Keeping The Heart Alive: Andrew Morgan On His Film "Samantha Rose"
Andrew Morgan is an internationally recognized, award-winning filmmaker focused on telling stories for a better tomorrow. His experience includes a broad range of work that spans narrative and documentary storytelling for multiple film and new media projects that have been filmed and released all over the world. Previous films include After the End (2013), The True Cost (2015), The Heretic (2018) and Long Gone By (2020). His latest film, the quietly intoxicating and warmly spirited Samantha Rose, was conceived of, shot and completed during the 2020 pandemic in a small and safe cast and crew setting in the rural settings of the Pacific Northwest.
Sam is lost, working a dead-end job, and afraid to pursue a real life of her own. Returning to her hometown in northern Oregon she reunites with a childhood friend and joins him and a group of misfits as they work the fall harvest on the surrounding vineyards. This ragtag family of runaways are fearless and free, leading Sam on a journey of discovery and healing.
Samantha Rose is set to release next month on September 7th; however, you can pre-order it on iTunes right now. We had the pleasure of chatting with Andrew about the film, its origins and development, shooting in a pandemic, clearing a massive amount of music on a modest budget, and much much more!
One of the many interesting things about Samantha Rose is how it quietly and subtly shows how an environment affects the interior of Samantha‘s character. In a lot of your films, the setting is a vital part of the story, so much so that it becomes a character. Can you talk a bit about your approach to finding and photographing these beautiful landscapes, and how nature and environment fits into your style as a filmmaker?
Yeah, it definitely does. I think when it comes to Samantha Rose, I had been out in Portland shooting something a few years ago, and I drove out to the Columbia Gorge to visit a friend of mine who’s a winemaker there — we grew up in north Atlanta, but he’s a winemaker now — and I just kind of fell in love with that place. To be honest, that’s sometimes how it starts. Like I was in Warsaw, Indiana visiting a friend who lived there, and I just sorta fell in love with the feeling of the place, and I kinda have that on the bookshelf so that when a story comes along, a really early part of the process is marrying a story to a place. Because, like you say, it has a lot to do with it.
When I started playing around with the story for Samantha Rose, I was thinking about where to set it, and I just had that moment where I was like, “oh my goodness.” I remember being overwhelmed by just how beautiful it was when I was there. It did something to me while I was there; it had a very psychological effect on me. I thought, what a cool place to take a character out of New York City and to put her back in a place where she grew up, and what that could do at that moment in someone’s life.
You’re right, nature especially in this one plays a really really big part of it. And, I mean, it’s just fun; it’s really fun stuff to photograph. My cinematographer who I’ve worked with for years, Lance Kuhns, is so brilliant at doing that. Also, when you’re working on a low budget, nature is free; it’s accessible, you know, so it was also a practical decision as well.
It sounds like part of the story birthed from that visit, but you also came up with the story with your wife, Emily. What was it like creating that concept? What was the process like for you guys?
Yeah, it was really special. I have to say that it was really special. I know that term gets thrown around a lot, but this one was extra special to me. I think some of it was the circumstances that we made it in. You know, we were several several months into the pandemic, and it really started from a restless feeling in me. I had couple other film projects that we were part way through that were larger that were put on hold, and I was just kinda in this space, like a lot of us were, where I just I really wanted to make something. A whole lot of my friends and collaborators were out of work, and they were kinda experiencing the same thing of trying to figure out just how to do something to keep their heart alive.
Emily and I started talking, and it really began with a conversation talking about all the way back to high school. She and I would make these short films with our friends on the weekends, and they were always really romantic and overly earnest, and they had lots of music and were probably being made in the shadow Cameron Crowe and John Hughes movies and all that. We just had this conversation where we were like, “I wonder if we can do that again, like I wonder if we can get that feeling back again.” We’ve done some films that are pretty heavy and take on some serious stuff, and we were feeling so heavy just as it was that we thought, “Man, could it be possible to get all of our friends together and just go make this in that spirit of fun and freedom, and we do it somewhere where we can pull it off safely and build a little world out there together in the woods?”
And that’s really what we did. We wrote the script together in a couple weeks, and we got together a cast that had never acted in a movie before, and we went up there and made a little experience together. The whole thing still makes me smile when I think about it. It’s almost like the way you want making movies to be when you’re a kid; it was like that filled with joy and that fun. It’s a cool spirit that it came from.
And also, the other thing I’ll say on a more serious note, there is something about the film that I think taps into a feeling I’ve certainly had and that a lot of people have had over the last couple of years: a collective sense of kind of lossness. And this is something going on with Sam’s character is going through in her life, as she’s in that intersection of trying to figure who she is and who she’s going to be and how to create a life that means something to her, which I really resonate with that — that was a very big part of my story and Emily’s story. But also, I think a lot of us are just in that space right now. It was fun to channel something so intense into something that I hope is really fun to watch.
The film is definitely fun to watch, and a part of what makes it such a joy is its tremendous backing track. Just like the locations, music plays such a big part in this film. What does music mean to you in your filmmaking, and how were you able to ensemble such a nice, beefy backing track on the modest budget you were working on?
