Most people felt driftless during the COVID pandemic in 2020-21. Tim Connery used that time to write his latest feature film.
“The Driftless,” which took the writer/director four years to shoot and produce, will have its Quad Cities premiere on Tuesday, Sept. 1 at 7 p.m. at The Last Picture House (325 E. 2nd St., Davenport). Connery will do a post-film Q & A with two of his cast, QC actors Tristan Tapscott and Justin Marxen.
The IMDB summary says: “Deep river valleys, tall limestone bluffs sawing through the sky... thousands of years ago, this unique portion of the Midwest escaped the crushing effects of the giant Ice Age glaciers. But with its scenic beauty, this preserved primal landscape also conceals unimaginable terrors: Mississippi River cults, accursed liquor, time-altering artifacts, and blood-thirsty vengeance from beyond the grave — four terrifying tales of the macabre Midwest.”
NOTE: You can see a trailer below.
It’s a 108-minute anthology of a four stories, strung around a theme of a shop of antiques and oddities, from Connery, a 39-year-old Dubuque native, who graduated from film school at Columbia College Chicago in 2009. He’s made two previous features, “Black Web,” and “Death to Metal,” saying “The Driftless” is his most ambitious project yet, starting filming in fall 2021, and finishing in July 2024.
“I knew I really wanted to just kind of like tap into actual horror, try to make something that was more heady, scary, dark, disturbing, that kind of stuff,” he said in an Aug. 27 interview with WVIK. Tapscott (a veteran of Circa ’21 in Rock Island) is a big fan.
“I’ve been in this business for a long time and it’s one of my all-time favorite projects,” he said Thursday. “The script is incredible, it features an insane crew at the top of their game, and some stellar performances… I was so proud to be part of it when we shot it, and even more proud to be part of it now.”
“The finished product is something special. I watched it in awe and I couldn’t believe I was in it!” Tapscott said by email. “It’s one of those singular movie going experiences that you never forget.”
“We shot this in the Driftless region in Dubuque - an area that is overwhelming with beauty which is the perfect setting for the horror that unfolds,” he added. “It was filmed (our section at least) in the fall of 2021 and I was able to work my good friend Justin Marxen and that’s always a thrill. And Tim Connery is one of the best filmmakers out there. Once the business REALLY discovers him, the dudes behind ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms’ better look out!”
What is the Driftless Region?
The Driftless area covers parts of four states (Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois), and gets its name since it was never covered by ice during the Last Glacial Period, so the area lacks the characteristic glacial deposits known as drift. Its landscape is characterized by steep hills, forested ridges, deeply carved river valleys, and karst geology with spring-fed waterfalls and cold-water trout streams.
Connery hopes his film named for the region will raise people’s awareness about the unusual topography and scenic vistas.
“The brand recognition of the region has really kind of exploded in the last decade for whatever reason,” he said Thursday. “It just kind of feels like you hear people talking about it more. You see it especially in my neck of the woods and north of us, you see businesses named after it. So it's definitely had a recognition renaissance of people knowing about it and talking about it.”
Many people already know very little about the Midwest, he said. “So to talk about something as niche as the Driftless Region, people are always shocked to find out that the Midwest isn't just like flat and cornfields. Mind you, it's mostly that as you know. But it was fun to kind of educate people from an actual geographical standpoint with something like a vehicle, like a horror film.”
“It’s just such a unique part of Iowa in the Midwest that I think people oftentimes overlook when they think about this region,” Connery said. “And obviously there's a component of it too as a writer. They always say write from what you know. So obviously, I know the southern part of the Driftless Region very well since I've lived 35 of 40 years of life in this area, spending time on the river, hiking trails, all those sorts of things. And as a writer and a filmmaker, when you go new places, even close by to home, you're always just kind of getting ideas and inspiration from oftentimes like the weirdest, strangest places.”
In the film – which premiered last October in Manchester, England at Grimmfest – the theme is the Driftless Antiques and Oddities store. The setup there is basically if you purchase something from the store and you tip Antique Al, who's the owner of the store, he'll give you the story of how that item found its way into his store.
“And basically, most of these stories have a dark background of what exactly happened,” Connery said. “So that's kind of the framing device. And, you know, I've always loved the anthology format.”
His day job is making promotional videos and short films for commercial and corporate clients, he also made a number of separate episodes for “The Driftless” over several years, so it would be easier to finance himself.
