Desert Cool
Whatever you do, don’t ask writer-director Francis Galluppi to put a cell phone in his movies.
Matt O’Neill and Francis Galluppi
It’s the early 1970s. A travelling salesman (producer-director-actor Jim Cummings, Halloween Kills) peddling Ginsu-like knives pulls into a gas station on a lonely desert road. The pump’s empty, so he goes into the diner next door to wait for the gas truck. It’s hot AF, and the air conditioner is busted, but the waitress (Jocelin Donahue, The House of the Devil) has one of those bulbous coffee pots ready. Eventually a pair of bank robbers (Richard Brake, Mandy, Barbarian, and Dark Winds’ Nicholas Logan – find that show), a couple of wannabe bandits (Ryan Masson and Sierra McCormick), and a retired couple on a road trip (Robin Bartlett and Gene Jones), among others, descend on the diner to wait for gas. Things get tense. Fast. Then it all goes to hell.
That’s the short version of first time feature director Francis Galluppi’s The Last Stop in Yuma County, a familiar but subversive and frequently hilarious homage to that most singular of sub-genres: the Suspicious Strangers Stuck in a Room Together thriller. It’s so singular it doesn’t even have a name, but the elements have shown up in everything from Assault on Precinct 13 to Free Fire, though ask Galluppi where it came from and he’s not quite sure. “I spent a lot of time touring in vans and ending up in these roadside diners. I’m a very neurotic person. I would walk into these diners and always feel like all the locals in this room know something that I don’t. That was maybe the catalyst. I’m not a nihilistic person, but my storytelling is. And I feel like it’s been so long since we’ve seen something like this.”
Lean, unapologetically nasty and laser focused on its WTF? destination, Yuma County is the natural next step in Galluppi’s artistic evolution, from music (hence the vans) to filmmaking. “I was always more infatuated with film than I was with music,” begins Galluppi, practically dropping into his Zoom seat after arriving from Los Angeles the night before for BIFAN (where the film picked up Best of Bucheon and Audience awards this year). “I was always the guy at the back of the van with headphones on, but I broke my wrist in 2016 and couldn’t play drums for six months so I picked up a camera and made a short film around the house with my wife; no crew or anything,” he adds. Drawing comparisons to the godfather of DIY indies, Sam Raimi – a role model for Ryland Tews too, also at BIFAN this year – Galluppi roped in bandmates and friends and started assigning jobs. “‘You’re going to be an AD and you’re going to be a grip,’ and they were all ‘What the fuck is that?’” he says with a laugh. “I watched The Evil Dead and you could just tell that Bruce [Campbell] and Sam were best buddies and they just went out into the woods and did this thing for no money and had a blast doing it. That was how I did my first short film, kind of a love letter to Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
“It was very disturbing,” chimes in producer Matt O’Neill. He does not side-eye Galluppi.
That short was High Desert Hell (2019), and it brought Galluppi to Bucheon. Kind of. High Desert Hell debuted at Horror Hound Film Fest in Cincinnati in the illustrious 7am time slot the morning after opening night. “I actually got up in the morning and went,” recalls O’Neill. “He was one of four people,” Galluppi adds. “I flew out with my dad, and he didn’t even go to the screening.” The upshot is that O’Neill and Galluppi met in Cincinnati and Galluppi found himself with a producer. “I was writing stories based on locations that I had free access to and I found this location in Palmdale. At the time I didn’t know it was such an overused location,” says Galluppi of Yuma County’s origins. “I took a bunch of pictures and wrote the script specifically for that location.” O’Neill introduced Local Boogeyman owner James Claeys into the mix and it was off to the races. “James said, ‘I’m going to give you US$50,000.’ I thought that was insane. I could make four movies for that much,” Galluppi chuckles.
