Jarrett Bryant’s award winning film, Maxie, is premiering at the Broadway Metro Saturday April 29. His film follows Maxie and his girlfriend Sid, an unhoused young couple, as they navigate the streets of Eugene and Springfield. Caught in the chains of drug addiction they show an intimate peak into a very real, very Eugene issue.
According to a report by the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce there are over 3,000 unhoused folks in Lane County. Oregon also ranks first in illicit drug use, according to this report from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in 2021. This film plunges into what drug addiction and homelessness looks like with Miles Dixon (Maxie) and Liv Tavernier (Sid) giving captivating and inspired performances.
The Torch sat down with the cast and crew, several of which are Lane Community College alumni, to discuss the challenges of filming during the pandemic, character choices, and what inspired such an honest take on addiction.
Present for the interview were Jarrett Bryant, writer/director and local Eugenian; Josh Schwartz music composer; Henry Huntington, Director of photography/ editor/producer; Malakhai Schnell who played the role of Nathan; and Evan Curby who played Maxie’s drug dealer. All, except for Jarrett Bryant, are LCC alumni.
Schnell, who was a former co-president of LCC’s Student Production Association, talked about the challenges of playing Nathan, Sid’s brother, recently released from prison and dealing with family drama and debt. “Playing Nathan took a lot of preparation. To be somebody who kind of had continuously had their life go the way they didn’t want it to. He’s a very capable person and yet gets pushed to a lot of bad things and has a lot of bad outcomes for himself. A lot of taking on the role was just digesting like what does it really feel like to end up in prison, what does it really feel like to go down that route.”
Schnell also spoke about the difficulties in the script changes. Bryant wrote the script in 2019 but had to switch gears once the pandemic hit. Bryant said, “It was trying, because when we started filming on February 15 we had maybe shot two weekends. So we had a lot to go, but now we knew that we had to alter it and the question was do we wait until COVID goes away, or do we continue shooting and rewrite the screenplay?” Cast and crew decided to pivot and add COVID to the plot.
The film, told entirely from the perspective of a few main characters, shows hints of COVID but the characters don’t really understand what’s happening. “It’s a time capsule. Someone watching this film 10 years from now they’re going to think back and remember, oh yeah, that’s what it was like everything was dead downtown,” Bryant reflected.
When asked about why certain locations were chosen, Huntington discussed the guerilla filmmaking style and what he looked for in a scene. “There’s just kind of picking out the grittiest looking spots of Eugene, or aspects of beauty in Eugene. I think that’ll be one of the more fun parts for local people who come in to see a film that’s produced in Eugene and Springfield, just to be like, hey I’ve been there. It’s fun to see your local spots in a film.”
Bryant said that while filming one particularly raw scene, there was a young couple arguing at the gas station near their film spot. The couple looked and sounded like Maxie and Sid. They rode bikes and Huntington said that their clothes even looked the same. An eerie reminder that art mimics reality.
Eugene is known for its natural beauty but there is also a darker side to the small town, or as Maxie would say, “It’s not that small.” Maxie gives locals a feeling of nostalgia while also showing the raw reality that many community members face every day. The film will premiere at the Broadway Metro Saturday, April 29, tickets can be found here. The full interview with the cast and crew can be found on the Torch’s YouTube channel.
