In Christian Nilsson’s Westhampton, Tom (Finn Wittrock) returns home to a place haunted by traumatic memories with the latest film he’s made and finds a generally unwelcoming environment that isn’t interested in his take on where he grew up.
Awards Buzz spoke with Nilsson about evolving from his less conventional earlier films to this project and first starting work more than eight years ago:
“Honestly, it’s crazy, thinking about if you go back to 2017 and the films that are coming out in that time. You have Moonlight, Lady Bird, a lot of coming-of-age dramas and then just a few years later, none of those. Suddenly, there are no dramas coming out. There are no coming-of-age stories, even the independent space feels like it’s moving towards more thriller-horror. In a lot of ways, it made making this film challenging. We had found people that had wanted to make it with us back in 2017 and then 2018, we started working with RJ and doing a lot of this. The current cast, we ended up attaching them to the project back then. But then, yeah, for a number of years, it was really challenging to make a film like this. Even then, it was never easy to make a movie like this. In 2023, we just decided, what does this movie look like if we just do it ourselves and stop waiting for the green light to come from the industry? What does it look like for us to greenlight it ourselves? We trimmed the story back. We fine-tuned things, dialed other things in. We went back to that original cast that we had that we had built and said, would you be down to being in this scrappier version of this movie? And every single person that that we had cast originally at a much bigger budget was willing to do it at a much smaller budget and we were able to put that together as the film that we did.”
Watch the video above to hear about his decision to set the film in a real place and how that turned out to be a true boon for the production process.
Westhampton is now playing in theaters in NY and LA.
