For context, when I’m not writing for this magazine, I’m a director and producer in the film industry. There’s one person rallying troops in the trenches for me and my colleagues all over the state. Andy Edmunds is on the front line of the conversations that bring major motion pictures and series to Richmond. He’s the director of the Virginia Film Office and has been with that organization since 1997. His efforts keep thousands of production personnel working and the dreams of indie filmmakers attainable. He’s been at it so long, you’d be hard-pressed to excise his name from any big swing taken by a local film creative this century. He’s essential. He’s also a total mensch.
He just directed his first feature film, The Cashier, set to premiere at the Richmond International Film Festival on September 22. I was asked to get together with him and shoot the shit about this side quest in an otherwise linear career.
He’s been in Richmond forever. He used to be in local rock bands while living in the 1980s’ much grittier-than-now Fan. He got his start in filmmaking, making music videos that would wind up in rotation on MTV. He became a formidable location scout for the VFO. Then he became a location scout, actually, THE location scout in Virginia. He rose to the director position in 2011 and has led the state’s engagement with the global film industry since.
Andy was our advocate who brought us Spielberg’s Lincoln, Mission: Impossible III and The Final Reckoning, Harriet, Argo, Dopesick, Swagger, pretty much everything made here in the last 20 years.
Making a film is not for the faint of heart. It is often done with the expectation of financial ruin. You’re lucky to break even. The stress of the inevitable judgment of audiences is heavy. Combine that with the insecurities inherent to entertaining the most people possible with a focused, subjective artistic message? It’s harrowing.
But if you compare that to the joy of releasing a story into the zeitgeist that’s been building pressure in your imagination for years, what’s money? What’s a critical review compared to realizing a dream?
So, I had to ask…
Christian Detres: Why on earth would you do this to yourself?
Andy Edmunds: [laughs] Making a movie is essentially disaster management. I do bring a bit of experience to the process. I know things are going to go wrong. But I also know solutions are going to be found. I’m good at keeping the calm inside the storm. You know, I was ready for this. My role in film over the years has been so varied. I know what everyone’s job entails. I know how departments interact, who’s relying on who, and who I can go to for the quickest fix to whatever we’re facing. I know how decisions cascade down the ranks and either cause or solve problems.
I also know how to treat people, something a lot of filmmakers should learn.
CD: It’s kind of like being a field general. So, you were comfortable because you knew how to do it?
AE: You kidding me? I didn’t want to direct this movie. [laughs] I wanted someone like Vince Gilligan or Jordan Peele. I thought I would screw it up. I knew I had a really good script. This is the first full-length screenplay I’ve ever written. I started it as a short, but kept going back to it over and over again.
It came about because I’m a news junkie, like you, and I’m sitting there watching some broadcast one night in 2018. This story comes on about a would-be domestic terrorist bomber who had mailed a bunch of explosives to his perceived political enemies. I paraphrase, but the story was, “This clumsy domestic terrorist’s plan was so stupid, he might as well have printed a return address on each box. He is definitely going to get caught.”
The very next story they show is about a winning $1.6B lottery ticket having been sold in South Carolina that no one had claimed yet. In my head, I just conflated the two stories together and said, what if the lottery winner was this stupid terrorist guy who is now wanted by the police? I recognized it as a really fun setup, and I rolled with it. I noodled with the story for a while, and then in 2020, during COVID, I had no more excuses not to write it. I had all the time in the world to do it. And so I did. This was the film in the “short” version.
Fast forward a couple years. I had shown the script to some friends. One of them was encouraging me to shoot it, and I responded that I had zero time to do that. He recommended I lean in and write the feature-length version of the movie, and I said, “I really don’t have time for that.”
But then in 2022, over Christmas, because this industry is a ghost town between Thanksgiving and the New Year, I sat at my desk and just brain-vomited the story onto the page/screen/what have you. Powered through and got it down. By January, I had finished 110 pages. It was pretty good. In the span of my career, I’ve read over a thousand screenplays. I can smell a stinker. This wasn’t one of them.
