Low and Behold catches a snapshot of post-Katrina New Orleans

• More: Review of Low and Behold

Snow blankets the peaks of the Wasatch Mountain range as skiers fly down the slopes into the heart of Park City.

A scene from 'Low and Behold.'

Here, the cast and crew of Low and Behold have brought a little bit of the bayou to Utah. Zack Godshall, the co-writer and director, Barlow Jacobs, the co-writer, producer and star, sit in front of a fireplace at the Park City Marriott, flanked by their two co-stars, Eddie Rouse and Robert Longstreet. 

Their story is an originally southern, timely look at life in New Orleans after one of the biggest disasters in U.S. history.

Low and Behold follows the story of Turner Stull (Jacobs), a young man who arrives in New Orleans to work as an insurance adjuster in the wake of Katrina. Working with his Uncle Stully (Longstreet), Turner is overwhelmed by the sheer devastation around him. As he attempts to deal with the harsh reality of the situation, he befriends a man named Nixon (Rouse), who enlists Turner in trying to find his missing dog.

As residents of New Orleans, Godshall and Jacobs didn’t have to go far to find inspiration for their film.

“I’d been living in New Orleans for about three years, and after Katrina I evacuated my house,” says Jacobs. “It was not livable anymore and I was broke and kind of figuring out what I was going to do next. A family friend approached me and asked if I wanted to come down and help him with the influx of hurricane insurance claims down in South Florida.”

Jacobs trained for about a week in Texas before he drove down to South Florida.

“I called Zack and said ‘I think I have an idea for this movie we wanted to work on,’” he notes. “I went there and worked three months as an insurance adjuster – I worked pretty much seven days a week, 18 hours a day, sleeping in a car and on couches and saved just about every penny I could.

Co-writer and star Barlow Jacobs (right) with co-star Eddie Rouse. (photo: Jason James)

First hand in South Florida, Jacob saw how life worked as insurance adjuster: move fast, don’t get involved, and make lots of money. It was an interesting dichotomy that Jacobs wanted to explore.

“What’s fascinating – I guess the moral dilemma there – it’s still a selfish thing,” explains Jacobs. “It’s not like you’re doing it for free. You’re not part of the relief effort, you’re doing a job.”

The movie places the viewer knee-deep in the reality of the situation, filming in damaged and flooded houses, to give an insight that hasn’t been captured by the news cameras.

“We started filming in May of 2005,” explains Godshall. “A lot of news cameras weren’t around any more.”

When telling this fictional story, Godshall and Jacobs intermingle interviews with real people affected by the storm.

“A few years ago, Barlow and I had met in New Orleans and talked about making a film that combined fiction and documentary in a way we hadn’t quite seen before,” notes Godshall.

“I think we were there at the perfect time,” says Jacobs. “We were just getting to a point where people wanted to express – they wanted to say something. The media coverage was dipping off and I think that really concerned people.”

“People were really open to what we were trying to do,” says Godhsall. “When we met someone, we told them what we were up to, and they seemed to really get it and appreciate it. For the most part, we didn’t really meet too much dissent. Actually, people kind of wanted to be a part of it. I mean, our movie is really just telling the story of what’s going on in that place at that time.

“A lot of the people you see in the film, we met them right then and there and they ended up being in the film. We’d meet them on the street or at a crab dock or something, talk to them a little while, and maybe ask them a few questions, get that on camera. They were really happy just to tell their story and be a part of that.”

Director Zack Godshall. (photo: Jason James)

 “I spent a lot of time in the South, so I have a sensitivity to the Southern attitude,” explains Rouse, who got his start in David Gordon Green’s George Washington. “The South is the South. People are genuine, for the most part. The through line with Southern people is hospitality – it’s humanity. Their core foundation is they deal with you as a human being.”

This was key to building the character for Rouse. Nixon is initially a comedic character, but with Rouse’s nuanced performance, there’s a layer of desperation and despair that shine through.

“The building of the character was based on collaboration and constant communication between Zack and Barlow,” says Rouse. “We had discussions on ‘how much do you show?’ We don’t want to give it all away at first. Zack explained to me his point of view that a lot of times in life, people can sense things that are going on with you, but you don’t allow yourself to open up and reveal, especially with our characters developing a trust issue. That was a big thing.”

It’s a theme that pervades throughout Low and Behold, interjecting humor and humanity into a tragic situation. It’s a feeling that Rouse knows well.

“I just reached in,” he notes. “Like myself, I don’t take life seriously. I’ve been through a lot of things and I almost died a couple times myself. So, in that experience of experiencing life, and that grit – everybody handles devastation differently. Me, I choose to laugh about it, because I lived through it.

“You can be serious when you have to, but often when you go through devastation, there’s comedy there. That’s hope. You gotta keep your face up, or you’re gone. It’ll destroy you. Life will just crush you without a sense of humor.”

Likewise, Longstreet had to approach his character, Uncle Stully, an often boorish man, across a fine line.

“Barlow and these guys had talked to me about [the character] and made it very clear that he wasn’t comic relief,” Longstreet says. “That it really came out of his shortcomings and, I was going to say his naïveté, but it’s really idiocy. He’s really stupid and insensitive.”

