FILM
Struggle Session AFTER SEVEN YEARS IN PRODUCTION, LOTAWANA FINALLY HITS SCREENS By Abby Olcese “How long does it take to make a movie?” Trevor Hawkins says he was 28 years old when he asked his wife, Cori Jo, that fateful question. “When I was in my 20s, I decided I wanted to be in production on my first feature by 30,” he explains. Hawkins had been working in video production for a few years in the Kansas City area and decided the time was right to get started on his own project. All he needed was a script. And a cast. And a production team. And everything else. So, how long does it take to make a movie? In the case of Hawkins’ debut feature, Lotawana, the answer is seven years. Seven years, three lead actresses, a shoestring budget funded by the Hawkins’ second mortgage, and a bare-bones group of dedicated filmmakers. That group includes Hawkins’ filmmaking partner, Nathan Kincaid, who has an assistant director credit on the movie, as well as Cori Jo as a co-producer. “He pitched me the idea first of all,” Kincaid recalls. “It was on the upper level of City Market Coffeehouse. He had this idea of showing the roller coaster ride of a new romantic relationship. He wanted to track the ebbs and flows, and put it in a lake setting.” Kincaid’s first piece of advice was to
write a script. “He told me, ‘Okay genius, if you want to make a movie, the first thing you need is a script,’” Hawkins remembers. “I Googled ‘how to write a script,’ presented it to Nathan and said, ‘All right, here we go.’ Then we were off to the races.” Shot primarily on Lake Lotawana and Lake Jacomo, Lotawana tells the story of
Forrest (Todd Blubaugh), an idealistic Thoreau-type who lives on his boat year-round in an effort to disconnect from the rat race. Eventually, Forrest meets the free-spirited Everly (Nicola Collie), and the two fall in love. Everly joins Forrest on the boat, but the pressures of the real world gradually threaten the idyllic life they’ve created. Hawkins says one of his goals was to
showcase a side of the state that most studio-produced TV shows and films don’t capture. “Missouri, in movies, is often portrayed as an armpit of the United States, where it’s got a rural, scuzzy vibe,” Hawkins says. “I know that’s not true for most of us who live here. It honestly felt like a privilege to be able to show Missouri in a beautiful, natural light that exists here for us all the time.” Another inspiration, immediately noticeable from Lotawana’s gorgeous, naturally-lit cinematography, is Terrence Malick—the director behind Days of Heaven and The Tree of Life. “You could say Lotawana is, stylistically, either a love letter to Malick or a straight ripoff of Malick,” Hawkins says. Like Malick, Hawkins prioritized shooting the film with as little artificial light as possible—partly to capture the beauty of the setting and partly, he says, to save money. “There were maybe two or three scenes where we shot at night, and we used a little extra light to give us some pop in the dark,” he says. That move was the right one to create Lotawana’s dreamy atmosphere, but it also took a lot of planning and time to execute. Kincaid says that to schedule scenes around the light he and Hawkins created a color-coded board, where each scene was
