Writer-director Ehrland Hollingsworth brings his brutal vision of the Old West to the screen in the thriller, Homestead.
Described as a “nail-biting mesh” of Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses and and the hit Yellowstone spin-off 1883, Homestead tells the story of a family of settlers who run afoul of a group of desperate outlaws. Their only hope? A boisterous 12-year-old marksman.
Homestead stars Brian Krause (Sleepwalkers), Dallas Page (The Devil’s Rejects) and Jamie Bernadette (I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu) along with Mike Ferguson (Hellblazers), Mike Markoff (“Death Squad”), Greg Kriek (Rogue), Betsy Sligh (I Want You Back) and Scot Scurlock (Painkiller).
Check out our interview with Ehrland:
Where did the story come from?
Ehrland: That’s a good question. Well, this sort of idea for it came from like, I watched the Green Room. And I liked that they’re just in one place the whole time. And I was like, that’s a great sort of crucible of a story, you know, they’re just trying to get out of the green room. And I was like, I’d like to do something like that. How can I set that up? A Western would be a great place to set that up. I mean, it’s kind of funny, because, you know, it’s like a normal story. It’s not like that creative have an idea of like, oh, these people at their house get invaded by outlaws, but that’s how I came to the idea. I didn’t want to have lots of locations. And so I started off with that idea and then sort of just building the characters from there. I sort of approached it with themes that I found intriguing, like, you know, just the idea of a guy running from his past, which also isn’t very, you know, creative, but I sort of wanted to turn that on its head a little bit with the character of Robert. And with the character of Irene, I just kind of thought it would be fun to have a young girl that’s good at shooting guns. That was just sort of more interesting to me, you know? But that’s where I kind of got the idea for it, sort of from a bunch of different places.
So, I’m not familiar with the term “homestead” and in the synopsis, it says it’s a homesteading family. What exactly does that mean?
Ehrland: Oh, well. I mean, there’s sort of like a history of homestead. You know, there’s like the Homestead Act, which gave people the right to, you know, a few dozen acres if they tended to the land. So, I mean, it’s more like a farmer or rancher something, somebody that would increase the value of the land for themselves, but they were kind of gifted the land by the government. Homesteading is kind of that, I’m not exactly sure where the term stead comes from but it’s kind of like a farm, but a little more out in the middle of nowhere. There’s a big homesteading movement going on of people wanting to move out into the middle of nowhere and be self-sufficient. So that’s what it refers to, someone who’s kind of a little further away from society, being self sufficient. But that’s a lot of what American settlers were dealing with in this time anyway.
That makes sense.
Ehrland: Yeah, the whole time I was trying to figure out a new title for it because it’s kind of just a broad term, but it never changed and I kind of like how stark it is, you know? Just like, Homestead, single word.
I’m definitely a fan of single word movie titles, book titles, anything like that.
Ehrland: Yeah, I kept trying to think of something but never came up with anything close. And I was like, ‘Okay, I guess this is what we’re calling it.’ There’s a couple of short films that have been called Homestead before, you know, with a similar kind of plot about being out in the middle of nowhere and I wanted to have that apparent in the title.
You mentioned a few tropes in your description of how the film came to be. Can you elaborate more on what you meant by running from your past but turning that on its head?
Ehrland: With the character of Robert, he is like this former outlaw, who’s run away. His backstory is that he was raised with this outlaw gang, as an orphan, so that was like all he knew and then he betrayed them and stole all their money. But in my head, he never fully redeemed himself at all and he doesn’t really try to, he’s more someone who just tried to run away from everything, like the only family he ever knew. And then tries to start a new family without really understanding or caring too much about the consequences of that. He’s not someone who’s really trying to right the wrongs. In my head, the way I was approaching it was that he wants to beat them. He is trying to protect his family, you know, he does care about that, but he’s always won in his life. The thing he’s kind of planning to do has gone his way, and then it doesn’t. I guess spoilers, you know, but he dies. I didn’t want to give him a full redemption arc. Like he kind of saves his family but even after he does save his family, they’re still in trouble, and they still have to get out of the situation. So, maybe it’s not like a fully turning on its head, but I purposely didn’t want to give him a full redemption within it where he says how sorry he is for everything.
