Local Heroes

Andrew McAllister

One might expect Andrew McAllister—whose first feature, 2002's Shag Carpet Sunset (also screened at SIFF), drew comparisons to Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater—to lean heavily on witty banter. But with his slow-cured follow-up, Urban Scarecrow, McAllister hangs a skeletal script on more substantive elements of mood, music, and imagery. He renders a scruffy, ambient world of failed dreams and bleak prospects—an apt description for the north-of-the-ship- canal strip of state Route 99 where the majority of McAllister's sophomore effort was shot.

"My dad worked on Highway 99 at a bike shop," explains McAllister, who grew up in Edmonds. "So a lot of the film comes from taking rides down 99 either at night or during the day. When I was 10 or 12, Edmonds was pretty rural. I was much more interested in living in a motel where there was all this activity and danger and abandoned drive-ins. There was just an otherworldly quality to the whole place."

When McAllister, now 30 and Seattle-based, returned to shoot Scarecrow, the highway's gritty terrain remained relatively unscathed, he says. "I grew up here before it was a tech town. There was much more of a blue-collar vibe, and that is still very much intact [on 99]. After every summer, the strip gets renovated more and more, but there are still parts that are very much untouched. The motels are falling apart, and yet the signs are really colorful and vibrant. It's almost like our Las Vegas Strip."

Appropriately, Scarecrow's plot centers on a teenage dropout forced to live in a drab Aurora motel with his failed comedian dad. While the plot itself is far from autobiographical, McAllister injected a healthy dose of his real-life pop into his film's melancholy patriarch: "My dad and his brother were Steve Martin fanatics—kind of the stupider, the funnier. So they'd do the craziest gags on my brother and me. It was kind of a depressing time, but there was so much humor. And I did have a buddy who lived in a motel down there who told me war stories."

And yet, the film's most gripping, life-inspired component isn't the dialogue but its setting. "The amazing thing about 99 is you get on the road, and there's this Big Sky, Mont., feel to it," McAllister notes. "Yet there's also this tremendous clutter and constant motion. So visually, it's pretty great." MIKE SEELY

Urban Scarecrow Egyptian: 9:30 p.m. Mon., June 5. Broadway Performance Hall: 2 p.m. Tues., June 6. Not rated. 82 minutes.

Linas Phillips

It sounds completely nuts: Walk 1,200 miles from Seattle to Los Angeles to see a man you've never met, who doesn't know your name, who probably won't have time in his busy filmmaking schedule to talk to you, a nobody, a neophyte director, clutching a video camera in one hand as you frame yourself nearly being blown off the shoulder of Highway 101 by passing semis.

OK, maybe the whole idea of Linas Phillips' auto-documentary road trip is ridiculous—until you consider whom he's hoping to meet: Werner Herzog, his favorite filmmaker, a guy with a fondness for extreme moviemaking situations, who's been called crazy himself. Then Phillips' Walking to Werner makes sense. As Phillips recently explained by phone from the Hot Docs festival in Toronto, where Walking enjoyed its world premiere to generally favorable notices, the film grew from his long-standing fascination with the German director (now based in L.A.): "I've probably watched the DVD commentaries on all his films more than anyone else."

"I love to watch great actors," Phillips explains. "And I'll go and watch all their stuff. So I stumbled onto [Klaus] Kinski. And then I moved on to [Herzog's] films without Kinski, and most of those are even better. There's something about Herzog and his films that wouldn't leave me. And he influenced me to leave New York and save up for a video camera and buy it. I just started making short documentary films. Werner said that if you wanna learn how to make films, don't bother going to film school."

Calling himself "a transient figure, like many of the people I met" on his two-month trek, Phillips reached Seattle in 2004 after a decade in New York. Here, he began collaborating with Dayna Hanson of the dance/performance troupe 33 Fainting Spells. With help from the Humanities Washington Documentary Fund, Hanson returned the favor by producing Walking, which draws inspiration from a famous story in Herzog's own life. In 1974, hearing a friend was ill and possibly dying in Paris, the filmmaker marched on foot from his Munich home to save her, he somehow believed, by force of his determination. She lived, and Herzog later wrote an account of the journey, "On Walking on Ice."

Thus, Phillips says of his own project, "It just came to me." No one's life was at stake, and he could only hope that his cinematic idol might consent to a meeting in L.A.—if he was even there when Phillips arrived. Knowing Herzog was friendly with Scarecrow Video's Norm Hill (whose DVD commentaries with Herzog are incorporated into Walking), he asked Hill to relay a few messages to the director. He heard nothing in reply (it turns out Herzog was in Thailand scouting remote jungle locations for Rescue Dawn), so Phillips just started walking in June 2005. Because that's what Herzog would do: "That's the great thing about Werner—he's so instinctual. His choices are of his own will; they don't have anything to do with wondering what will make sense. They have a sort of inner logic."