I was writing people I was familiar with. I knew how they talked. In a real way, this movie took me some 50-odd years to write. It is a compendium of my real feelings on extremism, hate, and intolerance contending with blithe magnanimity. I’ve been writing it my whole life. It’s not autobiographical by any means, but it does reflect my points of view on bigger issues.
I took the draft script to my “real” writer friends, first to Mark Richard…
CD: I love that guy. We had lunch at Chiocca’s recently. What a soul he is.
AE: He absolutely is. Incredibly accomplished writer and an old friend. He called me and gave me some detailed notes on structure, stakes, creating more tension in beats. I learned a lot from him. I wanted to get professional opinions from people that weren’t necessarily friends too. So I sent it to The Black List (an industry-leading critical community that reads and rates incoming scripts) to get an unbiased read.
If you score well on that site, it’s a pretty legit situation. On their rating scale of one to ten, getting anything five or above is considered worth pursuing. A six or seven and you’re doing pretty damn good. The Cashier got an 8! Top 4% of all scripts received. They review strengths, weaknesses, and market potential. They concluded that the lead in the film had franchise possibilities. I was obviously very happy with all of this.
Coming off the high of that, I’m thinking we’re going to be making a $4.5M film with Octavia Spencer and Ethan Hawke, you know? I have a producer buddy of mine making a spec budget. We began the process of trying to sell the film and finance the thing, which, as you know, is like pushing a giant boulder up a hill.
CD: Yeah, while other people throw other boulders at you.
AE: Absolutely. You have to be so tenacious. So bulletproof. So, last March, I just got tired of that path. I was admonished about wanting someone like a Vince Gilligan to direct. I was reminded that these guys at that level have not only a bunch of other vetted scripts on their desk waiting to be read, but they have a stack of their own scripts they haven’t gotten to yet.
So, I was encouraged to direct the movie myself. I know the story. I’ve worked on, like, 80 movies. I have a great DP and a great AD (Director of Photography and Assistant Director), and I had access to some great talent. The way the industry is now, you don’t need a star lead if the script is good enough. If the talent is there. The thing that moved us is just making a decision to do it. I put a pin in the calendar for December and said, “We are shooting this movie.” We circled the wagons, made some sacrifices, tightened the belts, and did it.
We had to replace the lead actor due to an injury and wound up with the great Michael Marunde in that role. He kills it. He just has that movie star look. He’s also a classically trained actor. He has the chops. Somehow all the miracles you need to make a movie just fell into place.
CD: You do know how insane this all sounds for people not in the film industry, right? The devil-may-care risk-taking we engage in on things that have so little statistical chance of being a sound financial decision is bonkers.
AE: Yeah, well, my wife and I have a long history of it. Hell, when we opened Poe’s Pub…
CD: Wait. Back up. You opened Poe’s Pub?
AE: [laughs] I got an option on that building for $500. It was an old gas station. It was boarded up for a year while we decided how we wanted to renovate it. We worked on it forever. I didn’t want to run the bar. I just wanted to get it open. But my partner decided to drink all the booze, and I wound up doing it myself anyway.
There was a hustle of taking something small, massaging it into something bigger, selling it to buy a busted-up house in Church Hill, renovating that, living there for a while, and then selling that to move into a beautiful house in Varina. We didn’t have any generational wealth to fall back on. We had to make it happen for ourselves.
CD: There’s a lesson in that, though. The path to being able to do any of this is rarely a direct line from A to B. It requires some scheming and plotting and indirect investments in building leverage for your personal projects. It also takes some trust in yourself that you can fail and get back up if need be.
AE: There are some elements of that in the film. It has a lot to say about morals, standards, and faith, but that’s a thinly veiled message about optimism rather than religiosity.
