the film],” he says. “Is this scene gonna do what we want it to do, does it go too far? There were thousands of conversations about it.”
As the film neared completion, Glodell opened up that dialogue to a wider community. He organized screenings for five or six people at a time, the only condition being they had no personal connection to the project.
“We gave them little questionnaires. ‘What do you think of these characters?'” he says. “We made a fairly big change based on [their reactions].”
The muscle car subplot and flamethrower elements added style to what was otherwise a relationship drama, he says.
Glodell made “Bellflower” on a miniscule budget, but he had the chance to shoot it with a state of the art film camera he was beta testing at the time. Instead, he built his own camera that would mirror his story’s rugged nature.
He also built a real flamethrower for the film and made adjustments to the car used in the film, dubbed Medusa, to give the project a boost of reality.
“We weren’t pretending we were having fun shooting flames. We were actually there, with that excitement, doing stuff,” he says.
“Bellflower” created quite a stir at the Sundance Film Festival, where audiences were riveted by the film’s visceral style and the real-life goodies Glodell and co. fashioned for the film. Having struggled so long to bring the film to life makes its initial embrace almost surreal for the young filmmaker.
“I never expected the outcome to be quite this good. We were working on this movie for so long. The longer we worked on it, the less hope we had people would be interested in it,” he says. “I feel like we were playing the lottery. What are the chances of anyone really seeing this?”
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