Movie log lines simply don’t get much better than Mickey Reece’s. For his 2020 festival darling CLIMATE OF THE HUNTER, it was all about two sisters lusting after a man who might be a vampire. For ARROWS OF OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE (2019), a man endows his son with a mansion filled with insane women. Constantly banking interesting ideas, weird thoughts, and intriguing concepts, Oklahoma’s prolific writer and director has been producing creative films with wild plots for years. It’s kind of his thing. Eternally striving to make movies unlike anything anyone has seen before, his quest remains validated with his newest release, COUNTRY GOLD.
Recently making its World Premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival, COUNTRY GOLD follows country music legend George Jones and rising star Troyal Brux as they meet up in Nashville the night before George is to be cryogenically frozen. Taking place in 1994, Troyal is a deliberate reference to Garth Brooks. Starring frequent Reece collaborator Ben Hall as Jones, Reece makes a rare move as he steps out from behind the camera to play Brux himself. Darkly humorous and surprisingly earnest, COUNTRY GOLD is as wonderfully weird as it sounds. Naturally, I just had to sit down with Reece to chat about it.
DG: I remember you telling me about the idea for this film back in 2020, and the premise sounded as wild to me then as it does now. Where did this idea come from?
Mickey Reece: I wish I had a good answer for that, but I never do. So, we shot the Elvis movie [MICKEY REECE’S ALIEN] in 2017, which is basically a historically inaccurate story about Elvis shot in this high contrast black and white. And really, it’s not even much about Elvis because it’s not accurate at all. It’s more playing with the image of that. You know what I mean? Playing with the iconography of Elvis. It’s the same thing here. I’ve never seen Garth Brooks in a movie, but I was like, “Man. What a waste.” You can literally just dress up in the Mo Betta shirt with the black hat, and everyone’s gonna know who that is.
That was kind of the jumping-off point. Then, me and Jake Snovel who plays…well, he’s in all the movies, but he’s actually Troyal Brux’s manager in this movie. We were driving back from Nashville after CLIMATE OF THE HUNTER played there, and we were watching these Garth Brooks videos. We watched this Brooks video of him getting interviewed by Barbara Walters just because we were talking about like, “Ooooh, what would Garth Brooks do in a movie?” And I don’t remember who said it in the car or what happened while we were driving, but something happened. We were like, “George Jones! George Jones is getting cryogenically frozen!” And then I was like, “Alright. Hold on. Let me paint this now. This is the plot description…George Jones invites Garth Brooks out on the town in Nashville the night before he was to be cryogenically frozen in 1994.” And we were like, “YES.” Then it was just like, “All right. Now, let’s write the movie around that.”
You play Garth Brooks, aka Troyal Brux, in the film. Was that always the plan? You’re in many of your movies, but this is a much larger role than usual for you.
No, it was a practical thing during COVID. For instance, what’s funny about this movie is, I’m playing the lead. I’m playing Troyal. Then there’s my production designer Kaitlyn Shelby, she’s the girl at the desk in Nashville when they get to the hotel. And then you have the band when I’m playing with my band. That’s the DP, Sam Calvin, a gaffer Andrew Appleyard on the drums, we got our first AD Jeff Dubray on the bass, and we’ve got our sound guy Nick McDonald on the steel guitar.
So, we’re shooting a movie during COVID, and we’re trying to be as effective as we can. You know, work with what little budget we have and the fact that we’re working during a pandemic. So, we have to be careful with all of that stuff. We’re not inviting a bunch of people in at any time, you know what I mean? There’s not just a whole bunch of actors coming in. It was really the crew playing parts and wearing multiple hats with all of it just so we could get it done successfully without any COVID breakout.
It’s funny because the last gentleman asked me about casting, and I’m like, “Well, I don’t know that this one was really cast.” It was more like, “Let’s work with what we’ve got.” Obviously, there are plenty of roles that required an eye for casting, but some of them were just like, “Let’s just throw our friends in here.”
Speaking of friends, I want to talk about Ben Hall. He’s a frequent face in many of your projects and perhaps even a muse of sorts. What was it like actually playing off him and acting alongside him in this film? That seems like a new step in your professional relationship.
Well, that was the only way that it could have worked. Because I’m not an actor. I’ve just been doing this for so long and have had to step into roles. I’m not writing myself off and saying, “I don’t act, I’m not an actor,” but working with Ben, it had to be done. We needed at least one solid, experienced actor. [Laughs] And then it’s just me giving him what he needs because it’s his show.
