Tina Kakadelis
The road to making a film is long and arduous. It is honestly a miracle that a film of any scale gets made, but there’s something a little more miraculous when it comes to independent films. Often, they are low budget and lack support of a major studio or distributor. Independent films are the backbone of the movie industry and have the ability to make waves in the more mainstream world of Hollywood. Director/co-writer Drew Saplin hopes to be part of this change with their upcoming feature debut, Cohetes. The film, on the precipice of pre-production, is a take on the classic roadtrip flick where a family of pyrotechnicians race down the coast of Texas with a truckload of volatile, and very illegal, fireworks on the 4th of July.
Saplin sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to discuss his reality TV and Terrence Malick roots, the surreal pastoral essence of Texas’ east coast, and the equity pay model they’ll be implementing that first made waves on Sing Sing. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Film Obsessive: This is your first feature film, but you have quite the background. Can you talk a little about the work you’ve done in the past and how it’s led to this new step in your career?
Drew Saplin: My background is all across the board, and the film I’m making is a culmination of everything I’ve ever done. I started out on a Terrence Malick film called To the Wonder. One of our producers on this film, Morgan Pollitt, worked on that movie as Sarah Green’s assistant. That’s where we met, and I actually called her up for this project. I was like, ‘hey, I need to make my first feature’, and she’s like, ‘let’s go’.
I was a staff P.A. on Arrested Development, too. Being around comedians all the time made me understand that these people are actually great dramatists. A lot of comedians are great at the drama part because they’re incredible at timing.
I kind of cut my teeth on that and then LA scared me. Some of the people there I couldn’t understand very well, so I moved back to Austin. I was like, I’m gonna hide out here and then go out to LA accordingly. I’ve got some best friends in LA still to this day. One of them being Brad Simpson, who’s also producing this movie. And then Via Bia, who’s another LA folk.
Once I came back, I started doing a show called Shipping Wars, where we just moved weird shit across the country all the time. Which is what Cohetes is about. We’re moving weird shit down the coast of Texas. Shipping Wars was much more run-and-gun. I can drive a Chrysler Town and Country like nobody’s business.
You would get on the highway, get in line with the 18-wheeler, and then what you would have to do is open the side door and have the camera shooting out of the side door. Then, as the junior field producer, you drive past the truck, barreling down the highway at 80 mph. We’ll get what we call a ground car. Usually, in places like Montana, Ohio, or Indiana, you would just do 100 miles an hour for as long as you could to get in front of the 18-wheeler. Then you would pull over really fast, unload all your shit, and wait. The 18-wheeler drives by, and you’d get a nice little pan shot, and now you gotta go catch them. With Cohetes, I was like, I want to do the safe version of that.
After Shipping Wars, I was an assistant director on a bunch of indie features. I worked a lot with some really great first-time directors. They gave me a lot of confidence as a first-time feature director to be like, ‘oh, I’m able to facilitate your vision and one day I hope I can take Tums for my own project instead of Tums for somebody else’s project’.
I worked at Rooster Teeth for the last seven years, and I made it to the very end. I feel like I beat a video game. They closed the doors, the credits rolled, and they said thank you and good night. I was directing and writing a lot of web content for them. Again, the same kind of story of this indie film run-and-gun deal where it was like, ‘Hey, we need to have a guy break through a drywall wall for $0 because it’s funny,’ and it’s like, okay, well, how do you figure that out? It was about directing those pieces that needed a lot of production with little to no money.
My day job right now is I’m the safety coordinator for the University of Texas Art Department. Anytime a student has a gun or a cigarette in their short film, they have to come talk to me about how to execute that safely.
Our movie is about transporting super-dangerous fireworks down the coast of Texas on the 4th of July. And it’s like, ‘Oh, Drew’s pretty qualified at doing that, ‘ but then in addition to that, I cannot talk about this project without talking about Allie, my wife, who’s a licensed pyrotechnician. She’s an accountant by day, pyrotechnician by night. This movie is very much a love letter to her and a story about women in leadership. It’s also a story about my own journey to being a leader. It’s a ragtag team of people coming together to try to do a dangerous thing in a certain spot.