That last part is such a good question! Yeah, I mean a film for me typically starts with feeling. It’s not as intellectual as it is an emotion. I think when I started this one, I had a feeling of nostalgia; I had a feeling of you blink and you’re not 22 anymore. There’s something about the wide openness of life in that season that at the time, you’re almost too scared to realize just how thrilling it is, and there was something in me that wanted to make a film that has a little bit of that undercurrent of not sadness, but a little bit of nostalgia. That certainly came out in some of the music, some of the stuff I did with Duncan Blickenstaff, my composer who’s just absolutely phenomenal. We started tinkering around with stuff at the very beginning. He’s great about writing music all the way through. You know, I listen to some of his stuff when we’re in production sometimes; it’s really inspirational to me.
The other thing was I really do still have a big soft spot in my heart for the Cameron Crowe soundtracks, you know. As a kid, when I was first getting into film in the backyard, that stuff just floored me; I couldn’t believe how many songs he could get into a movie, you know. It was so cool and such a part of the experience. So we started thinking a lot about that and reaching out to a lot of independent bands. Some of the music you hear in the movie is actually played by the people in the movie, not just the ones that are performed on screen but a couple of those tracks are those actual people who are in the cast. A couple are even like old roommates’ bands.
And then we had this incredible music supervisor who worked with us for the first time named Chris York, who’s based out of Nashville and just phenomenal! He worked his heart out, alongside me, and my editor, and everybody, and just pulled together these songs and got stuff cleared for us in a way that was... Yeah, I mean, everything was done on a shoestring and some credit cards and the budget for that stuff is— it’s just wild, actually. It was overwhelming what he was able to pull off.
Yeah, that stuff isn’t cheap, so to get what you guys got at the price points you got them at is just incredible.
It was so cool, and honestly, we just really told the story of how we were making the film, and we would show scenes. We had some more notable musicians that play on the soundtrack as well, people like Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek, some of these folks who are more established, and typically, their songs would be worth more than five of our budgets. We would send them scenes, you know, and I would have cut their songs in, and I would just say, “This is what we’re working with, can you help us pull this off? Look at how beautiful this is. Doesn’t this move you?” And they were cool, and I’m just forever grateful for that. It was kind of a running joke honestly. I told Chris when he came on board that I think we can clear like five songs, and I think by the end there’s like 18 songs or something like that. Just so much music!
You did all of this in the 2020 pandemic — and you were able to keep everyone safe, so massive props for that. What was it like experience like filming under those circumstances? How did you have to approach this one differently?
Yeah, my producing partner who’s also my brother is phenomenal, and it’s to his credit that we did keep everybody safe. We did testing on set. We had a really closed type of environment, and we were really fortunate because so much of the film took place outside. Once we brought everyone in and then cleared testing and stuff, we just really shot inside of that. Some of the other stuff we had to was much more surgical than it otherwise would have been; we just had to be really really specific and tight about what we were doing and how we were doing it.
And I’m not trying to sound so positive either; it was tremendously difficult as well. I would just say first, on the positive side, I feel so fortunate because I can’t fathom this past year if we hadn’t done it. I have struggles with mental health, along with most of humanity at this point, and just for me it was kind of soul saving to have something to make. It’s just a gift that I can’t fathom a year without. It gave me something to focus on in the face of something that felt so helpless. And we got to take our kids up and live on set with everyone; it was just a really special thing that I’ll never forget.
But it was also just super challenging. We shot it all in just 13 days. We faced some massive fires up in Oregon that rolled in halfway through our shoot. We literally woke up in the middle of the night and you could barely see outside, and we had to call an audible and move the entire cast and crew up to Forks, Washington, which just happens to sit right on the ocean so it was much cleaner air. We re-found locations the next morning and kept shooting by that afternoon, and somehow, it just all worked. The whole thing was just such a testament to having an incredible group of people who believe in something they’re making and are all there for the same reason; there’s almost nothing you can’t overcome together. In some ways, it was the simplest and most free that I’ve ever shot, and in other ways, it was the most unbelievably challenging. Something about the combination of those two things just leaves a mark and feels really special after you get through it.
What do you hope audiences take away from the film?
I think that I would just love people to just have an experience that’s good for their heart, maybe causes them to look back and think about their life. Sometimes, I think life just happens so fast to all of us, and I think the movie is a little bit of a reflection; it’s a reflection on being young; it’s a reflection on growing up in a very complicated time in history. For someone who’s in that process of figuring out their life, I hope it’s empowering and enabling. And for those of us that are a little further down the road, I hope it’s good to spend time in the shoes of hearts that are a little younger. It certainly had a soften effect on me as we made it.
You can pre-order Samantha Rose right here on iTunes and also listen to our full conversation with Andrew on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Hungry for more?! Check out the links below:
Samantha Rose on iTunes
Samantha Rose review
Full Audio Podcast with Andrew Morgan
Long Gone By review
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!