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McKinnon serves up some southern cooking
It's a late summer, sweaty day in Georgia when we arrive on set of the director Ray McKinnon's latest film Randy and the Mob. We are not at a southern plantation house, we are not at some back-wood hillbilly swamp fest, but at an unassuming gas station in the middle of the road suburban sprawl off Bankhead highway in Douglasville. This smells of diesel fuel and southern middle class boredom. According to McKinnon, that is exactly the vibe he wants to evoke, "With this story I was intrigued by a number of things, one is a middle class southern small town and that society, as opposed to a white poor working class society that we've seen a lot of movies done about, or your aristocratic society that we've seen a lot of movies done about. I'm from a middle class town and family so that intrigued me". McKinnon is no newcomer to the film scene. His film The Accountant won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 2002 and his film Chrystal (2004) is a feature length film starring Billy Bob Thornton. The creative structure behind McKinnon's films has evolved with the help of his two southern friends and collaborators from Ginny Mule Productions, Lisa Blount (Ray's wife, actor/producer) and Walton Goggins (long-time friend, actor/producer). Ray writes the script, then the three come together for an editing and planning process. How does McKinnon approach story telling? "Certain characters that I've met along the way intrigued me," he notes, "the main one being the archetype for Randy, the wheeler-dealer, or the good ol' boy who's got his cell-phone and his show truck. It's kinda like somebody's molded Randy and I've often thought of a small town as like a third parent— and the town will say 'be a man, here's what a man is, do this.' "Also, in a small town you can have grudges that go back to the third grade. In a big city chances are it's mostly anonymous. Where I come from and in my family, there's a lot of storytelling, and I think that helped my ability to lie. You know good writing is lying on paper. So much of modern storytelling has become so literal. All these reality based shows, or if we see a movie we need to understand absolutely everything in a literal way, it takes away from this magic, or wonder of not knowing everything. I like to go to movies that make me think afterwards."
Randy and the Mob, in a nutshell, is an oddball comedy about good ol' boy Randy, from a middle-class Atlanta suburb. Randy has an identical-twin gay brother, Cecil (McKinnon plays both brothers), and he's married to a clinically depressed baton teacher with Carpal Tunnel syndrome (Lisa Blount). Randy has money problems, and soon is in hock with the mob. Enter Tino Armani (Walton Goggins), the very odd mobster who has a very odd effect on everyone. When Tino arrives things begin to change. "Armani, like the suit, no relation," says Goggins about his character. "I am I-talian... you don't even know if he's Italian, maybe he's a very lonely guy, he's a buttoned up isolated guy. He sees the world thru his particular pair of sunglasses. He was raised in various foster homes and kinda shuffled around a lot, never had a family to speak of and maybe he assumed this identity who knows. I don't think we've ever seen a mobster quite like this guy before. "I don't know that he didn't come here looking for answers certainly, but he's been a catalyst for everyone else to discover who they truly are, individually. Spending time with people one on one, he changes them, he's a good listener and he tells these stories that may seem profound to other people and we never know if he's intending them to be that way or if they're just literal." With Randy and the Mob, we have a film about the south being made in the south by native southerners. These native sons and daughters have all worked in Hollywood only to return home years later to the place where they all began. The real south can't be faked. We are claiming our own. With Georgia's new sales and use tax exemption law having passed, with the Georgia Production Partnership (GPP) fortification, and with homegrown filmmakers such as Ray McKinnon cranking out quality films, we are beginning to see the Atlanta film industry revitalized. cinemATL.com visited on location with Randy and the Mob on day 15 of shooting — 2 days before production ended, 8/27/05. Lisa Ward is a video artist living, working and teaching video in Atlanta Georgia. |
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