Filmmaker Statement

Pigeonhearts is my UNCSA my second-year film when we made this little movie I was sophomore, Emma was a senior in the drama school, and Lucas was a freshman. The semester before I saw Emma Geer in the rehearsal of a Tennessee William's play 27 WAGONS FULL OF COTTON and I was absolutely floored by her performance. That night I decided I was going to write my next movie for her. That summer I fled the south on a whim to live and work in a kitchen on a ranch in Montana. I was 18 years old, trying to figure out who I was and I was wondering what I was going to do when I got back to school. On the 4th of July, I was on the phone with Kevin Cutrara, and he encouraged me to pursue screenwriting, which I was very afraid of attempting at the time. So I switched from the producing program to the screenwriting program and starting wondering what I had to say, and I really didn't know. So I waited and listened for something to come. At the same time I was trying to get a job on Jeff Nichol's LOVING that was gearing up to shoot that fall. I remember watching The LOVING STORY, the documentary that the film is based on, I remember watching it on my laptop in a cabin crying because I was reminded of the southern landscape I had known my whole life and for the first time I realized I missed it. In August I left Montana to work as the UPM on Matt Brown's short ELK GARDEN, which later became the feature film MAINE that premiered at Tribeca. We were shooting in Whitetop Mountain Virginia, we were a bunch of filmmakers, and actors living in this little house away from the world, I slept on an air mattress on the porch. It was a dream. Right next to our house was an old abandon farmhouse. One night the production designer insisted we go inside and have a seance in there. So we crawled in through the broken window, careful not to cut ourselves on the shards of glass. We explored this place stuck in time, had our seance in the dark. It was fun, but school was about to start back up in a week and I needed to deliver a script. The next day I went back to the house alone and it was a very different feeling. I remember standing upstairs staring at this window with a tattered curtain, I was thinking about where my life was headed and what I was leaving behind in the process. At the moment I released that I had already left a chapter of youth that I could no longer return to and at that moment I knew the feeling I wanted to capture in this movie and I began to write. Then I went back to school with this script and that's when I met Lucas, one of the most wonderful humans on the planet, and he was perfect with Emma. He joined the team and we were unstoppable together. I'm so grateful to their commitment to this film. Through our rehearsals, we discovered these characters together.  I wanted to capture a portrait of youth. Our first encounter with love and the haunting memory it leaves behind. Many things have changed since we've made this movie, we've all grown up a bit, but It'll always have a special place in my heart.