Yeah that’s not something we see very often at all.
Ehrland: Yeah, that was kind of the idea. I saw like one review where they mentioned like, that Robert has a redemption arc. And I was like, no, not really. He intentionally doesn’t. No one is particularly redeemed. He betrayed everyone. And everybody else in the film has kind of like the people they stuck by, but Robert didn’t before that, and he kind of doesn’t at this point. The thing too is he has the opportunity to give the money back to the outlaws and, you know, it’s unclear as to whether or not they’d kill the family immediately after they get the money back, but he could have ended it. They were there for him and the money and he did not give himself up for his family, and then put them in danger throughout the film, kind of for his own pride.
I really enjoyed how this film was shot, because it felt very classic Western, but it also had a modern, like, bend to it, I guess. But one thing I really loved was the fact that you began the film with Irene shooting the rabbit in the eye and then ended with her shooting the one guy in the eye. Why did you choose to begin and end with not only the same image, but with this particular image?
Ehrland: I don’t know if it’s that deep. I wanted to start off the film with them shooting guns, you know, and just sort of introduce the thought of violence and then have the rabbit die, as sort of like the first blood that’s spilled. And yes, she shoots him in the eye and it just sort of felt natural to bring that back at the end with Ezekiel getting shot in the eye. I mean, it shows you how good of a shot she is and getting shot in the eye is evocative in a lot of ways. You know, eyes being a pathway to the soul or something, but there’s something very visceral about shooting somebody in the eye and kind of taking them out in that way.
It was just incredibly powerful.
Ehrland: I wish I had like a deeper thing, but, you know, it certainly was evocative to me in some way. But yeah, that was more or less like my thinking, like it needed to be circular in some way.
What was it like working with your cast, especially with your younger cast?
Ehrland: It was great. This was my first time directing a feature film, so I was very nervous working with people, also this was like the largest cast I’ve ever worked with. But everyone was great and very professional, I was so impressed with just everybody. And like with the younger cast, with Betsy and Kevin, they were great. I mean, they were just as professional as everybody else. So having the younger cast was not really an issue other than kind of like scheduling and timing and all that. But yeah, I didn’t think of them too much as like, oh, they’re child actors, they were just as present as everybody else. One thing that was an issue with them was that they weren’t as good at retaining eyelines and they felt like they needed to act a little more sometimes… That would be the difference between the adult actors and the child actors, that the child actors were not as good at holding eye contact for as long as the adult actors. But yeah, that’d be the only thing.
There was one line toward the beginning of the film. I forget who says it but it was in the kitchen and one of them says “never trust a man from Cleveland. I’m in Ohio so, hearing things like that just feels like an Easter egg and it makes me happy, but I was just wondering like, why Cleveland?
Ehrland: I feel like I’m gonna disappoint you. Well, there’s a lot of reasons for Cleveland but I don’t have specifically anything against Cleveland. But what I wanted is some kind of, you know, city that would be sort of popular in that time and that would represent metropolitanism to some extent, like westward expansion metropolitanism and, somewhere that seemed like it might have a reputation. But I didn’t want to say Chicago, or something like that. And her saying, ‘don’t trust a man from Cleveland,’ was just sort of out of left field because she’s just trying to come up with something, you know, she comes up with it herself. And so yeah, nothing against Cleveland, but I wanted it to be kind of like, sorry, no offense to Cleveland, but I wanted like a second tier city to be where he’s from.
No, that’s totally fair. I just thought it was funny. Are you working on anything else at the moment?
Ehrland: Oh, yeah, quite a few projects. Right now I’m actually editing this sort of found footage film, from the perspective of security cameras, and hopefully I’ll be finished with this soon and then move on to something else. I shot that last year, just very low budget. And then I have a couple projects in the works, you know, more like larger scale feature films, hopefully, that we can do. I’m not sure if I should talk about them right now.
You can follow Ehrland and Homestead on Instagram @homestead.film.
