A Sketch of Nashville's Film Industry

It’s been over 15 years since the crew of Percy Jackson set up shop in Nashville. Beyond that relatively quick detour to shoot a sequence set at the Parthenon, the Metro area’s film scene has consisted of Harmony Korine, a host of his local indie imitators, the faith-adjacent oasis over in Franklin, and country-centric projects like Walk the Line, Country Strong, ABC’s Nashville. But longtime resident Steve Taylor has spent his career trying to change that. And it finally looks like his work is paying off.

When Angel Studios opens its latest film, Sketch, this week, audiences across the country will have a chance to see the first nationwide theatrical release shot entirely in Nashville (that isn‘t country-music centric) since the 1970s. A family film that has much more in common with wildly original 80s and 90s entries like Little Monsters and Hocus Pocus than the empty big-budget YA adaptations of the last few years, Sketch focuses on Amber (Bianca Bell), an elementary schooler mourning the recent loss of her mother while her dad (Veep’s Tony Hale) tries to keep his family together.

But when a mystical pond accidentally brings the Lynchian drawings in Amber’s sketchbook to life, the family is forced to confront their literal and figurative demons before the monsters devour their town.

Written and directed by Nashvillian Seth Young, Sketch is easily the most inventive and exciting movie to grace multiplex screens in years–largely because it manages to be both a multidemo crowd pleaser and an emotionally resonant story about the power of family. It’s also the highest profile project that filmmaker, musician, and Lipscomb professor Taylor has produced. 

As Nashville 9-1-1 began making itself at home on the city's streets this month, dreams of Music City as the next Atlanta or New Orleans seem like they could finally become a reality. Local boy made good Nate Bargatze kicked the year off by announcing a plan to build a Tyler Perry-style  film and television studio here. Adopted hometowner Nicole Kidman has made increased efforts to shoot portions of recent projects like her latest movie, Holland,  and her new Patricia Cornwall series, Scarpetta, in the Greater Metro Area. But, Taylor has remained Nashville’s moviemaking champion for years. He and his team more than deserve to see Sketch become the summer’s word-of-mouth hit.

Taylor sat down with The Pamphleeter to talk about hometown productions, Nashville’s film ecosystem, and the importance of lifelong collaborations.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You've been a staple of Nashville film culture for years. You even get a shout out in the 1999 Jim Ridley article that rallied everybody to save The Belcourt because of the “Kiss Me” music video you directed for Sixpence None The Richer. How has Nashville changed as a film culture and as a production hub since you first got started?

It’s certainly gotten better and more sophisticated. Our crew base has expanded, and I love shooting here. My argument is always that we can do more for the same amount of money here than if we went to another state with better incentives, because I know the people we want to work with and we’re all getting to go home at night. It will just be a better movie.

I’m good at making that pitch. I have done it multiple times, and it was the same thing here. Seth had a lot of people that he worked with when he was doing commercials and short films that he wanted to integrate into this project, and they all ended up working really well and working really hard. It was a harmonious set, which not all of them are. Everybody was glad to be going to work every day. 

The Tennessee Entertainment Commission was a huge help as well. And the incentives, while they’re not as good as if we went to Georgia, they help. In my mind, it makes it more than worthwhile to stay in Tennessee.

How did your collaboration with Seth and Tony begin?

Seth and I go way back to the first movie that I co-wrote and directed, The Second Chance. We needed a large megachurch, where a key scene was going to happen and one of the characters was going to say a mild, mild curse word. 

I went to Brentwood Baptist, because that was the biggest church. It turned out that their music pastor was a fan of our star, Michael W. Smith, and so he worked it out to make that happen. And then he said, “Hey, my son's a filmmaker. Could you take a look at his DVD?” And I'm thinking, “I certainly owe you that.” It was Seth's DVD, and he was starting out at the time. He might have been like 19.

Most demos aren’t very good. This one was fantastic! So, I asked him to do second unit on that movie, and then I also had him do second unit on my next movie, Blue Like Jazz. He directed a music video for my band and directed a Kickstarter video. Then, I was in some of his short films. One of them, I played a Russian spy. So we had a lot of different collaborations.

When he first started working on Sketch, it was originally called Darker Colors. This would have been in 2017. He sent the first half of the script. I gave him a few minor notes, but mostly it was  like, “Man, I can't wait to see how this develops.”

Around that time, he had a short film that went viral. J.J. Abrams was really into it. So he went to California, moved his family there, got an agent, and then met Tony somewhere along. As he continued working on the script, my understanding is that he was thinking about Tony for the dad role. Tony gave him good notes on the script, and then helped him and hooked him up with some producers in Los Angeles.

For whatever reason, they were never able to find the funding for the project. So Seth moved back to Nashville four years ago. I got together with him before I was heading off to Taiwan to shoot another movie, and asked him what was going on with Sketch because he made a proof of concept that was funded by a Kickstarter campaign. He said, “It's dead. Nobody wants it.” And I said, “That can’t happen.” I asked for the latest version of the script, and I took it with me to Taiwan and read it.

When I got back, I said, “We can make this movie, but it's not a big-budget movie.” I’m usually terrible at raising money, but within two weeks, we had two different parties who were interested in funding, and one of them stepped up and upped the budget even a little more. So, we were off to the races. Tony had been involved with the project for almost as long as I had been. He ended up being a really great partner and collaborator, not just as an actor, but also having really good input throughout the production.

I've seen so many big Hollywood movies this summer with effects that seem totally rubber stamped. I can’t think of an exception. But Sketch has such a vibrant and unique world. Can you talk a little bit about making a movie that is so reliant on VFX on a very, very low budget?

I had seen Seth work over the years, so had a lot of confidence in him, not just as a writer and a director, but as a visual effects artist as well. It’s just right in his wheelhouse. We shot all of the movie in Nashville and surrounding areas, and Seth actually edited the movie himself. Then it was time to go to work on the VFX, and that was the process that took longer than any of us anticipated. 

Seth is very exacting in what he wants, and so we ended up having to bring on additional help, but he was always overseeing things. He’s got a great eye for detail and had a really strong vision of what he wanted creatively. I think we ended up with a movie everybody's happy with.

How do you balance teaching film to college students and engaging on these years-long projects? You’ve got this other job nine months out of the year. How do you find that balance? 

The university gives me a very long leash when things like this happen. In this case, we had probably 30 students involved in the production. They were all getting paid. They’re all getting IMDb credit. Some were still in the program and some just graduated, but they all got a benefit from being involved as well. There are aspects of the university film program, even though it’s kind of above and beyond the main job that when you can take on a project like this, all boats rise. And so hopefully, between what MTSU is doing, and Belmont, and Lipscomb and some other programs, we're helping to create the workforce of tomorrow. And as the film industry grows in Tennessee, it will have good people to work with for years to come.

What would you like Nashville audiences to know about this movie that we haven’t covered?

One of the exciting things is that it’s not just a movie that was shot in Nashville. Seth and I are residents of Nashville for decades. He wrote it primarily in Nashville. It’s just very much a Nashville-birthed project. 

I was trying to think of the last time that a movie that's getting a wide release was so kind of Nashville centric, and it was probably Robert Altman’s Nashville. I'm excited for our city that this is coming out, and hopefully it'll make some noise.

Sketch is now playing in theaters.