What was it like to be on the Bruce Willis movie set? We asked locals who were there.
Through a public-private partnership, the Columbus Film Commission has a $5 million fund providing incentives to attract film and video productions to the Chattahoochee Valley. But those cinema and TV projects won’t come here if they can’t find suitable locations and crew members.
That’s how folks such as Jenny and Daniel Hord, as well as Jullian Vann and Matt Westlake, are key parts of this effort.
Daniel is a Columbus firefighter and manager of the family’s Turntime Farms in Harris County. Jenny is a homemaker. They allowed the action movie “The Long Night,” starring Bruce Willis and Chad Michael Murray, to be filmed at their house.
Westlake and Vann are two of the 10 Georgia Film Academy students at Columbus State University who interned on the set as production assistants.
They shared their experience with the Ledger-Enquirer.
About a year ago, through a mutual friend, Columbus Film Commission production coordinator Joel Slocumb heard about the Hord’s 5,500-square-foot house on the 880-acre organic farm and asked if he could visit.
“He came out and snapped a handful of pictures,” Daniel said. “We never heard anything else.”
Then on May 13, Daniel got another call. Officials with a film project wanted to stop by.
‘My wife’s going to kill me’
Daniel had read the news story four days earlier announcing the Bruce Willis film project coming to town.
“I didn’t connect the dots immediately,” Daniel said. “My whole preference was that we would be done in 30 minutes, I can get back to work, and my wife would never know I brought them into her house.”
So when they told him they liked the outside and asked to see the inside, Daniel thought, “Crap” but said, “Sure.”
As he let them see the bedrooms, Daniel thought, “I’m going to have to move out. My wife’s going to kill me.”
Jenny’s older brother and her parents also live on the farm. Daniel showed their houses as well.
As soon as they left, Daniel broke the news to Jenny.
“In my mind, I’m racing through how I left the house and what it looked like when he brought a movie producer through it,” she said. “I know our house is generally clean, but you think about our closets and our kids’ bathrooms, and all those things gave me a little panic. But it all seemed so far-fetched and surreal that I didn’t really entertain it. It just seemed like a funny game we were playing. … So we didn’t really take it too seriously — until they said, ‘OK, we want to meet with y’all about signing a contract.’”
When they learned the film project was indeed the Bruce Willis movie, Daniel said, “It was exciting because I grew up in the era when Bruce Willis was a huge star, an icon. It was neat, but I also wasn’t naïve to the fact of what that would look like. He would be at our place, but it wasn’t like we were going to hang out with him.”
Jenny added, “What’s hilarious was our kids’ reactions. We were like, ‘It’s Bruce Willis.’ And they were like, ‘Who’s that?”
Their children’s ages are 14, 11, 8 and 6.
“They kept asking us, ‘Is Bruce Wallace gonna come?’ They kept calling him funny names,” she said.
‘Once-in-a-lifetime’
Filming lasted 10 days in June, but the Hords had to be out of their house for about three weeks. They moved into her parents’ house on the farm.
“It would have been much harder if we couldn’t still be right here,” Jenny said. “… That made it more doable and more fun, because we could kind of pop in on the action and retreat when we needed to.”
For a movie titled “The Long Night,” the filming had to be done mostly after sundown.
“Our boys, being a teen and a preteen, they loved it,” Jenny said. “They stayed up late and ate snacks from the snack cart and hung out with the stunt crew. They kind of lived it up to the fullest. Our girls are younger, and they just were kind of ready for it to be over.’”
The worst part for Daniel, he said, was the lack of control.
“Once you sign on the dotted line, even though they did everything they agreed to do, the movie just takes the course it takes,” he said. “When they have to change something. They snap or say, ‘Let’s do it,’ and all 80 people move in the same direction, and it happens so quickly.”
The best part, Daniel said, was seeing “how a movie is made, the true behind-the-scenes in an area we’re obviously intimately familiar with. It was fun to see my boys just live it up and to enjoy it. It also was a really good family-bonding experience..”
Jenny added, “They would put fog machines in here to make smoke, and it would be in the middle of the night, so it really felt like a dream. . . . Even though I knew he was coming, it was still surprising to see Bruce Willis at my house. That was very strange.”
As a scene in the dining room was prepared, Willis asked for a cup of coffee. But the props crew had set the table with glasses for cold drinks. So they scrambled to find a mug.
Jenny is a potter — and Willis ended up using in the film one she had made.
“That was really fun,” she said.
Willis was on the set for only two of the 10 filming days.
“Because his time was so valuable, they shot every scene he was in through the whole movie,” Daniel said, “and then they went back to the same scenes and reshot them.”
But he was there on Jenny’s birthday.
“He found out it was my birthday,” she said, “so he just came up and gave me a hug and said, ‘Happy birthday!’ It was just a cool moment.”
Their 11-year-old son, Ezra, was an extra, acting as a patient in the clinic during the scene filmed at Doctor’s Hospital in Columbus.
“We don’t know if his face will make it in or not,” Jenny said, “but it just made his day just to even try.”