Cohetes is a meta thing of me learning how to lead people. Ironically or coincidentally, I never can remember, Allie and I just had a child. The character in the movie, Ari, is very much an amalgam of our two personalities and then also now in our house, there’s an amalgam of our two personalities.
I’m very excited, as you can tell. The universe is giving a lot right now to us, and we’re just excited to receive it and make it happen. We’re very close to going into production in the next couple of weeks. We’re kind of buttoning up our last little bit of financing and you know, right there on the edge and ready to go.
I think Via mentioned that you guys were shooting some big festival as part of the film.
We had talks of doing Buc Days and we’re looking for other carnivals right now to shoot around. Having that Malick background is utilizing existing spaces for production value that we are then able to work inside of and work around.
Also, having a background in reality TV, it’s the same deal. A lot of directors don’t utilize it to their advantage. A lot of directors have a tendency to squeeze real hard. Like, I gotta do it my way. One of the main themes of the movie is, if you have a great team, let them go. That’s kind of this iteration as well, where it’s like, you’re going to go to a carnival and shoot the truck in the climactic scene, driving down the arcade of the carnival. Well, what happens if people get in the way? We’re not gonna run them over, but what happens if pedestrians look at the lens? How do you control that?
That kind of verisimilitude you can’t have anywhere else unless you’re doing it this way. I’m fascinated by combining these two worlds and blending the documentary, or the found elements that are existing in the world, with a narrative film. People have done that forever, using non-actors. It’s a common thing. It’s just fascinating to me. It feels very much in line with the sensibilities of the film, which are very much of an American New Hollywood feeling in a movie.
We’re ready for a new Hollywood. A new new Hollywood. I think this movie’s going to hopefully be a part of that.
I think you might be the first person who has ever put Terrence Malick and reality TV in the same sentence.
It’s the same thing. You just have different people in front of the lens.
What was so exciting to me in hearing about this project was the road trip aspect and the Americana of it all. I saw that you compared it to Little Miss Sunshine and Hell or High Water. The two movies are very different, so can you talk a little about the combination of the two and how that works thematically?
That’s a great comp, but also, I’m an Austin filmmaker and I have deep roots in the Austin film community. I always say, I’m as much of an acolyte of Richard Linklater as I am of Robert Rodriguez. This movie is kind of both, right?
Ari, the lead, and Memo, her uncle, are locked in a car physically and emotionally with a trunk full of explosives. That relationship between the two characters is a great example of the tension that we have in the movie where it’s like, hey, yes, there’s a big universal problem, there’s a truck full of explosives, but also, we don’t like each other, so we have to figure that out inside of the car and talk about it while something might explode at any moment.
I think Hell or High Water is similar to Little Miss Sunshine because of the family dynamic. I think it’s something Little Miss Sunshine does very well that we’re looking to capture—forcing disparate personalities into a small space in order to work out their differences.
If you’ve seen the deck, which we have available on our website, the characters are very archetypal on the deck, but on the page…I’m not trying to wax arrogant about how good the script is. I co-wrote it, but Samantha Bennett, my co-writer, is an incredible character writer. Anytime we’re talking about structure, I always talk it down because I’m a structuralist, so I try to talk up the characters because Sam’s the character person. The characters in the movie are so great. They seem archetypal in the deck, but ultimately, they’re all people that I’ve met in the Coastal Bend who have worked on these fireworks shows.
There’s a veteran, a woman escaping a domestic violence situation, members of the Vietnamese community, members of the Latino community. Everybody has a reason to want to get paid for this fireworks show. It showcases how even though everybody has a different reason or a different thing they’re after, they can all come together around a common goal beyond what exists in the world and actually make something happen.
We looked at a ton of ensemble movies, as we wanted to write this movie to figure out the sweet spot for characters. It’s six. You can have six people before your brain stops retaining things. Six means as long as everybody looks really different, your grandma is going to go, ‘oh, that’s the boy in the vest, we know vest boy’. Little Miss Sunshine, Galaxy Quest, Mad Max: Fury Road, and The Birdcage are all six. That’s our Little Miss Sunshine element.
