By George

Farmer-filmmaker George Woodard premieres The Farm Boy

BY SALLY POLLAK • sally@sevendaysvt.com

Henry Woodard grew up in front of his father’s camera. As a kid on his family’s Waterbury Center dairy farm, Henry was a “guinea pig,” he said, for short movies made by his dad, farmer-filmmaker George Woodard. In one little movie, Henry played a boy who goes into the woods to get a Christmas tree. Back home, his grandmother is waiting for him with an apple pie. Henry wore a wig and played the grandmother, too.

“He was doing a little filmmaking back then,” Henry said of his father. “What better subject than your 7-year-old son?”

Henry is now a 30-year-old landscaper and sugar maker and the star of his father’s new movie, The Farm Boy, which premieres at the Hyde Park Opera House on Saturday, March 25. This is not a short practice reel made for kicks but a two-anda-half-hour feature film set during World War II, in which Henry plays a character loosely based on his paternal grandfather, George Woodard Sr.

The black-and-white movie is the second feature film written and directed by George Jr., who is 70 but likes to say he’s “close to 80.” The first, which also starred Henry, is the 2009 coming-of-age western The Summer of Walter Hacks. Henry was 11 when that movie was shot.

“He knows how to pretend,” his father said. “When he hits it, he hits it.”

The new movie, like George’s first one, took about six years to make, with production shaped around his life as a farmer. He lives and works on the hill farm that his grandparents purchased in 1912.

“If you’re gonna be a small farmer, there’s one thing you have to know: You have to know how to do everything,”

George said, noting that the same is required of a small moviemaker. “I think that’s a strong point for me. That, and I have a 200-acre back lot.”

In The Farm Boy, Henry’s character, serviceman Calvin Dillard, falls in love with a young woman he meets at a barn dance. (That’s where George’s parents met.) Dillard and his movie sweetheart, Mary Small, played by Grace Woodruff of Waterbury

Center, get married when he’s home on a two-day pass; then he returns to boot camp.

Like the real-life serviceman from central Vermont on whom he’s based, Dillard is a crack mechanic who serves at the Battle of the Bulge in winter 1944. He’s working on an Army truck near the Belgian battleground when the rig is hit by a shell and blows up, hurtling him (and the truck) down a snowy embankment.

The woods where Henry is currently tapping maples are about 200 feet from trees at the Woodard farm that stand in for the Belgian forest. Shooting the scene two years ago, Henry managed to stay uninjured through four or five takes barreling down a hill, avoiding a battering by trees.

“Sometimes I see why stuntmen are stuntmen,” he said.

But what happens to Dillard in The Farm Boy?

Back home in Vermont, Dillard’s wife is informed that her husband is missing in action. She’s working as a telephone operator — as George’s mother did — when she hears the news. Then the movie pauses for an intermission. (When was the last time you watched a movie with an intermission?)

The ensuing action takes place mostly in Belgium, though it was shot in Vermont. (“Belgium is too far to get back in time for milking,” George said.) On both sides of the Atlantic, there’s a woman.

“The story only works if you have two women who are absolutely wonderful,” George said. “It’s a conflict for the audience.”

Along with Henry, the other leading actors in The Farm Boy are Coco Moseley — who speaks French in her role as Renee, a member of the French Resistance — and Woodruff. George met Moseley at a photo shoot in his barn; he spotted Woodruff dancing in a high school production of Oklahoma! It turns out she grew up by a field George hayed for 40 years.

Moseley, director of the Lawrence Memorial Library in Bristol, was pregnant during one season of shooting. Her daughter is now 4.5 years old.

“Movies are long and slow, and they require a great deal of patience,” Moseley, 37, said. “Ten hours in the woods working on this project in March, [set] in World War II, in wool tights, a skirt and uninsulated boots, was really grueling.

“One of the things that kept me coming to the project with George,” she added, “was his incredible creativity and love and passion for the project. [It] was so inspiring.”

The filmmaker is the third of four children of the late George and Teresa Collins Woodard. His father stopped milking cows when George was 9 and went to work operating heavy machinery on crews that built Interstate 89.

George became interested in drama and performance as a student at Harwood Union High School and later was active in community theater. But he also loved farming and brought cows back to the farm in the mid-1970s. He stopped shipping milk more than a year ago but still raises beef and young stock with a herd of 25 cows. He milks one cow once a day.

On his big “back lot,” George and his crew built sets for The Farm Boy, including a farmyard in the Ardennes with a farmhouse, barn and chicken coop. They used hay wagons for the buildings’ foundations. The crew included George’s niece, Suzanne Woodard, who pitched in as a stunt double.

“He’s very focused on film days when he’s shooting,” Suzanne, 32, said of her uncle. “He knows what he wants, and he brings it to fruition.”

In this film, George wanted to evoke a particular time in the past — in both feel and story. He achieves that through “conventional filmmaking” and the use of one camera and wide-angle lenses. He watched many movies made between the 1930s and ’60s to emulate their style, employing filmmaking techniques that don’t rely on “tricky stuff,” he said.

Writing the screenplay, George made use of letters his father wrote from boot camp. For the dialogue, he borrowed phrases that he recalled his parents saying. For example, his father used to talk about the Dodge flatbed truck he drove to pick up milk at local farms: “It’ll go downhill like a jackrabbit,” he would say, “but going uphill, it wouldn’t pull a hat off a churchgoer.”

George used that line in The Farm Boy, along with “swear words” such as “Judas Priest” and “Gol Dang.”

“Whenever somebody says that, the mother says, ‘Watch your language,’” George noted.

In his own youth, George enjoyed the company of his mother and father so much that when he went off to school at Vermont Technical College, he returned home on weekends to hang out with them.

“I came home ’cause I didn’t want to miss anything,” he said. “They were a good audience; you could get ’em laughing.”

He ventured farther from home — to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s — to work in the movie industry. He got acting jobs and other gigs, including work as a grip and a set builder. George returned to Waterbury Center after a few years with singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie’s beat-up guitar case, which holds his acoustic Gibson, and started milking cows again on Loomis Hill.

“I didn’t want to bail on the farm,” George said. “And I realized there’s nothing they’re doing [in California] that I couldn’t do back home — as long as you have a camera, lights, some actors and a good story.”

Last week, George was working on finishing touches in time for the movie’s premiere in Hyde Park. He’ll be at the opening screening, and Henry will be there, too, if sugaring allows. Henry will dress for the occasion.

“I’m not going to wear overalls,” he said.