Actor Robert Longstreet. (photo: Jason James)

“With the sensibility that [Zack and Barlow] have, they have such a great sense of humor,” Longstreet continues. “You can do the scripted, but then you could go off on things, but they did it in a very specific way. They would turn me loose once and I would do a take my way. Barlow and I would talk about it afterward, and we’d run it by Zack, he’d throw something in and it would build into something that was coherent in their structure of the story, so it wasn’t just improv for improv’s sake.”

That study of character led to a full realization of the story and characters.

“I think if you do [a character] one noted, you’ll lose the drama in it,” says Longstreet.

The movie starts out with stark images of destruction. The story could have easily devolved into melodrama, but the filmmakers were very wary that they wanted to approach all sides of life.

“We wanted to immediately come in with the comedic element just to show that this is going to be something a lot broader than that. That it is going to be complex,” says Jacobs.

“One of the things that was interesting to us as writers was this stranger coming into a strange land,” notes Godshall. “It’s a unique environment. I’ve never been somewhere that is like that and we wanted to capture some of that. We thought it was a good way to begin the movie, just a kind of barrage of people and things and out of that comes some comedy.”

Jacobs felt that kind of comedy in his real life as a claim adjuster.

“When I was doing these claims, I was astounded by the fact that in one given day you can go to a house and it would be just an absolute total loss with people that are hurting so much,” he explains, “but then the next house you can have people that are so excited just to have you there and have you actually processing their claim and there’s moments of pretty unbelievable joy. Then there’s these moments of profound comedy that come through both of these things. I thought that was so fascinating, just the reality of how complex a situation like this is even in a tragedy, and we wanted to explore those complexities in the story.”

The surreal nature of the situation was compounded by the fact that many of the cast and crew were natives of New Orleans, dealing with their own problems while making a movie.

“We’re from that area, a lot of us,” says Godshall, “and to be collaborating with people that literally lived through the storm – who were hanging out on their roof for several days before they were rescued – that, to me is special. I’m just very happy to be able to allow those people to tell their story and hopefully we can find an audience for that.”

“We had cast members and crew members getting out of their FEMA trailers to come to set every morning,” Jacobs adds, “or still dealing with the loss of loved ones, and in many ways it wasn’t just telling our scripted story, it was telling their own story.”

Actor Eddie Rouse. (photo: Jason James)

Rouse used that humanity to build his character, “I think maybe what you’re feeling is my sense of understanding, in my own way, the loss, the devastation and the pain.”

“We’ve been disconnected for so long,” he notes. “This film brings back the connection. It doesn’t matter that I live in Philadelphia, it doesn’t matter that he lives wherever he lives, if something happens to one of us, it happens to all of us. And if we don’t pay attention to it, we will suffer the consequences. This film embodies that.”

It also allows the public to see a more human side of the devastation than what’s seen on a news report.

“From a media standpoint, we as the American public, when we see devastation, we’re on the outside of it all the time. All we get is the surface view of it,” Rouse explains.

“It’s almost like a loss of innocence type of thing. It’s like we’re allowed to go behind the scenes, so to speak, of loss. That’s the beauty of this… that we’re allowed finally to look at it from a point of view,” continues the actor. “This film allows people to actually, in their own way, experience it. To actually feel it.”

As a result, the group is also looking to give back to the city that inspired their dream of becoming Sundance filmmakers. A portion of the proceeds from the film will go to help charities helping New Orleans recover.

On the film’s website, lowandbeholdmovie.com, the producers have a list of worthwhile charities that they’ve determined are truly helping the cause, something they looked at very carefully.

“We did pretty extensive research because there are some – especially when there’s devastation so large – there are a lot of bogus charities that pop up,” mentions Jacobs. 

“We really researched some amazing charities, especially a lot of stuff going on with dealing with mental health, which is an epidemic right now in that city – people are dealing with it from every socio-economic class.”

This isn’t the last film that Godshall and Jacobs hope to make about the South. To them, there’s a lot that about the region that hasn’t been captured on film.

“I think the problem with a lot of films that are shot in the South, and it’s even more discouraging when it’s a Southern filmmaker, is that they try to make it a Southern film, instead of just making a movie in the South,” notes Jacob.

“The South is going to be the South,” he continues. “New Orleans is going to be New Orleans. I think New Orleans is one of the greatest cities in the world you can shoot a movie in, just because of the look of the people, the landscape, the architecture, everything like that. But, it seems like everybody heads straight to St. Charles or to Bourbon Street, and make almost a cliché or cartoon of what New Orleans is or what the South is, instead of just letting it be what it is – because New Orleans will shine through. You turn a camera on there, it’s going to shine. You go to Mobile, Alabama or Chattanooga, Tennessee or any place, like Lafayette, there’s such a vibrance in the South. You just have to be there, you don’t have to make it Southern.”

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Michael D Friedman is the online producer and an editor for CinemATL. In his spare time, he is a screenwriter and filmmaker. He is a founder and co-president of the Atlanta Screenwriters Group.