With Hell or High Water and Twister, there’s a surrealism and a pastoralism that’s only captured in the Southwest. You don’t really see it a lot in other cinema. Our movie takes place along the coast of Texas, which is kind of a strange thing. In Hell or High Water, there are all these really great vistas. We’re kind of looking to capture that as well.
I think that’s where the two are meshed together. It’s high stakes, high tension, but then also high family drama and high interpersonal conflict. How do we resolve that by the end?
You’re shooting in Corpus Christi, right?
Yeah, we’re shooting in Corpus and then the radius around Corpus. Rockport Port, kind of in that area.
I have a really good friend who lives in Corpus Christi. I went to her wedding and she took us out to a beach and it was exactly like you’re describing. I’m from the Pennsylvania, Mid-Atlantic area. We have the creepy forest, you know? There’s something strange about being on the water, but also being in Texas. It is very surreal down there.
I think something I’m looking forward to, that really doesn’t exist on other coasts, is the industrial elements that have their own stark beauty, where it’s like oil refineries and wind farms. As the sun sets on them, the lights turn on and they have their own kind of Christmas tree vibe; even though what they’re doing to our climate might be detrimental, they’re still pretty.
Even with the active tension of these explosives in the back, there’s also the additional tension of the universe around them. I think it’s a world that all of us kind of share. I’m trying to keep a sense of reality because it is kind of an improbable situation; the suspension of disbelief is there. This is a thing that could happen.
Ultimately, if you create a world around the improbable that’s like our world, it’s much easier to believe, and I think easier to swallow. We’re really trying to keep a high level of verisimilitude and keep it inside our universe. There’s a fun scene that I have, and I’m really hoping to get, in a Whataburger parking lot. Whataburger started in Corpus Christi. It’s not product placement because that’s just part of Texas. We’re really excited about stuff like that and capturing the specific elements of the coastal bend that are unique to it and make it feel like a real place you would go or we’ve been before.
Something that was also very exciting, that made me interested in the project, is the equity-based pay. It sounds like something that should be taking over Hollywood. Talk a little bit about what that looks like for your specific movie. Do you think it’s sustainable for the whole industry?
Anytime I talk about the story of this movie, when I’m pitching it or talking to people about it, I have to talk about the equity model. I came up on the crew side, and there were so many times on projects that I was an AD. I’m 23 years old, I got my first big AD job, and they said, ‘It’s a $400,000 movie. You’re the first AD, so we’re going to pay you $100 a day’. I was like, what? Then, I found out after that movie wrapped it was an $800,000 movie. And I was like, ‘Why did you guys lie to me?’ Because we could pay you less.
First ADs live to be in their 50s and then usually die of heart failure because they get stressed out. I was like, okay, well, this is something I’m passionate about and I’m willing to go all the way for, how can I make this fair? How do we make filmmaking fair?
In the independent sphere, this model works very well. We learned it from Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley, who did Sing Sing. I actually got to have a coffee with Greg once. We sat down and chatted about this thing, and he gave us the tenets. Everybody on the cast and crew gets SAG scale. Then, depending on when you join the project, you get equity in the project.
The equity split is 40/60 upfront with cast and crew. Cast and crew get 40% of every dollar netted. Investors get 60% of every dollar netted until they recoup 120%. Then it goes 50/50 forever.
A lot of times, coming up on indie movies, especially early in my career, you work with these dudes who say it’s deferred pay. If the movie makes money, you’re going to make money. It’s like, okay, but it’s actually once the investors make all of their money back, and that never happens. When can I expect that to happen?
So we’re saying that if the movie makes a dollar, $0.40 of that dollar goes to the cast and crew no matter what, in whatever capacity. That’s after sales and distribution take their cut. We’re really talking about how to be very transparent. That’s worked out really well for Clint and Greg at the million-dollar level and at the $350,000 level. I’m excited to have it work for us in that capacity.
I think from a scalability standpoint…that’s where it gets tricky, right? There are still things to be worked out. I think something that needs to be worked out is sales and distribution. How can we extend this model into sales and distribution so that when there are proceeds coming in, we’re able to split everything all the time from the very first dollar? Is that talking to Taylor Swift’s people about how they did their thing? I don’t know, but that’s one caveat that we’re trying to still solve. That’s not going to get solved in this film.
