deep fried movies

Year – 2015
Decade – 2010s
Director – Jon Watts
Cinematographer – Larkin Seiple; Matthew J. Lloyd
Genre – Thriller
Keywords – Neo Noir; Set in a Single Day; Made for Under a Million
Studio – Focus World
Filming Locations – Colorado (Fountain and Colorado Springs)
Budget – $800,000
Aspect Ratio – 2.39
Format – Digital

The Movie
A pair of 10-year-olds in rural Colorado take a joy ride in a cop car they find unattended, unaware that the vehicle’s owner – a corrupt sheriff played by Kevin Bacon – has something in the trunk he’s definitely going to want back. Pulling inspiration from Jean-Pierre Melville, Sergio Leone and violent coming of age stories such as River’s Edge and Over the Edge, this sinewy neo noir was shot largely in director Jon Watts’ hometown of Fountain, Colorado for just $800,000. The film impressed Marvel execs enough after premiering at Sundance that the studio tapped Watts to helm their latest Spider-Man incarnation, ultimately leading to a trio of web-slinger adventures starring Tom Holland.

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Scene Breakdowns

After Cop Car opens with a montage of shots establishing the rural Colorado setting, the movie establishes its two young protagonists with this two-minute tracking shot of the boys walking along the plains while they repeat curse words back and forth.

Here’s director Jon Watts on that long take…

“My favorite moment to shoot was the opening tracking shot. I always had that in my head. It’s such a little thing, but the camera actually passes through the fence. It’s tracking along with them as they say their cuss words — and that’s something I’ve actually done, I actually have had that conversation — and they get to the fence and they stop, but the camera keeps going. It’s a trick. You have to rig the fence up in this crazy way so that the camera and the track can squeeze through without looking like the fence is broken, because it’s a real fence that’s 100 miles long. The camera than looks back and watches them through the fence and as they climb through and walk off into the distance. It’s a long, slow tracking shot. We did it late in the schedule but I was very, very happy when we got that.” (via IndieWire)

Watts on how the young leads handled both the film’s gun violence and the opening scene’s deluge of profanity…

“They were never playing with (the guns); it was like, they were handed it, did the scene and handed it back. I underestimated just how extreme people’s reactions would be to those images. People really flip out in the theater; they just squirm and can’t watch.
The cuss words were much more contentious (for the young actors) than anything with the guns or the violence. They were like, “Do we really have to say these words?” as if they were going to somehow get in trouble. “No, it’s OK, your characters are saying them,” and their parents were like, “It’s fine, we understand.” (via Fangoria)

After disposing of a body in the woods, sheriff Kevin Bacon returns to a clearing to find his patrol vehicle gone. This long take (roughly 2 minutes and 20 seconds) finds him frantically searching for the car before calling into police dispatch.

Here’s a shot-by-shot breakdown of the prelude to the climactic shootout. With the boys locked in the back of the police car and Shea Whigham lying in wait under a windmill with a rifle, Bacon’s truck pulls up.

Here’s Watts on constructing that final shootout…

“No one was there at the same time, because of everyone’s weird schedule. We would shoot the Kevin piece, and then we would shoot the parts with the other actors; very rarely were they all on set at the same time. Then we’d shoot the kids reacting, like, a week later. I had storyboarded the whole thing very specifically, so we knew how it all fit together, and it was just a matter of going through and getting the shots.” (via Fangoria)

Annotations

Director Jon Watts on the making of Cop Car and his advice to aspiring filmmakers…

“You have to make things and keep making things. Cop Car was made with all of my friends. I wrote it with my best friend. I’m really close with Cody Ryder and Alicia Van Couvering, who produced it. I’m really tight with both of the DPs. You get really scrappy when you’re making things for zero dollars, and you just have to keep thinking like that. It’s not like, ‘Oh, we now have a little bit more money, let’s do things differently.’ If you just keep boiling it down to the simplest possible way to make it, I think that always ends up being the best. We were able to talk all of the mistakes we made on various projects and music videos and learn from them along the way. I really felt we got to do Cop Car the way we wanted to. There was no one there to tell us this was the right way or wrong way to do it. I’m really happy with the way it came out — not just the movie, but with the experience.” (via IndieWire)

