When a movie nobody knows about is actually one of the best movies of the year
Genre: Contained Thriller
Premise: A knife salesman is holed up in a diner in the middle of nowhere when two bank robbers show up, loose canons who are a beat away from killing anyone who could ruin their score.
About: First time writer-director Francis Galluppi has talked about the challenges of getting his movie made. At first, he was going to direct a 5 million dollar version of the film but he quickly learned that when you go that high, the financiers demand that you use certain actors in the main roles, as they are proven in foreign sales. Those actors, unfortunately, carry the sheen of a “straight-to-digital” vibe (aka John Cusack) so Galluppi decided he was going to shoot the movie for 1 million instead. That way, he’d be able to choose all the actors he wanted. The difference is a buzzy movie that will be a calling card that should send Gulluppi up the Hollywood ladder quickly, compared to sending him into the doldrums of straight-to-digital purgatory.
Writer: Francis Galluppi
Details: 90 minutes
The best way to experience this movie is the way I experienced it, which is to not know anything going in. Because I really didn’t know where this thing was going. And that was exciting because that rarely happens to me with movies anymore.
However, in order for me to convey just how strong the writing was in this script, I need to unleash a ton of spoilers. So, again, go watch this first THEN COME BACK. Otherwise, you’re going to be robbed of a really cool experience.
We’re in the middle of Nowhere Arizona. A well-dressed knife salesman pulls up to the last gas station for the next 100 miles, only to learn from Vernon, the attendant, that they’re out of gas. But the gas truck is on its way. So just sit tight in the diner and you’ll be on your way soon.
One of the first clever things about this script is that the opening title sequence is a bunch of close ups of that fuel track flipped upside-down off the highway, post-accident. In other words, it’s the first of many uses of dramatic irony in the script. We know that truck is never coming but the characters do not know that.
The pretty waitress at the diner, Charlotte, is married to the town sheriff, who dropped her off. We keep hearing through the radio something about a local bank robbery. And then, what do you know, two nasty looking dudes, Beau and Travis, show up for gas only to find out the same thing – there is no gas yet. So they head to the diner as well.
Not long after Beau (the older bank robber) susses out that Charlotte may be onto him, he pulls out a gun and tells everyone not to do anything stupid, like call the cops. Just do as he says and once the fuel arrives, it’ll be like they were never here.
After this happens, more people start showing up – a young wanna-be Bonnie & Clyde couple, an older couple, and a Native American man. None of these newer people know what’s going on here. But the knife salesman and waitress do.
As the tension builds and people start putting two and two together, Beau decides to pre-empt any uprising and pulls out his gun. Beau seems to forget, however, that this is America. And, in America, everybody has guns. This begins a wild Mexican standoff, the result of which will blow your mind.
I LOVED the directing here. It was so simple yet still stylish.
However, it’s the WRITING I was the most impressed by. I see so many upcoming directors debut with these films that everybody says show “PROMISE.” The reason they say “promise” and not “this film was great” is because the script is always bad. And that’s because young directors don’t put any stock into the script. It’s an afterthought compared to the directing.
This is the first time in a LONG TIME that a new director genuinely put just as much effort into the script as the production.
There are two places in particular where this script excelled.
1 – Dramatic Irony
2 – Setups and Payoffs
This is a dramatic irony masterclass here. Dramatic Irony is so important that I dedicated an entire section of my dialogue book to it.
Most writers who understand dramatic irony only do so on a basic level. This writer understands that it has multiple facets and if you can learn those facets, you can make a simple premise like this one play out with more power than your average Marvel film.
I mentioned the crashed fuel truck. Normally, with dramatic irony, the character and the audience know a secret together. But you’ll notice here, we’re given the crashed truck information on our own. We’re the only ones who know it. Not a single person in the diner knows it. This ostensibly adds a layer of drama before anything has even happened, which was such a rad creative choice.
But you’ll also note that Galluppi doles out the information about the bank robbers being in the diner to only two other characters, the knife salesman and the waitress. This introduces what I call in my dialogue book “superior” and “inferior” points of view, which is what really brings dramatic irony to the next level.
Because when Beau is talking to the Old Man and his wife, there are different ways in which his dialogue is affecting people. To the Old Man, his words are harmless. But the knife salesman is sitting right next to the Old Man, and he (as well as we) interpret his words much differently, since we know he’s a bank robber and that he has the capacity to kill.
Another thing Galluppi nailed was the setups and payoffs. Setups and payoffs are one of the easiest ways to tell if a writer put a lot of work into a screenplay. Because good writers connect the early parts of their scripts with the later parts.
(Big spoiler so don’t read this until you’ve seen the movie) My favorite setup and payoff was when the Knife Salesman is getting away in his car but then he runs out of gas (due to a separate clever setup and payoff) and he’s stranded in the middle of nowhere. And we know the cop is coming after him (another example of dramatic irony).
So he’s screwed. Sooner or later, someone is going to find him out here with the bag of money. And he sort of stumbles to the other side of the road, over to this dip down from the highway. And there he sees… the crashed fuel truck! This fuel truck had been talked about the entire movie. What better way to end the movie than to pay it off? Ironically, he ran out of fuel at the very place where he could get more fuel.
And yet, as this screenplay did over and over, it didn’t go in the direction you thought it would.
I only had two minor issues here. One, Galluppi cheats with the whole cell phone angle. He puts us in an unidentifiable year, almost in a different dimension, where it’s both the present and the past. This was clearly to take cell phones out of the equation.
And two, the knife salesman is introduced as someone who clearly has a secret. So when that secret never emerged, I was disappointed. The only explanation I can come up with is that the actor misplayed the role. He was supposed to play a coward but his eyes and his actions tell us the entire time he’s hiding something. But it turns out he isn’t hiding anything.
Still, this was such a fun movie. If you’re a screenwriter or a director, go watch this now. You will learn something, be inspired, or both!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If your story takes place in one location, which almost always requires you to have a lot of dialogue, dramatic irony is practically a must. Because without location changes, you need changes in the conversations themselves. Which you can achieve by building superior and inferior points-of-view regarding key information. Character A and G know that Character X is a bank robber. But characters B, C, and D don’t know that. And character E suspects he might be the bank robber but isn’t sure. So you can even play with the middle-ground there. But the point is, if all of your dialogue is on the surface and none of it requires the reader to think at all, your one-location story’s going to get boring fast.