The other thing is, to your point, does it work all the way up? Once we hit $5 million, once we hit $10 million, once we hit $20 million, what does that do? I don’t know what the answer is. I haven’t gotten that opportunity yet. I can speculate, though. Basically, what happens would be that you then separate your actors and crew, but there’s still a way to universally treat everyone with consideration. It is happening in the industry with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s company. They did Air under this artist equity model. They’re also doing The Accountant 2 with it as well. We don’t know what their equity share is with the cast and crew. We just know that they’ve offered it. So it could be 0.5%. I believe it is an upfront offer of equity share plus a full day rate at your union rate.
I’m just such a believer in collaboration. I think Ridley Scott said making movies is a ratfuck. It’s everybody doing everything they can to be the best they can. It is really hard and really challenging, but everybody’s working at the same time. That level of collaboration doesn’t exist in any other plastic art.
I did a movie a couple of years ago, where they’re like, ‘we’re going to really look at putting the money on screen with the actors and the camera department’. I was like, ‘Okay, well, if I don’t do a schedule, y’all aren’t making a movie even though the schedule isn’t on screen. ‘
Technically, everything we’re doing here is on screen. Everything helps move that needle forward. I think there’s room for equitable treatment across all departments. My job is to be responsible. That’s it. I don’t believe in auteurship. I believe in responsibility. At the end of the day, if the movie’s great, I get the credit. If the movie sucks, I get the credit. My job is to be responsible for everybody’s collaboration.
All I’ve ever wanted to do is make good art with my friends, and I think this is a great avenue for it. Also, the other kind of capitalist element is that this actually makes the movie cheaper. It’s 20% cheaper to do it this way. In addition to that, you wind up getting one of Robert Rodriguez’s special effects supervisors, Bob Trevino, attached to the project. People were like, how did you do that? Because he knows that if the movie’s good, he makes money. We’re not getting fresh-out-of-college folks to do work for $100 a day and then hope for the best. We’re getting veteran professionals because they’re aware they can get a share of the profits.
They’re basically treating it as an investment. It really works for both sides. I’m shocked this hasn’t been something we’ve been doing this whole time. I think the best thing Greg said was that this isn’t dogmatic. It’s a sliding thing that works for however your production needs it to work. Treat it accordingly, and make it work for you.
They have two other tenets. One is ten-hour days, five-day weeks. Why not have quality of life? Just because a bunch of dudes did a bunch of coke in the ’80s and said we can work 16-hour days doesn’t mean we have to work 16-hour days.
The other is a transparent budget with cast, crew, and investors. Why can’t I look at how much the sound guys make? Why should we hide that from one another? Everybody’s making the same across the board. There are challenges to that, like when you have a first AC who’s never produced anything look at your books and go like, ‘wait, we don’t have a locations budget, or we’ve only got $1,000 in locations budget’. You’re like, ‘yeah, yeah, don’t worry, we’re producing it, we know where that money is going. ‘ Everybody might have questions, and there might be some people who haven’t ever worked on the production end of things. Sometimes it’s scary to look at production budgets and be like, wait, there’s no porta potties, where are the porta potties? Why did you guys not think of that? We did, but they’re just hidden.
For Cohetes, how can people stay involved in the updates as you’re filming? Where should they go for that information?
We’re pretty low-profile, but we have a Film Independent sponsorship, which is great. If people want to donate to our project, they totally can. You can check for updates there, and then also donate to the project if you want. As we have people come on board and partner with us, we send out our group updates.
The goal is to go into pre-production in two weeks. Then, hopefully, have the whole thing turned around by October, which sounds insane, but it’s not because the guy we’ve got editing is a genius. He’s my favorite person. He’s good, fast, cheap, and nice.
We hope to be ready for all of our SXSW and Sundance deadlines. So excited to get it out in the world. We’re hopefully going to get picked up by some festival. I’d love to be at Sundance. I’d love to be at SXSW. Either January or March of 2026.
That’s great! And I hope you guys send me a screener when it comes out.
If you come back to SXSW, you’re going to get tickets. You’re coming to the front of the line.
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Drew!
