INDIE SPOTLIGHT: A Conversation with ‘The Lemurian Candidate’ Writer-Director Casey Cooper Johnson

Two friends take their troubled buddy on a Mt. Shasta backpacking trip to reconnect. But when he upends their plans with a stash of hallucinogens and a wild theory, their weekend on the trail spirals into a surreal quest for meaning… and contact with alien beings.

Something is in the air that has people’s scrappy filmmaking-senses tingling. Maybe it’s the great unknown of the shifting tides of the industry or in this case for The Lemurian Candidate… aliens. But back to the shifting tides of the industry and the great unknown. This has been the case for indie films for decades – perhaps I dare say, since their inception. There are a handful of filmmakers that have carved their own paths, and continue to, through the indie space (aliens included) and/or have held on dearly to that scrappy indie filmmaker mindset (Kevin Smith, Kelly Reichardt, Richard Linklater, Jay Duplass… to name a few). For the lucky few, it’s been absolutely rewarding – financially, project greenlights, etc. (far and few, with a lot of boulders to push around) but really, it’s that community connection that keeps them going. And I hope that is the case for filmmaker Casey Cooper Johnson.

Casey Cooper Johnson is that scrappy (out of this world talented… OK, alien puns will end soon) independent filmmaker who is carving his own path. His company Crossing Bridges Films is no stranger to producing, shepherding and supporting independent stories across the line. Their latest project is his indie feature, comedy/sci-fi, The Lemurian Candidate. And he’s pivoting in directions that yes, takes a lot of work, focus, and perseverance – but it’s getting his film out in front of audiences and growing a community. From a successful West Coast road show to now pivoting to a non-traditional distribution channel, the film will premiere on Substack TV on March 27 – Casey is continuing to find ways to get his little big movie in front of targeted audiences in a big way.

In this interview, Casey discusses what specifically inspired him to write this story, filming a micro-budget film in his hometown of Mount Shasta, the challenges of low-budget filmmaking, and the importance of key collaborators, such as his editor, cinematographer and Visual Effects Supervisor to dial in the visual tone of the film.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: As wild and zany this film is, you’re really dealing with a lot of heavy emotional stuff: isolation, disconnection, not feeling like enough. But you tackle it in such a wonderful, heartfelt way, with a good dose of humor. What clicked for you to write this story now?

Casey Cooper Johnson: I would say there are kind of two inspirations. The story inspiration comes from... a good friend of ours passed away a few years ago, and he was kind of the psychedelic ringleader of our kind of hippie Berkeley college kid group in the 90s. And so, a lot of this movie is, while not a true story at all, it's inspired by some of the fun, crazy, musical, psychedelic, backpacking adventures we used to take all around California and Oregon.

Mount Shasta is a place where my family's from, and I spent a lot of summers and holidays, visiting my dad and his side of my family there, hearing about the legend of the Lemurians. And so, I always thought that that would be a really fascinating lore to dive into.

And I think the other side of this was I've written, as have so many people, a handful of scripts that were too expensive to get financed. And script after script, you spend years writing this precious, amazing script, and then you can just barely get anyone to read it, let alone finance it - and it's like the kind of movie I want to watch.

A few years ago, talking with some of our friends, our fellow graduates from AFI and Rob Spera, a mentor of mine… it just kind of came clear that I needed to find a story and write a script that I was going to shoot no matter what. And that was the story that I felt like I could do it on a micro budget, because it was in my hometown of Mount Shasta, because it was small enough to do it with the money I could raise, and that was largely the idea was we were just going to set ourselves, like a nine month window to put it together and raise the money, and I was going to take that little chunk of time off in the summer of 2023, and whatever we had by that August 1, we were going to use that and shoot that. So that was a really great motivator to get my butt in gear.

I wrote really quickly, and we raised just enough. Obviously, it wasn't as cheap as I promised everyone, as I believed. I thought I could make this for like 25 grand, if need be. It definitely was much bigger than that, and shooting in the mountains is much harder, and I should have known better. [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] Well now you know for the next one.

Casey: Yeah. With a combination of some investments and donations from family and friends and some local investors in Mount Shasta that were excited to have a movie shoot there, and a little bit of credit card pain [laughs] ended up with the movie couple years later. [laughs]

Sadie: It was worth it. And writing to what you know and the gift of having such cool lore basically in your backyard. Let’s dive into these characters and their collective, yet individual journeys. How did you approach mapping those journeys along with their individual voices?

Casey: I think the beginning of how I looked at these three characters was based off of some of the real people in our group. And so, Jesse was clearly my friend, Scott, and personality wise and energy wise, very much who he was. And I wanted to sort of approach his character from the moment when I started to realize that our friend was showing signs of some mental illness and some mental instability, but not to the point where it was so far gone... when it was still like at one moment, he's absolutely brilliant and inspiring and leading us all on some crazy charge. And the next moment, we're like, ‘Wait a minute. What's going on?’

Tom was very much me, the kind of normal character archetype in my mind [laughs] the guy who's trying to sort of keep everything together. And Stan a mixture of a few of our friends who were, wonderful guys, but more the complainers, like when it would be raining and we're all in a tent, the guy who's like, ‘This is stupid. Why are we here?’

I wanted them to each sort of fit that buddy comedy trio, so you could almost map those guys into a number of other buddy comedies, where you've got these different archetypes. And then I think that the key for me about their journeys was that looking back, my friends and I, who are all taking those backpacking trips where we'd go out to the forest and drop acid, it was sort of like everyone comes back with lessons about themselves, no matter what you think you're doing, everyone sort of takes a journey of self-discovery. I

I really wanted to imbue them all with no matter what their issues and conflicts and fights are 10 years later in life, it's still sort of like 50% mad wild, raucous mountain party, and 50% soul discovery, and everyone realizing that they're having a new coming of age, so to speak, when you're becoming an adult and trying to figure out what you have to become now that you have to be responsible for things, and how to hold on to that sense of youthfulness when you have all these responsibilities and everyone's growing apart.

