Florida has lately occupied a very special position in the American cultural psyche. There is, of course, Florida Man and DeSantis’ war on a safe mouse, and some bright, color-saturated movies that present the state as a kind of Wild West where anything can and transformation is inevitable: “Spring Breakers” and especially “Zola,” films of such an expressive and hyper-stylized aesthetic that the term “Tampa-core” emerged to describe them.
The funny thing is that the state itself prevented filming there. What do you mean by a touch throughout Florida?Let’s back up a bit.
“Suncoast” is, in Chinn’s words, “semi-semi-semi-autobiographical. ” Like the character played by Nico Parker in the film, Chinn was a teenager growing up in Clearwater and facing an ongoing family tragedy: her brother, who was similar in age to her, was suffering from a terminal illness of brain cancer, and she and her mother took him to hospice where it turns out that Terry Schiavo, Obsessed with national media, he was also receiving long-term treatment. “For years and years, I would talk about this and other people would make that face,” Chinn said. , referring to the expression, at the time, of the one in this article.
For those who want a reminder of what happened in 2005: Terry Schiavo, a woman in a persistent vegetative state that has become an early flashpoint. Her husband, believing that he might never recover, sought to have her die with dignity; Her parents, clinging to the hope of recovery, sought to make her live. Even George W. Bush weighed in.
“It’s rare to find a script this well put together from the beginning, and we all tuned in,” said producer Kevin Chinoy, who also produced Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project. “”Suncoast” made the impression blacklisted in 2020, signed through Searchlight in 2021 and went into production in 2022, a remarkably quick timeline for a spec script.
But it’s easy to see why, because of characters like Harrelson’s Paul. He’s the one who most clearly exemplifies Chinn’s aim with “Suncoast”: That empathy is the key — to process grief, to understand where other people are coming from, and to debunk stereotypes. In any other film, it’s easy to imagine Paul just being a Jesus Freak. “With Paul, I really wanted people, regardless of politics and wherever they stood on this issue, to see his humanity and to see where everyone’s coming from,” Chinn said. “We need to get ourselves back to a place where we have some understanding. Maybe not the same beliefs. Maybe we’ll never be kumbaya and able to love and embrace everybody, but maybe we can just start to see more humanity in each other. I don’t think we’ll survive otherwise.”
To be clear, “Suncoast” is also a comedy — you have to empathize with a person to laugh with them — and laughter is Chinn’s go-to mechanism for lowering defenses. “I tend to laugh at the most inappropriate things,” she said. “I get through the hardest moments of my life crying with laughter. It’s always been a coping mechanism for me. It’s how I developed my personality — my personality is a coping mechanism.”
Chinn wanted to make sure “Suncoast” ended up as “a movie you’d want to see again, because we all know those movies that are beautiful and amazing, but you can never do it again.” Key to that is Parker, 17 when the movie was filmed (and British but doing an American accent). She had to find a character who was sensitive but never maudlin, capable of handling very serious scenes with her mother and brother, and funny moments with Harrelson’s Paul and a cast of young actors playing her high school classmates.
“I thought they were so sweet,” Parker said of the characters played by Ella Anderson, Daniella Taylor, Amarr, and actual Florida-born actress and influencer Ariel Martin, all of whom provide comedy by being so unable to process what Doris is going through that they can’t even come close to find comforting language for her. “There’s a real gentle quality in their obliviousness.”
Doris’s inner circle of friends (of which she is indeed a part, though Parker also feels like an outsider, like someone who had to mature much faster but still needs to be a teenager) provides much of the film’s comedy. It will also offer highlights about the era that all the students at the top school of 2004/2005 will enjoy: they sing Christina Milian’s “Dip It Low” and the Pussycat Dolls’ “Dontcha,” selected with astonishing precision through music manager Mary Ramos, and “Do It with such enthusiasm that you, those actors, were little kids when those songs came out.
“She would tell me about her formative years that made me die of laughter,” Parker said of his director.
Oh yes, all roads lead to the Sunshine State. But for film productions, the state government can do whatever it wants. In July 2023, Tallahassee will close the State Film and Entertainment Board, following the end of all state-funded tax incentives. for film productions. Local incentive systems still exist at the county level (Tom Cruise even filmed some shots of LED walls in a St. Petersburg studio for “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”), but there are no state-level films. The authority acts as such. A central point of contact to attract productions to the State.
Rather, it is mosaic and fragmentary. The MPs said the monetary return from state incentives is not enough to justify the program, even though film productions have a proven track record of pumping cash into local economies.
“I’m now filming in Savannah and Charleston, and those cities have huge savings from film,” Chinn said. Aside from three days of filming external shots in Clearwater, “Suncoast” was filmed almost entirely in Charleston.
“I was devastated when we didn’t get tax credits in Florida,” Chinn said. “I wasn’t happy because I think it’s hard to conquer Florida anywhere else. Dolphin mailboxes! Little things like that can’t be found anywhere else. Luckily, he discovered a space in South Carolina for filming, which was consciously designed to make its owners look like a Florida space. And his attention to detail (a truck of nine Bay News presses!) made the film seem more Floridian than some of the more touristy videos that were filmed in Florida.
There’s love in the details.
“Suncoast” is trying to contain a lot too. It’s very funny, yet Chinn invokes Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “The Time to Live and the Time to Die,” a movie which no one would say is anywhere close to being a comedy, as a key influence: “That’s the most beautiful movie ever.” But in “Suncoast,” as in Florida itself, many seemingly contradictory things can be true simultaneously.
Or as Parker puts it: “I think even though the movie can get pretty miserable and pretty sad, I think I’d like other people to leave it with the feeling that everything is going to be okay. And experiencing something similar, or just feeling depressed, you can take a look at it and have confidence that an ending is a new beginning. Life is constantly changing and you never know what’s going to happen.
“Suncoast” is a Searchlight Pictures movie and is now streaming on Hulu.