I knew it would be a lot better than a scenario of getting another actor and them trying to be like, “I want to do my thing. I want to put my stamp on this too.” Like, “Uh, no, no, no.” This is more like, “Feed Ben his lines and let Ben do his thing.” That was kind of how I approached it whenever I was working with Ben. But I was also confident in that, and I knew I still needed to maintain the character that we had already established at the beginning of the move. However, when Ben is there, it’s like, “Oh, the weight has been lifted.”
And also, working with the actors while you’re acting with them is almost easier because you’re right there in the mix in the middle of it all, you know what I mean? It suffers visually from it because I’m not at the monitor. But, whatever. Different experiments for different movies. We’ll try something different every time.
Ok, I have to ask — did you change Garth Brooks’ name to Troyal Brux for fear of Brook’s wrath? I’m just curious why you kept George Jones’ the same but changed Garth’s.
Okay. I’m about to say something that you are going to be appalled by. The character was Garth Brooks, right? Written as Garth Brooks, and we got it funded as Garth Brooks. So, there’s the tax rebate in Oklahoma where they’ll rebate like, 35% of your production from everything that you shot [locally], every local person you employed, and all the money that you spent locally. Well, we spent every dime on this movie locally.
So, we were just about to shoot. We had been approved for the rebate, and we were good to go. It was just days before we were going to shoot, and we’d already started spending money. And then they said, “We can’t rebate this.” They had just gotten around to reading the script and realized that it was Garth Brooks. So I go, “Oh, no, no, no. It’s all satire, so legally, we’re fine.” Like, it’s not like SNL goes through lawsuits every weekend or something, you know? We were all confident that this was fine.
And then they were like, “No. We can’t. The Oklahoma Film and Music Office can’t rebate a movie that is making fun of our own bread and butter.” [Editor’s note: Garth Brooks is originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma] This was wild to me because I was like, “Garth Brooks is never gonna know. He’s never gonna see it.” This is not some major motion picture that somehow Garth is going to catch wind of. And also, even if he does, it’s satirical, but it doesn’t paint him in a bad light. The crazy thing is, it kind of makes him look cooler. But anyway, we had to change the name last minute, so he became Troyal Brux.
Why George Jones?
I really think it’s just as simple as when we were watching the Garth interview with him and Barbara Walters, I’m pretty sure he mentioned George Jones in there.
Ok, be honest. Was part of the appeal of Garth Brooks that you also got to play Chris Gaines?
Well, with that it was…we’re making something so original here. I just mean like, original as in a detour from the original people, Garth Brooks and George Jones. And we’re taking such a detour here that it’s like, do we even [do that]? But it’s a Garth Brooks movie. It’s gotta have some Chris Gaines in there somehow, somewhere. But it was also, how do we even put it in there? Then, we’re bringing attention to something that’s closer to real life. The way we figured out how to do it, I don’t think it’s pandering or anything. I think we still got the Chris Gaines in there for the Garth Brooks fans. It’s low-hanging fruit.
This film seems to share some visual and thematic threads with your film, MICKEY REECE’S ALIEN. Is there an actual connection or relationship between these two?
Absolutely. This is definitely the sister film to ALIEN. Very similar concept, and probably five years from now, I guess we’ll buckle down and do a third one. I don’t know who that’s gonna be, but we gotta work in threes. It has to be a trilogy, you know? So, I plan on doing a third one in four or five years. Because ALIEN came out in 2017, and then we’re doing this one in 2022. Every five years, we’re going to make one of these.
Many of your films have very ambiguous endings, and I was surprised to see this one have so much closure. Why did you feel that this story deserved or needed some definitive resolution?
Well, this is more straightforward. This material has to be more straightforward because everything else is so ridiculous. I would say that it was also kind of modeling it after the Elvis movie, which had closure to it as well. To a degree, if there is any genre that we’re playing with besides the kind of COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER, TENDER MERCIES, CRAZY HEART, if there’s anything we’re emulating genre-wise and structure-wise, it’s comedy. Just comedy films. And, it’s what it needed to respect those characters.
Have you thought about what happens to George Jones in the future? Like, in your head, does he go on to wake up and live the rest of his life in whatever future year it is?
We’ll never know. [Laughs]
Maybe he gets woken up and has a conversation in your next film with somebody. Or maybe he has a cameo just walking through the background.
That’s actually a pretty good idea. I hope to remember that.
Write it down. You can have that one. [Laughs] Seeing how I know you always have something cooking, what’s up next for you?
Okay. [Fidgets excitedly] The next movie is called THE COOL TENOR. In a vaguely dystopian future, a retired widow weds an unstable jazz enthusiast who becomes obsessed with avenging her late husband’s death. It’s a thriller.
I love it. I can’t wait.
Tags: Interviews, Mickey Reece
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