Y E S T E R D AY T O D AY YOU DON’T NEED A BIG BUDGET TO PRODUCE A HISTORICAL FILM. JUST SOME PATIENCE AND A LOT OF INGENUITY.
WORDS / KODY FORD PHOTOS / KANDI COOK + AMBER LINDLEY Because we still haven’t invented time travel, historical films are the closest you can get at the moment unless you’re into Renaissance Faires or Civil War reenactments. These movies have an epic grandeur to them. Juliet’s lament upon the balcony. Ben-Hur in a harrowing chariot race. William Wallace shouting, “Freedom!” They capture the imagination with their intricate costumes and elaborate sets, all of which seem a bit expensive. But you don’t need $100 million to make it happen. We spoke with several independent filmmakers who have made period pieces about how they crafted such a film on a smaller budget. THE OLD WEST For decades Westerns reigned supreme at the box office and on television sets. They told tales of bravery on the frontier, which appealed to a post war American sucking down Coca-colas and drag racing hot rods in their suburban enclaves. Now, in hindsight many of these films are seen as problematic revisionist history. But the appeal of Westerns still lives on today. While maintaining accuracy with details is still important, today’s filmmakers tend to provide different points of view that were overlooked in the past. Amber Lindley has long had a soft spot for historical epics. As a teenger she gravitated towards Jane Austen novels and pursued the aisles at Blockbuster Video looking for historical romance films. One of her favorite films is Far and Away, the Ron Howard film that starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Irish immigrants. The film faced criticism for both the production and themes as it revolved around the Land Run of 1893 in Oklahoma. However, the epic scale of the film touched her. “When I saw Far and Away, it's this huge, sweeping epic thing,” she said. “And it does have its problems, but sitting in the theater and watching that land race on the big screen, I had never experienced that
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before...When you're in that moment with those boomers, what does that mean to our history? That scene was just so well done in Far and Away that it made the movie for me.” Lindley’s love of days gone by led her to option the novel, The Mustanger and the Lady by the late Dusty Richards, of Springdale. While the novel had more of the John Wayne Western archetypes, Lindley saw another story that could be told with the material, one of female empowerment that would be more relevant to modern times.
She developed the story with the character, Julie, as the lead, but her collaborators and investors just didn’t see her take as bankable. But soon Lindley found herself a powerful new ally when director James Cotten, who had just boarded the project, also expressed that Julie should be the lead.Their investors decided to let Lindley and Cotten give it a shot. While Cotten meshed with Lindley on the vision for the story, he brought a level of experience that no one else involved with the film had—he’d actually directed a Western, the post Civil War film, Sugar Creek. He immediately talked the production team into narrowing the scope of the film to reduce the budget. So many extra costs are incurred when shooting a Western such as $70,000 insurance for the horses. Cotten convinced the team to learn from his mistakes on Sugar Creek. They did a rewrite on the script that, in Cotten’s words, reverse engineered the story to fit
the budget. They kept the costumes. They kept the horses. They kept the guns. But they brought the movie in at $500,000. They chose to film Painted Woman in Oklahoma because of the tax incentives at the time and the ability to access locations that fit the time period. He wrote several scenes that would allow them to film strictly within a museum that had once been the home of one of the state’s richest men. It had period appropriate furniture and was designed much in the way it had been over a hundred years ago. They found horse trainers who had their own wagons and costumes they could provide. They built multiple locations on the land that belonged to this crew. They filmed the early part of the film at night to shoot in locations that would have proved more problematic for blocking out modern life during the daylight. “You need to be smart about what it is you're planning to do,” Cotten said. “And one thing that a Western allows people to do that a modern movie doesn't have are landscape shots, being out in the woods. Land without things on it is cheap to rent. Get your characters down to a small amount of characters, limit the costumes that they're going to be in. Tell a story that is about the characters like having to traverse the landscape that is against them. And what happens in between the characters, design it down to its bare essentials of what the story should be, and then do whatever those bare essentials are to the best ability that you can. Bring a lot of production value inside of the camera work and the landscapes. And come up with interesting ways of how to get rid of the things that are expensive.” Painted Woman came out looking far more expensive and expansive than its budget might have allowed with an unseasoned director at the helm. Lindley has since gone on to co-produce the documentary, The Western District, which tells the story of the judicial district in Fort Smith in the time before Judge Isaac Parker, aka “The Hanging Judge” and the rise of corruption under the newly-assigned head U.S. Marshal
