During our recent interview with director Calvin Reeder to discuss his latest film The Oregonian (premiering at Sundance this week), the filmmaker spilled a few general details about his hoped-for next project, a feature version of his earlier short film The Rambler. Reeder hopes to gain some momentum following Sundance in order to raise needed funding for the movie, which concerns a young drifter who goes on a bizarre odyssey through the Pacific Northwest. The short was chilling and fantastic, so here’s hoping he acquires the resources he needs to expand it to feature-length. So far he already has buy-in from distributor Anchor Bay, but needs further capital to make the project a reality.
“They want to come in and help,” said Reeder of Anchor Bay’s involvement. “They’ve only been able to provide some of the funding or whatever, but we can’t seem to find the rest of it just yet…it’s not really an expanding of the short, but a lot of those parts are in it. It just kind of starts with The Rambler getting out of jail, and he kind of follows this somewhat episodic and sometimes very psychedelic journey. [Laughs] It’s hard to explain, just like everything else [of mine] I guess.”

Reeder has actually been attempting to get the project off the ground for the last two years, but decided to shoot The Oregonian – a cheaper, less time-intensive project – instead when the money didn’t come through.

“It just was going really bad. So I just changed gears and involved some of the people that I wanted to make `The Rambler’ with for something that would be less money, and we could do in less days,” he told me. “[‘The Rambler’ is] kind of elaborate and would have been expensive and would have taken a lot of people’s time.”

We’ll keep you posted if and when the project finally starts coming together.

‘The Rambler’ Short: