After years spent apart, two estranged friends try to reconnect over a weekend backpacking trip in the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountain range.

Director Vision for ‘Out and Back’

Making our film Out and Back has been, to put it lightly, a transformative experience for me as a filmmaker. While working as a day-player on non-union film sets in Los Angeles and helping my friends bring their own films to life, either as a producer or cinematographer, the idea for this film struck me like a freight train. I had been itching to make a widely relatable yet personal and nuanced film about something very close to me: substance abuse. Having had close friends and family members participate in the AA program throughout my life, I felt like very few recent films captured the ebbs and flows and the inevitable cycles of addiction, especially through the eyes of characters on the precipice of adulthood. Having wanted to tackle this theme for quite some time, I thought a perfect backdrop for the story would be a weekend backpacking trip between two estranged childhood friends. And to top it off, I decided we should shoot the film on a REAL backpacking trip on location in California’s Eastern Sierra Nevada mountain range, capture the film in chronological order and shoot on Super 16mm Film Cameras. Sounds great, right? What could possibly go wrong?

We initially secured our modest financing to shoot this project on location in the Sierra Nevada’s back in 2019 but we were unfortunately derailed for a myriad of reasons. When we tried picking it up again in 2020, 48 hours before our first shot was scheduled, key members of our crew tested positive for COVID so we pulled the emergency break on the film. Finally, in the late spring of 2021, we had all the right pieces to move forward with shooting, the only problem was we couldn’t secure the right actor to play opposite our amazing lead, Luke Shelton. After many sleepless nights, I realized there was really only one option left to fill the role and get the film moving, I had to act the part. Having spent nearly 3 years with this story and these characters jumping around furiously in my head (and a LOT of support and the cast and crew), I figured, what the hell? I could try pulling it off.

The end result is something that I hope is both enjoyable, nuanced and relatable to a wide audience but especially to those who have had drug or alcohol abuse affect someone close to them. I have been told that the film is “sad-funny” which I couldn’t be more happy to hear. As the great Sydney Pollack has said, “a good film is two sides of a good argument”. I strived to deliver on that sentiment with Out and Back, I hope you enjoy.