Sadie: The film looks great and has such a great rhythm, and that’s thanks to many of your key collaborators, notably your editor and producer, Antoneta [Kastrati] – who also happens to an incredibly talented writer and director - and your cinematographer Connor [Bjornson]. How much prep did you give yourselves, especially in terms of coverage and dialing in the tone?

Casey: The illusion that I was in and the illusion that I was trying to sell Neta and our other collaborators at that early point was that this was a small movie. [laughs] And again, a third of this movie takes place at night on the mountains and by firelight or moonlight or space light or whatever. But I was really committed to doing some night scenes up there, because that's when the wildness comes out on camping trips, it's all about the campfires and kind of crazy night adventures.

I think the first part was just us figuring out the challenge of shooting at night on a low budget. And we had a DP Connor Bjornson who was just a few years out of AFI and our good friend Chris Schwartz, had recommended him to me as a guy who was out there doing a lot of great work on tiny budgets. And so, he had just a microscopic crew out in that forest, but they were able to light these kind of amazingly big night scenes. Big, I think, is relative, obviously, but for us getting to see deep into a forest behind the campfire, that was brilliant.

We did a three-week shoot. So, the time to shoot a whole movie in three weeks it's all a crush. And I leaned into and, talked with Neta and Connor about this idea that there will be certain scenes or certain setups where we just shoot a lot of stuff in a three shot. I thought it worked OK for the comedy, that these three actors were great at sort of staying in character and improvising a little bit, and that we could capture certain chunks of dialogue in a three shot, or like two guys here and one guy here, because these two guys are kind of ganging up on him, and so we're not really going to do a lot of coverage.

And then we'll have a few key things that we'll do that are really important visually to make this a trippy movie. We designed certain sequences, especially when they're stoned or tripping - it's got to be a good tripping movie if it's about three guys on drugs, so we designed each of those trips with a specific visual style, but always trying to do that in a really economical way.

Sadie: Another key collaboration and collaborator, David Gidali and his VFX work in this film. How much that was pre planned? Did you have animatics ready to go for him to reference?

Casey: He was another very early collaborator, and I pretty much went to him at the very beginning and took him out for breakfast and just said, 'Hey, I've got this ambitious little micro budget movie, and the only way I can do it and pull off this ending is if you will do it with me, and do it for an unknown symbolic amount of compensation.' And he was so gracious, I owe him so much that he was up for that adventure, because it was a lot of work. And clearly, not paid for what he put in.

But we did a lot of preparation. I did a full animatic of the ending sequence with storyboarding, and then animated that to voice and music and sound effects, just to try to give everyone, but especially him, an idea of what we're trying to do. Not to give too much away, there's a moment where someone has to sort of levitate in the air. And we didn't have the budget for ropes and cables... pulling someone up in the sky. And he figured out some really incredibly ingenious tricks for how we could shoot the practical plates. Obviously, in post, it takes a long time because he's doing his real paying work, and then working on these shots and scenes in his free time. But I'm just beside myself with how that came together and what he pulled off single handedly.

Sadie: I want to talk about taking the movie on the road in the West Coast – essentially a road show, and pivoting where you needed to as the industry contracts and well… indie films. But also, how has that impact for you as a filmmaker been with directly connecting with audiences in more intimate way?

Casey: The West Coast road show was largely inspired by what I had learned about Hundreds of Beavers (2022). This wacky, little low budget movie that that was shot sort of up in the beaver country of the Great Lakes. And they kicked off that launch with a Great Lakes tour. And the point being that your first audience is the audience where this movie takes place.

And so, for us, we realized the West Coast, is kind of a hippie, Grateful Dead, tripping in the mountains, Mount Shasta movie and California and Oregon would be a great way for us to start that off. And the LA premiere - it wasn't in a cinema. It was an outdoor space by the LA River, and we had a psychedelic DJ, and we had Mount Shasta beer for the audience, and we collaborated with a cannabis company that does THC pop rocks, and they made Lemurian space crystals, Sonder, this really cool company – they were giving people free packets of space crystals to eat before the movie. And it was kind of like, ‘Hey, this is this sort of wild west coast tripper movie. Let's turn it into a little bit of a Burning Man festival for the night.’

The tour was basically up the coast, cinemas that would agree to play our movies. We were doing all of our own theatrical booking and promoting. But it did amazingly well in Mount Shasta, where the movie shot. It ran for 10 weeks there. It just kind of caught fire. And the local community really embraced it. And people started coming from around Ashland, Oregon, Humboldt County, that region. It really caught fire in a really fun way.

And that is now the nucleus of fans that now we're trying to build on that with this new release. Our second idea is this first of its kind release on Substack. And the idea again, being, we're all trying to figure out ways to do a kind of release where filmmakers have some control, where we can reach audiences directly, and where we're not at the mercy of distributors and sales companies who don't really care about our small, little movies.

So, this Substack release on March 27 is going to be a situation where we're offering people an annual subscription, and with that, they get the movie, they get a party kit with the space crystals and the funny hippie glasses and stickers… And then throughout the year, special fun drops, new merch and T-shirts and hoodies, and just kind of trying to make a whole mountain trippy universe around this movie.

Visit The Lemurian Candidate website here and subscribe to the Substack here to follow the film's journey.