Producer Jordan Foley and a Hollywood crew of 50 came to Gilroy a month ago to find a place that was bleak. Instead, they fell in love a city they say is better to film in than Hollywood.
They spent weeks filming the movie Desolate around Gilroy, a dystopian story about life after a severe drought, sort of a “Mad Max” in the South Valley. They found the city randomly, because director Frederick Cipoletti’s wife drove through it on her way from Los Angeles to the Bay Area.
They wanted brown hills and open fields, a place where a few survivors battled with villains who wanted to steal land, kidnap women and kill anyone who stands in their way. What they also found was a city they loved.
“I can’t say how amazing Gilroy was,” said Foley, 37, who has produced two other movies, Puncture, starring Chris Evans and The Open Road with Justin Timberlake and Jeff Bridges. “This is the best experience I’ve ever had working in any town anywhere. There’s a lot more going on in the city than we could have imagined. This movie wouldn’t have happened if not for the people of Gilroy. I’m almost afraid to tell people how amazing it was because I want to come back without the big studios coming up and changing everything.”
A big chunk of the movie’s $700,000 budget was for housing at the Hilton and moving the cast and crew. People told Foley he would save money if he shot in L.A., but he found Gilroy was a big savings because local businesses let him film cheaply and ranchers were generous with their land.
“When you factor in what it would have cost with locations and permits and cops and firemen— all the things that come with filming in L.A.—we saved money by coming to Gilroy and got so much bang for our buck and the beauty of it will come out on the screen.”
Some of the locations for Desolate include Sandy’s Cafe, Saccullo’s Surplus and Glass, Bamboo Village, Launderland, Farmer’s Feed and Supply, ranches owned by Don Christopher and Bill Derosa and Bolado Park in Hollister. The film used 100 locals as extras.
The movie features Callan Mulvey, Tyson Ritter, Mark Kassen, Will Brittain, Natasha Bassett and Juston Street.
Mulvey played in 300: Rise of an Empire, Captain America: Winter Soldier and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Tyson Ritter is the lead singer for the alternative band The All American Rejects. He acted in the movie The House Bunny. Kassen was in the TV series Another World. Will Brittain was in the 2013 film A Teacher and is in the new remake of King Kong called Kong: Skull Island, due out in 2017.
Natasha Bassett was in Hail Caesar! Juston Street was in Richard Linklater’s latest Everybody Wants Some!!
The production did most of the shooting from 2 p.m. to 11 p.m., but pulled some all-nighters in businesses that needed to be open in the daytime.
Mary Saccullo couldn’t believe how much they transformed her store into an eerie green and blue lit room. “It was like another world for seven hours,” she said.
Foley, who produced the movie with the director and writer Jonathan Rosenthal, said Gilroy’s cooperation really showed up one night when they were staging a shootout by the railroad tracks downtown.
“We called police dispatch and said we’d like to fire off 12 blanks right now,” he said. “They said, ‘OK, have fun.’ In L.A. that would never happen. They’d make you have four kinds of police there and the F.B.I. It was amazing.”