Watts on the genesis of Cop Car’s script…

“It’s based on a recurring dream I’ve had since I was a little kid. The movie was shot right where I grew up; we basically walked through those same fields when I was 10. And I always had this dream where I’m that age, in the passenger seat of my mom’s car, and my friend Travis, who’s also 10, is driving around our town, trying to pass people, who recognize us but aren’t stopping. He keeps going faster and faster and I’m getting more and more nervous that something bad is going to happen, and then I wake up. I thought there was something evocative about that situation and that feeling, and I toyed with the idea that maybe it was a police car. Then I pitched it to (Cop Car co-writer Chris ford), and he was like, “Well, whose car is it?” At that point, we realized we had a story, and we sat down and worked it out.” (via Fangoria)

Watts on casting his two young leads…

“We had a big nationwide casting search, and I really liked James, who was in New Jersey, and I really like Hays, who was in Virginia, I think. Both of them just seemed serious; they seemed like they could take these situations seriously. They never seemed like they were acting. They were just being themselves. I cast both of them without knowing who would be who, and without ever seeing them together. We flew them out to Colorado and I had them read both roles, and then it became totally obvious who should be who.” (via Entertainment Weekly)

Watts on how the film was financed…

“I sent the script to (producers) Cody (Ryder) and Alicia (Van Couvering), and they put together this modest budget, and Alicia found someone who would pay for one half and Cody found someone who would pay for the other half. Alicia was able to set up the foreign sales based on it being a genre film and the script, since that type of fare travels so well. That was really our saving grace. She also pitched that we’d able to get a slightly recognizable name in the lead role and not a complete unknown. With that in mind it was just like, “Alright, let’s pick our start date.” You just decide you’re going to do it. When you tell people you’re making it, people start getting involved.” (via IndieWire)

Watts on how Kevin Bacon ended up in his $800,000 indie…

“That was very fortunate. My fiancé is a manager and she works at the same company as Kevin’s manager. She liked the script and she was like, “Why don’t you get Kevin Bacon to be in it?” And I never thought we’d even be able to approach someone like that. He’s a huge movie star! [Laughs] But she told me that he had a window after The Following and before he goes on a Bacon Brothers tour, so (Kevin’s rep) David Schiff read it and then Kevin read it and he liked it. He liked the idea of it being a visual  performance, and he did have this tiny window, so we moved the shoot date up two months so that we could have him.” (via IndieWire)

Watts on the scene where Bacon uses a shoestring to open a locked car door, which takes the character multiple attempts…

“I always knew that it had to be longer than it was supposed to be, and really, really frustrating. But that’s a tricky thing, because it’s frustrating to watch as the audience. We cut that so many times: a little bit longer, a little bit shorter. Just back and forth, back and forth. Because it had to be just right, so you were frustrated but not bored, or that it didn’t seem like a mistake. Some people have seen the movie and they’re still like, “It needs a little bit of tightening up in the middle,” but it was always totally intentional. Because it’s so true: in movies, everyone is such a genius. Everyone is so good at everything that there’s no stakes. But I was like, “I think that would really take forever. That is so hard.” And I wanted to show that.” (via Entertainment Weekly)

Watts on his Cop Car references…

“The biggest thing was probably watching Sergio Leone movies again. Like, watching The Good, The Bad And The Ugly again. A Fistful Of Dollars. Like, the landscapes obviously. But also the idea of drawing out tension and not being afraid to linger on someone’s face while they’re thinking. Or waiting. Like, I love that. Just a nice reminder of what you can do with a few simple sounds to create the space. That was great. You watch that and then you watch, like, some David Lean movies again. And you’re like ‘yep – huge landscapes. I can make the character tiny.’” (via Den of Geek)

Watts on the film’s Sundance premier…

“We were in a very fortunate situation when we went to Sundance. We made the movie so cheaply that we had already broken even with just our foreign sales. We made the movie for $800,000, so Sundance was just fun for us. There wasn’t that pressure of like, “Oh, my god, if we don’t sell it for enough money or sell it at all everyone is going to be mad at us.” So it was great in that regard, but it was nervewracking too because it was the first time I had ever shown it in front of a crowd.” (via IndieWire)

Behind the Scenes