Paying for the films
“Making movies is really, really expensive. So I've been through the process of making two feature films, super low budget,” Connery said. “We crowdfunded parts of those first two feature films, and I knew I didn't want to crowdfund again. It's just you can only pump that well so many times.”
“I knew that I wanted to make something bigger in scope, and I wanted to make sure that I had access to better talent, better equipment, better crew,” he said. “I just wanted to show the world like what we could do. And one of the bad things about living in the Midwest as a filmmaker is you don't necessarily have access to those big money pools -- those investors that have like deep pockets that want to take a chance on someone like me.”
“Filmmaking is a test in patience, always,” Connery said of the multi-year process. “Because even if you did get production done in one month, let's say, and you did it all, you still have a lot of post-production to do. So whereas when we wrapped the Pella, Iowa shoot, we walked away with a full cut of the whole movie because I had my editor on set cutting the thread story, the antique store stuff, which was considerably smaller segments than the bigger sub-stories.”
“So, we had a full 2-hour, 10-minute cut when we left Pella, which is crazy,” he said. Most of the locations were in Dubuque and Dubuque County, including Tapscott’s scenes on a Mississippi River beach at Finley’s Landing Park, between Dubuque and Guttenberg.
In “The Pool Keeper” section, that was shot at the Best Western in Dubuque because they have a huge pool atrium “that's just like plucked right out of like the '70s and '80s indoor pool atrium,” Connery said. The antiques shop was the only location not in the Driftless Region, but at North Creek Antique Shop out in Pella, which “ended up just being the perfect location look-wise and infrastructure-wise and the owners personality-wise to open up their doors and let us play and have fun for three days,” he said.
The 20-actor cast also includes busy QC child actors Ben and Betsy Bergthold of Davenport, in “The Pool Keeper.”
Tapscott plays the lead in the “Papa Bait” segment, going on a road trip with his girlfriend, and towards the end of the trip, his plan is to propose to her. Marxen plays his best friend, and there’s a scene where they discuss a strategy talk about how to propose. “There's kind of more than meets the eye in that scene that you find out later on,” Connery said.
“What ends up happening is the whole proposal on the beach that they're camping at ends up getting botched, because a cult of masked weird people show up on the beach and, without spoiling too much, interrupts the proposal,” he said.
Of Ben and Betsy, Connery said he’d heard a lot of good things about them and their family.
“And knowing that they had already been in a large number of projects, I suspected that their parents would be down for what we were— it was basically one day, but it was a really late— I don't think we wrapped them until like 2 a.m., because we were shooting all overnight for the poolkeepers so that we could have total access to that whole pool atrium.”
Range of film screenings
He’s really looking forward to seeing Last Picture House for the first time, which was opened primarily by co-owners (filmmakers and Bettendorf natives) Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, most famous for the monster 2018 horror hit, “A Quiet Place.”
“If you love cinema and you're in Iowa, it's hard to not know about them. So that's equally cool,” Connery said.
He premiered the film at Grimmfest because of its reputation as a prime horror fest.
“They have a great reputation, great festival,” Connery said. “They put us up for the week-long event, and we had a great time. I had my wife out there with me, which was great, and a friend of ours showed up for it as well. So, obviously exploring Manchester was really cool. It was only my second time to England in general, my first time to Manchester. It was just a great experience all around.”
After playing at festivals throughout the U.S., he also was proud to show in his hometown, in April at the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival.
“We had essentially sold-out screenings and then we won Audience Choice,” Connery said. “That was the first opportunity for most people locally to see the movie if they weren't actually a part of making it. That was really, really cool because at that point they had been hearing a lot about it. I had been yapping about the rest of the festivals we had been to.
“And finally, we got to our Iowa premiere. And, yeah, I mean, your hometown crowd is always a super validating experience too because my friends and colleagues and some of my clients were able to see it,” he said. “I just know that they would shoot straight with me if they did not like it. My favorite part is always just like asking people after the fact because the 3 main substories are so different from each other to see like what resonated with people. And there is always a different answer from different people.”
Connery also is looking forward to the post-film Q & A, with Tapscott and Marxen.
“The idea of someone sitting down and paying attention for two hours, that means a lot to me, and I don't take that for granted,” he said. “That's why I just love, love meeting people, hearing what they think, whether they liked it or not, or what segment they like the most, and hearing their questions.
"There's been some great questions about some of the different components of the film that brought insight to me that I didn't even know when I was writing it. So that's always just such a cool part of the filmmaking process that I just love.”
You can reserve tickets for Tuesday’s showing $11 for adults; $9.50 for seniors, military and children) HERE.
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