CD: It reminds me of P.T. Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, which is all about some young entrepreneur just banging at opportunities until he finds traction. He then turns that success into the basis for another journey forward to the next one. That’s not just a lesson for filmmakers, but just strivers in general.
I have always revered Robert Evans. The Kid Stays in the Picture is an annual watch for me. The peaks and valleys of this business are steep, for sure.
AE: I mean, he is the man.
CD: I have always felt being a producer, which is the segment of the process you were describing, getting the thing actually made, has a lot more to do with the clever fires inside your brain than the title on your business card. There’s a certain mentality, or modality to your mindset, that creates the confidence (and sometimes recklessness) needed to even try to make a film.
You have to be observant to a fault, constantly finding the angles that advance your project. Seeing, and never passing up on, opportunities. I mean, I looked at you as soon as you walked in this room (My Noodle on Monument and Lombardy) and could see the location scout in you doing math.
AE: [laughs] Yes. Immediately. Like, where do I park the trucks? Distro cable can go here, here, and here. The stairs would be a problem…
CD: [laughs] Yes. But that’s the thing. You always have to be on. There’s a bit of fun in it, of course. It’s like being a skater, which I haven’t been in a long time. But even so, I still clock curbs and banks and staircases, thinking, “That would be perfect for blah blah blah trick,” etc.
Being a filmmaker requires constant awareness of moments and places, lighting that inspires, turns of phrase that pop, mannerisms that draw the eye or reveal a soul. In other words, a psychosis. [laughs] My wife literally has to tell me out loud to get out of producer mode and just enjoy a thing.
So, you’re coming out of this process. The film is done. You’re set for RIFF later this month. The 22nd, to be exact. You just sent me a screener that I’m looking forward to watching. What would today Andy Edmunds say to back-then Andy Edmunds? Gimme some wisdom.
AE: Find more money. [laughs] You know, what was important to me, and I don’t want to sound corny…
CD: Some of the best things in life are corny.
AE: True. But I wanted to take advantage of the slow part of the year in our industry and take into consideration that we are going through a deep valley in opportunities here. The streaming firehose of a pipeline has been largely closed. There was a lot going on a few years ago that just doesn’t exist now.
It is time to do for yourself. Make your own way. Be clever. Bring it in and get people of similar mind and vision to join you and just do the thing. No one is coming to save you. Making a movie with your friends is a labor of love, and you’ll find in that environment, miracles tend to happen. Things fall into place.
The fourteen-hour days feel like adventures when you shoot that last shot and wrap production. There’s nothing like it.
I walked around the corner home to watch The Cashier for the first time. First of all, Mike Marunde and Daphne Reid are phenomenal as the two leads. Daphne lives in her righteous-to-a-fault do-gooder who exasperates her family and lawyers by waffling on whether to keep a found lottery ticket purchased, and lost, by a hapless crook. Marunde plays the crook and his twin brother.
It’s charming, pious, and vulgar. It’s more Elmore Leonard meets Madea in the alley with a shiv kind of vibes. I kept being reminded of Jackie Brown, and I love Jackie Brown.
The Cashier opens at RIFF on the 22nd HERE
All photos courtesy of Andy Edmunds and The Cashier
Support RVA Magazine. Support Independent Media in Richmond.
RVA Magazine has remained one of Richmond’s few independent voices. Since 2005, we have provided grassroots coverage of our artists, musicians, and communities, marginalized or otherwise, documenting the city’s culture that lies right under the surface and beyond the headlines.
But we can’t do this without you. A small donation, even as little as $2, one-time or recurring, helps us continue to produce honest, local coverage free from outside interference. Every dollar makes a difference. Your support helps keep us going and keeps the local creative spirit alive. Thank you for standing with independent media, and thank you for reading.
Show your SUPPORT HERE
Also, subscribe to the newsletter HERE
We’ve got merch HERE
Subscribe to the Substack HERE
And Reddit HERE
And YouTube HERE