In true indie spirit bigger players were involved at various times, O’Neill recalling one, “Involved a big name who wasn’t right for the movie, and who’d be paid $3 million for two days.” O’Neill and Galluppi shake their heads in unison. The option expired, but they damned the torpedoes and reached out to actors like horror icon Brake, landing the likes of Cummings, Jones and Re-Animator and The Flophouse favourite, Castle Freak’s Barbara Crampton. “We did get lucky … but the script was so damn good. And that was what hooked me,” O’Neill says. “It was a, ‘Wow! We have to do this.’ That’s what got everybody on board, and we just kept plugging along.”
Despite the solid indie darling cast, “We still had no money. It was all bullshit,” Galluppi picks up. “And James … had been joking, saying, ‘I’m just going to sell my house to finance it.’ I realised that nobody wanted to make this movie. It’s a Western. It’s a period piece. It’s all the terms that Hollywood throws around and nobody wants to make. So I called [James] and said, ‘I don't know if you're serious or not, but if you are we can make the movie that’s on the page and nobody is going to be there to tell us what to do. And he sold his house and we were up and running. It was about as indie as you can possibly get.”
Initially, Galluppi had visions of a true, guerrilla film, with no permits, no trailers – in Palmdale, where it averages about 40º in the summer – and with his scruffy crew that learnt their jobs in YouTube tutorials (like his script supervisor did). “I come from a punk rock background, that ‘Fuck the system and let’s just go’ attitude,” laughs Galluppi. None of that happened because O’Neill was on hand to wield labour regulations and permits and do it. “It was that sort of balance that really worked.” And, no. Galluppi wasn’t shooting with a bunch of amateurs. He himself picked up the essentials while working with a record label that produced music videos and commercials, and the bass player in a band Galluppi was playing while he was making High Desert Hell was also a cinematographer. It’s Los Angeles. Everyone has a second film-related job. He couldn’t help but he introduced Galluppi to working pro Mac Fiskin – now his right hand.
Yuma County is cut from the same dusty, proverbially sun-burnt cloth as Bad Times at the El Royale, Feast and Legion – which marry the strangers-in-a-diner trope to a hyperlink noir, creature feature and biblical apocalypse thriller respectively – and the grimy, violent nihilism of pre-reactionary Don Siegel (Coogan’s Bluff) and Sam Pekinpah (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia), the latter of which Galluppi cites as a major influence. It’s got a gloriously retro-grindhouse credit sequence, creative shot compositions angles and a warm golden glow that gets more fiery each passing minute. Yuma County is one of those movies you can feel when you watch it; the overexposed spaces are familiar from scads of westerns as well as genre corkers Rubber, Fall and The Devil’s Rejects. What sets it apart is how gleefully Galluppi (who’s also producer and editor) plays with the familiar conventions, both narrative and aesthetic. That and its funny, rambling, vivid characters. Galluppi considers himself one of those directors that’s open to collaboration, which served Brake’s menacing bank robber well; Bartlett and Jones were able to improvise many of their scenes. “Their skills are so sharp, and they’re just at the of their game,” says Galluppi. He’s not gushing, but he’d be within his rights. “There was one morning I switched a scene where I needed them talking in the background, and I wrote them two pages of dialogue. They both fucking nailed it.” Yuma County warrants repeat viewing in order to catch the Easter eggs and background conversations; no shit there’s a Waco joke. “If you really pay attention you pick up little nuggets and they’re some of my favourite parts of the movie,” adds O’Neill.
With the exception of maybe John Sayles, no one stays indie forever. Galluppi is about to pull a Chloé Zhao/Josh Trank/Gareth Edwards, who got called up to the big leagues after their first indie successes. In a bit of full circle serendipity he’s been tapped to direct a new Evil Dead film for Ghost House, and his bleak, gritty, Gold Rush-era baby, By the Skin of One’s Teeth, is in development at Taylor Sheridan’s (Wind River, Hell or High Water) Bosque Ranch. Galluppi is sticking to period action, partly because of personal taste, partly because, “I fucking hate cell phones. Technology dates movies so quickly.” And he’s sticking with memorable character actors that can disappear into massive personalities. “I mean, at the end of the day you don’t remember Star Wars because of the big the climax. You remember it because of Luke Skywalker.” — DEK