Scene 98, take one.
Adam Nelson, a computer technician from Columbia Falls, darts in and out of the camera’s frame to secure a line of yellow crime scene tape across a hallway at a hotel south of downtown Kalispell. The hallway recedes behind the tape like the archetypal horror film hotel corridor, dim and narrow and bare. Ominous.
In real life, the hallway leads to the hotel’s perfectly innocuous pool. It’s not clear where it leads in the world of “Buster’s Mal Heart,” a surreal dark comedy that began filming in the Flathead last week. But it can’t be good.
The story, written and directed by award-winning director Sarah Adina Smith, is about Buster, a man on the run from authorities who survives the Montana winter by breaking into people’s homes. Hundreds of miles from the ocean, he is troubled by a recurring dream that he’s lost at sea. Though the producers can’t elaborate without spoilers, his dreams are the first hint that Buster is one man split between two bodies.
It’s a rainy morning in Kalispell, one of the first days of shooting the low-budget indie film. The production crew was hoping for snow.
Travis Stevens, founder and CEO of Snowfort Pictures, the boutique production company producing “Buster’s Mal Heart,” is upstairs in the production room, wearing a red buffalo check flannel. He has created nine films that have taken home many best feature awards from festivals around the world.
This, his newest project, which will premier in spring 2016, isn’t Stevens’ first take at dark comedy. He produced in 2013 a film called Cheap Thrills, wherein a down-on-his-luck man and his friend accept a dare from a couple at a bar that leads to more dares, each more twisted than the last.
“This [film] is a different kind of comedy,” says Stevens. “It’s almost absurd.”
Producer Jonako Donley nods, agreeing, “It’s surreal in that we’re taking something metaphorical and treating it as if it were literal.”
Scene 98, take two.
Nelson fastens the caution tape to the beige brick wall and steps out of view. Cash Johnson, another local man, enters the shot and turns away from the camera to walk down the hallway, ducking under two more lines of tape.
Johnson, a a hotel employee and local physical trainer, says he was just working at the hotel one day when he was asked if he’d like to be in the film.
They told him his look – athletic, clean-shaven, honest – was perfect for someone on the detective’s squad. He agreed, enthusiastically. This is his first time acting.
Nelson got the gig after attending an open background talent casting call held on Oct. 10 at the Flathead Valley Community College. He’s appeared locally in shows at the Whitefish Theatre Company and FVCC Theatre.
The men are two of a fleet of Flathead Valley extras playing churchgoers, funeral attendees, park rangers, local law enforcement, fraternity brothers, and hotel guests. The film stars Rami Malek, the lead of 2015 drama–thriller television series Mr. Robot, and Kate Lyn Sheil, known for her role in House of Cards, among others.
Scene 98, take three.
This take, Nelson is instructed to stretch the caution tape from the opposite direction. Johnston walks down the hallway. The camera focuses on the other actors he passes – the detective questioning Adelita, a maid at the fictional hotel. Stroking a puppy named Pickles, the actor, Teresa Yendique, sobs silently and waves her hand in the air to bat the detective’s questions away.
Yendique, who is from New York City, had never been to Montana before this film project. Neither had Donley or Stevens, who first visited in April to scout locations for the movie.
Stevens has shot in rural locations before – his most recent film, “We Are Still Here,” is set in a sleepy, scary New England town – but the vast mountains of the west are important to Buster’s character, he says. The massive mountains and open spaces evoke a sense of longing, a fundamental sense of incompleteness.
“He [Buster] has his place of business and his house,” Stevens says, “But he longs to be in the wilderness. Look at those mountains,” he continues, gesturing to the wide window in the producer’s room on the third floor of the hotel. “The expanse you feel.”
As for why they chose Kalispell and the Flathead Valley, Stevens says, “It’s a story about a good person, and we wanted a town that conveys that wholesomeness.”