It’s that distinctive yellow carton. If you’ve spent any time around Austin, especially during South by Southwest, you’ll have seen people splitting a pack of American Spirit cigarettes.
“There’s something very sociable about sharing a cigarette with someone, something very intimate,” said Austin-based writer/director Christopher Yates, whose debut feature, American Spirit, gets its world premiere at this week’s Austin Film Festival.
There’s a core question in American Spirit, about “the relationships that we collect in our life, even after somebody is out of your life physically,” Yates pondered. “What would that look like, to run into somebody who had a huge impact on this period of your life but now you’ve changed? You’re a different person but you still have that baggage with you. And that person knew that version of you, and now they’re being introduced to this version of you.”
Those questions are asked and maybe answered across one drunken wander through and around the campus of UT Austin, as former high school girlfriend and boyfriend turned college strangers Melody (Yasmeen Fletcher) and Jonathan (Cooper Roth) bump into each other one drunken night. The format was inspired by “all these late nights I spent at college,” he said. “The real meaningful moments come, not at the party but after the party, in these conversations you share with people, and this intimacy that can be shared late at night. Of course, if you’re a little bit drunk it makes it a little bit easier to open up to people.”
Here’s a first look at their encounter in this exclusive teaser trailer:
Melody and Jonathan’s experience “is very loosely based on a relationship I had in high school.” Yates said, and it never quite ended how I wanted it to. So what would that have looked like, if we had met up in college and we could air some of our grievances.” However, rather than risk the film becoming wish fulfillment by having Jonathan as his proxy, Yates made Melody the key protagonist, “so you can see that Melody and Jonathan are equally right and equally wrong.”
What’s distinctive about American Spirit is that it breaks the established tradition of college movies pretending that high school didn’t really count, and people aren’t still dealing with its fallout as adults. Yates said, “For many people, if not most people, that’s the most impactful period of your life. That’s when you’re forming your ideas of what relationships look like, what friendships look like.”
Cinematically, Yates notes that his ambulatory romantic drama draws inspiration from Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy and Cooper Raiff’s South by Southwest 2020 selection, Shithouse. All those films are indelibly connected to their settings – Vienna, Paris, the Peloponnesian Coast, Los Angeles – and American Spirit is no exception. Yates picked locations that he knew from his own time as a UT student, like Jester Hall dorm and Kerbey Lane, and then wrote them into the script. When filming came, “We got lucky in that we got nine out of the 10 locations we wanted to shoot at.” The only big exception (which eagle-eyed Longhorns may notice) is that the Fine Arts Library acts as a stand in for the larger central Perry-Castañeda Library, “and we were kind of grateful that we didn’t get the PCL because those fluorescent lights are real hard to work around and the Fine Arts Library has some good natural light.”
To take full advantage of those locations Yates made sure to film over the summer vacation so there would be less risk of students accidentally walking into frame. “We more or less had West Campus to ourselves,” he said, “and it became an eerie experience. The streets are empty, it’s just us. If you see people in the background, it’s extras, and we put them there.”
The idea of having everything happen in one night created specific filmmaking challenges: not least that the cast and crew went from filming the one daytime scene straight into barreling through a 90-page script in 11 all-nighters with the clock ticking. Yates said, “You’re fighting sleeplessness, but even if you wanted to go into overtime the sun’s going to come up in eight hours, and we’re shooting outside.” Luckily, his cast more than met the challenge. “Cooper and Yasmeen are so wonderfully talented and wonderfully committed that they would turn up every day and they would know nine pages and they would not mess up.” That commitment and skill is most apparent in a pivotal sequence at another West Campus landmark, Laundry Works laundromat on West 29th. It’s a scene that Yates filmed in single, 19-minute takes, and he praised his cast for how it all turned out. “They would bring the emotion time after time after time.”
American Spirit
D: Christopher Yates
USA, 108 min, World premiere
Sun., Oct. 27, 6:30pm, State Theatre
Wed., Oct. 30, 9:30pm, Highland Galaxy
Follow all the Chronicle’s 2024 Austin Film Festival coverage.
This article appears in October 18 • 2024.
