Directors and writers Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly’s latest project, “Beneath the Harvest Sky,” tells the story of best friends Casper and Dominic, played by Emory Cohen and Callan McAuliffe, trying to get out of their small town in Maine. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and at Tribeca Film Festival this month and is also available on demand and on iTunes.
Gaudet and Pullapilly talked about creating “Beneath the Harvest Sky” and what they hope viewers, specifically college students, will get out of the film.
How did you guys come together and start making films?
Pullapilly: Aron and I actually met working in television news, so I was working for the local ABC station in Grand Rapids, Mich. and Aron was working for the Fox station there. We had always loved making movies but we weren’t quite sure — it seemed like such an intimidating thing to try to make that leap into it…
Gaudet: Gita and I spent the next five years making this documentary film called “The Way We Get By.” We made that and used documentary filmmaking as a bridge to scripted narrative filmmaking, then wrote the script for “Beneath the Harvest Sky” and came back to Maine to make another movie.
As a married couple, what is it like working together?
Pullapilly: Well, we work 24/7 together so we’re around each other all the time. I think in order to do that you have to really love each other in order to really succeed because I think a lot of people, a lot of our colleagues, always say how incredibly difficult it would be in their world. But I think Aron and I have kind of compatible skill sets in a lot of different ways in life and in our professional work. I can’t imagine making movies without Aron and I think he would feel the same, right?
Gaudet: Absolutely. It’s hard. Filmmaking takes up so much of your life it’s pretty time-consuming, so if you didn’t work with your partner, you probably wouldn’t see them that often. So for us, it’s a way to be around each other a lot and share in what you’re doing in your life because our whole lives are sort of consumed by making movies.
How did the concept come about for “Beneath the Harvest Sky?”
Gaudet: Growing up, some of our favorite movies were “Stand By Me” or “The Outsiders” or “The Goonies” or “At Close Range” — these movies that were really more about teenagers growing up and starting out in the world. We really wanted to make a coming-of-age movie that would appeal to younger people … As soon as they turn 18, they really want to get out and go somewhere else, go to college somewhere else or go to a bigger city and try to work, so we thought that was a great backdrop for a movie about 17-year-old kids that were trying to figure out their future and had dreams of going somewhere bigger. It all grew from this idea of wanting to make a coming-of-age story like the films we grew up loving.
How would you describe the relationship between Casper and Dominic?
Pullapilly: They’re best friends, extremely loyal to each other. And when you’re growing up at that age, Aron and I would always talk about as we were creating those characters, just how much our friends in growing up and your best friend is everything in your life and how much it was important to portray that in the film.
You guys premiered the film at the Toronto International Film Festival, what was that like?
Pullapilly: That was incredible. Toronto is one of the top film festivals in the world, and to be selected at Toronto is kind of like winning the lottery. It’s so incredibly hard to get your film accepted at Toronto.
You guys were a part of Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch. What was it like to be recognized?
Pullapilly: To be recognized in a way was a huge stamp of approval but also such a confidence booster to say, “Wow, all of those struggles, all of those years trying to figure out if we could reach our dreams of making movies”…
In the film, there are a lot of twists and turns. When you were writing the script, did you know how you were going to end the film, or did you change things as you went along?
Gaudet: Maybe a little bit of each. When we were researching the movie, it changed a lot because all we knew was we were hoping to make a good coming-of-age movie and we thought that location, setting it during a potato harvest, would be interesting, something people hadn’t seen before.
But then when we went up to northern Maine and we started interviewing everyone, and interviewing the kids and teachers and farmers and different law enforcement, we started learning about the prescription drug abuse and prescription drugs coming across the Canadian border and we started learning more about what the life was like for kids in that area, and that really informed our script as we would write it. Probably 85 percent of what’s in the script is based on true stories that somebody told us…
What do you hope people get out of “Beneath the Harvest Sky”?
Pullapilly: I think it’s such a story of friendship, but I also think it’s a time where people all across the country will have a look into another community in Maine … near the Canadian border. And this is the first feature film that’s been released nationally in Aroostook County in Maine so it gives people an insight and a look at the world that a lot of people have never seen before…
Gaudet: At the core of the movie is a really great friendship, and we hope that that really resonates with people across the country — that their relationship with their best friend, they see some similarities there and connect with it in some way. We’re also very proud of the music in the film … the composer Dustin Hamman did an amazing job, and we hope people will watch the film and then also connect with the music.