Except for the opening scene at a Columbus gas station, all the other filming was on their farm.
CSU interns
Approximately 80 students have earned their film production certification in Columbus since 2016, when the Georgia Film Academy was established at CSU, now one of 13 sites in the academy.
Around 90 CSU students are taking such courses this school year, with options for certificate-only, minor, associate’s or bachelor’s degree programs toward certification, said Danna Gibson, who chairs the university’s Department of Communication.
Vann and Westlake are two of those students.
“It’s always been like a goal of mine to be on a film in general, to work on a film, ever since I was a child,” said Vann, 28, a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Benning. “Coming to Georgia kind of opened an opportunity for me.”
Vann expects to graduate after the fall 2020 semester. He wants to attend the cinematography master’s degree program at the University of Southern California. His ultimate goal is to become a screenwriter and a director.
“I just like the creative aspect behind film” Vann said. “I’m a huge sci-fi film fan, so George Lucas and ‘Star Wars’ and films like that, that’s what inspired me as a young child to read these stories and try to flex my creative mind.”
Westlake, 37, graduated from Northside-Warner Robins High School and served for four years in the U.S. Marine Corps. He and his wife moved to Columbus around 12 years ago.
He’s on track to graduate after the fall 2021 semester. His ultimate goal is to write professional wrestling scripts and possibly direct or produce movies.
“I’ve always had a love for film,” Westlake said. “Movies like ‘Star Wars’ and all those old classics, they were my babysitter. … Once I found out that CSU had their film production track, I was all over it.”
Wet and muddy
As production assistants on “The Long Night” set, Vann and Westlake got wet and muddy while they filmed through the rain.
Vann was one of the assistants who moved “this huge pile of trash that we had accumulated” to get it out of a scene.
But the dirty work was worth it when the assistant director praised him in front of the crew for getting the set quiet.
“It was really nice hearing that from him,” Vann said, “because, based on the movies he worked on, like ‘Titanic’ and the ‘Power Rangers’ series, … just hearing that from him, someone who’s been in the industry for so long, that kind of really uplifted my spirits and had me feeling like I could do anything when it comes to doing film.”
“We were the catch-all,” Westlake said. “If something needed to get done, they’d call for a PA.”
They had five days of rain, but it delayed the shooting schedule by only one day.
“I always knew that movies weren’t shot in sequence,” Westlake said. “But what really got me, … these guys would be in the middle of rewriting the script to make it conform and fit to what we were experiencing (with the rain). … We watched them rewrite scenes on the fly.”
They also saw the crew change the script when the casting director found a local girl instead of a boy to play Willis’ grandchild: Riley Wolfe Rach, a 13-year-old Springer Theatre Academy student.
Fun and inspired
The worst part for Westlake was the first night, when they shot a scene for nearly three hours at the pig barn and rain “dumped profusely,” he said. “Myself and two other set PA’s were crammed underneath a 10-by-10 pop tent, standing in about 2 inches worth of water.”
The interns earned minimum wage, $7.25 per hour, but the experience was invaluable, they said. Their work hours were from around 4 p.m. to sometimes as late as 6 a.m.
Still, they had fun — and were inspired.
“The cast was incredible,” Westlake said. “To see the actors put themselves out, like, they didn’t have to walk all way out in the rain, but they walked all the way out in the rain to make their walk-ups legitimate. There was so much dedication.”
Westlake gushed about hanging out with actor Chad Michael Murray during one of the lightning delays.
“I found out he’s a huge a comic book fan,” Westlake said. “I found out that he wasn’t too thrilled that Robert Pattinson was cast as Batman. So that was fun to have somebody else in on that vote.”
The downtime was uplifting. Westlake laughed as he recalled Murray continually telling him, “My name is Chad” and not “sir.”
“It was just a humbling experience to be around the actors,” Westlake said. “They were so cool. … It made me understand that not everybody in Hollywood is presumptuous. They are people who actually are real people.”
Westlake and Vann worked those nighttime shifts while also having full-time jobs.
“I think the longest time I went with no sleep was like 96 hours,” Westlake said.
But they would do it again, because it solidified their desire to work in the film industry.
“Definitely,” Vann said.
In fact, Weslake is a production assistant on the set of the comedy “Electric Jesus,” co-produced by Vanna White and being filmed now through mid-September in Columbus.
Key parts of the hub
Peter Bowden, president of the Columbus Film Commission and VisitColumbusGA, said the Hords and the CSU interns are prime examples of the key roles local folks can play in helping to make the Columbus area a film and video production hub.
“The worst thing we can do is to show something to a filmmaker, have them fall in love with it, only to find out that the property owner is not open to being a part of the movie,” Bowden said. “Scouting and this vetting process is probably one of the most critical first steps.”
Another critical step is proving that the Columbus area has people who could help film these projects to be shown on screens around the world.
“Part of that strategy is training a certified local workforce through CSU’s Georgia Film Academy … along with the infrastructure (Flat Rock Studio) and of course the local incentive through the Columbus Film Fund — three components critical to the plan.”
