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| Meghann Fahy, Lily LaTorre, Kali Reis, Josh O'Connor and Max Walker-Silverman Photo: Amber Wilkinson |
Max Walker-Silverman returns to Colorado for his second feature, Rebuilding, which stars Josh O’Connor as Dusty, a cowboy coming to terms with the loss of his home in a massive wildfire at the same time as reconnecting with nine-year-old daughter Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre). Like A Love Song, it is a heartfelt film that while acknowledging loss, focuses on hopefulness. Given recent fire breakouts in LA, the film took on extra resonance during its screenings at Sundance.
Attending the world première screening this week, Walker-Silverman explained the origins of the project. He said: “This script began a couple of years ago when I had just moved back home to Colorado, where I’d grown up. On one hand, it felt like the simplest and loveliest and cleanest possible thing in the world. It was the place I love best and where all the people I love are and my friends and my family and it's where I understand myself most clearly to live and to be who I am.
“On the other hand, I didn’t know what life there might look like. And in looking for a home and trying to build a home by myself I started asking some questions familiar to all of us. Whether its fires or floods or more or less anything material, of what is this home going to look like and what can it be? I didn’t have the answer to those questions so I tried to imagine them. This film was me trying to picture what a nice life could look like.”
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| Josh O'Conner as Dusty and Lily LaTorre as Callie-Rose in Rebuilding |
The life is certainly not what Dusty hopes, since he is stuck in an emergency government caravan but it is there that he finds himself part of a community of others who have been left disenfranchised by the blaze.
Walker-Silverman adds that this nice life wasn’t “one in which losses were avoided or erased, as they cannot be. But instead, it was one that decides if loss and destruction will be part of our lives, as they are and have been and will only increasingly be and that there will be strange and amazing things that follow their wake, as they do every time.
“People taking care of each other in ways that they only do after loss. Let's hope that that can only become more a part of our lives as well. That's how I wrote the film.”
He said that he wrote the script about 70 miles away from where the film was set. He says when he returned to that part of Colorado he was “struck by the great, vast beauty of it, so empty and so huge”.
O’Connor has had a busy time of late, with films including La Chimera and Challengers and has also been rumoured to be eyeing a role in the Marvel Universe. The character of Dusty is an introspective one and he says that he came to the film because he really loved the writer/director’s first film, A Love Song.
He adds: “I was thinking as I was watching the movie, Max and I had a conversation - maybe our first conversations - about hope and the lack of it in cinema, that it’s rare. And it’s one of the things I love about A Love Song, the hope that Max has.
"Beyond that, we had this Zoom call and as you’ve just heard, he speaks so beautifully and from the heart."
