Miles Away — Feature Article

WORDS — NAT KASSEL PHOTOS — C/O SIZE 8 STUDIO

Sam Wilson was working the grill at a Vancouver taco joint when he started writing his first feature film, Miles Away. The taco joint was more like a nightclub though, and Sam usually worked until four in the morning, cooking drunk food for a steady stream of people partying on Granville Street. He’d moved to Vancouver from Melbourne, with a brief stint in the mountains of Norway in between, and had spent the previous decade hopping between acting gigs and hospitality jobs. “I had a bit of a rough couple of years in Melbourne, chasing film work,” says Sam. “The whole acting thing’s pretty tough – just lots of rejection and inconsistent work.”

Sam initially headed for the mountains of Norway, planning “to get away from the film industry and get away from everyone,” but after six months of isolation and negative temperatures, he knew he wanted to make a film. With little more than a backpack, Sam headed for Vancouver, which he soon found to be “a beautiful city full of starving talent”. Before long he was in a relationship, then going through a breakup, and all the while, trying to get work as an actor, flipping tacos and writing his own script. He was also surrounded by way too much cocaine. “That was the low of the low,” he says. “But it was all that rock bottom that really inspired the film.”

The film, Miles Away, is an experimental, indie creation, touted as “an anti-love story set between the worlds of jazz and skateboarding”. Shot totally in black and white, it somehow feels both stylised and hyper realistic. It took four years to make and was shot on a shoestring budget, funded mostly through Sam’s labours at the taco bar, and later, at a Jamaican food truck. Sam wrote it, directed it, played the lead role, then edited and produced it. But perhaps more impressive is the fact that he somehow convinced between 200 and 300 people to work on it for free, with little more to offer them than free beer, courtesy of a beer sponsor.

When I catch Sam on the phone for this interview, he’s sitting on a headland in Port Macquarie, where he grew up, looking out at the surf. With a hearty chuckle, he tells me his mother has been doomsday prepping for the latest lockdown, but that he’s glad to be out of the city, staying with his mum on a farm that’s been in his family for a couple of generations. Miles Away is just about finished, which is a relief.

“I thought I was going to die quite a few times during the making of this film,” he says, somehow without sounding too dramatic. “I was actually amazed that I made it through the stress, the exhaustion. It was week after week of getting pushed beyond your limits. We were about three weeks into shooting and I would wake up in the middle of the night and I couldn't breathe. I felt like something had crawled into my throat. I’d get myself out of bed, not breathing, and I’d stumble through my house to make sure someone was there, in case I passed out. I’d find someone on the couch or go into my housemate’s room and then all of a sudden I’d feel the breath coming back in.” He exhales deeply. “That was the level of stress.”

The film tells the story of Miles (Sam Wilson), an Australian skateboarder in his 20s who moves to Vancouver to spend the summer with a girl named Lulu (Nalani Wakita). Miles and Lulu fall into an intense relationship, cocooned by a handful of mutual friends and a steady flow of booze and recreational drugs, which creates a slow-boiling tension that builds throughout the film. While Lulu goes off to work, Miles spends time with his best friend Sid (Theo Jones); they spend their afternoons skateboarding and their nights partying, seamlessly moving between jazz bars, comedy clubs and skate shops. It all feels very familiar.

The film’s most amusing character is probably Charlie, a comparatively older guy who owns a jazz club. His lines are delivered like slam poetry and he snorts coke like a maniac. He’s got a drug-addled intensity that mostly adds to his charisma, but towards the end of the bender, feels increasingly dark and nauseating. Sam describes Charlie’s character as “the personification of drugs. He's this cool, fucking elusive, mysterious, all powerful, omnipresent beast.”

With the exception of a few of the stars, Sam mostly recruited non actors to play themselves, or variations of themselves, a technique made famous by Larry Clarke, the director of seminal hyper-realist films like Kids and Ken Park. Much of the dialogue in Miles Away is ad-libbed, which has the effect of making the viewer feel like a voyeur, looking in on a series of private moments between lovers and close friends. It makes for intimate viewing.

“I only used a handful of actors – the minimum really. Actors are hard work, they ask too many questions,” Sam laughs. “But real people, if you cast the right people, they're good at being themselves. They’re fucking better than anyone else in the world at being themselves.”

Sam attempted to create a shooting environment that blurred the lines between film set and reality. He asked the cast to start calling each other by their character names for weeks before they started shooting, setting them up to inhabit the roles they were playing. A bar and restaurant called The Reef was one of the major shooting locations, and the producers made an effort to make it feel like a regular bar for everybody on the set. The actors and extras could go up to the bar and order a drink, or go outside to smoke, and it wasn’t always clear whether shooting was in progress or not.

“It was a real wild head fuck,” says Sam. “I was trying to create this really live environment so people would really forget that we were shooting. That comes with its fucken challenges as well, because you have maniacs walking on set and all sorts of craziness going on.”

That craziness culminated to breaking point when a fist fight started to break out on the set. Some of the skaters, who were essentially extras playing themselves, had a beef with some of the actors who were playing Lulu’s colleagues. These two groups actually have beef in the plot of the film, so Sam says he’d been encouraging the tension as a conduit for method acting. It was supposed to add authentic tension to the scene, but he admits that it got out of hand.

“A full-on fight broke out. I was screaming at everyone to cut. I had to grab Nate by the back and pull him off,” Sam explains. “That scared the shit out of me.”

He continues: “I gave a speech and everyone came good. There was no bad blood. The skaters just laughed about it. For them it was just a new experience where they were allowed to get rowdy and it was all fun and games, at the core. It was the actors who were really scared. No one got slogged in the face, but it was close. It was really close, and that scared the actors. They didn't know how far it was going to go, or how far these skateboarders would take it. They out-acted the actors.”

When Sam talks about the skateboarders on the set, he sounds a little bit tired, as if they were a pretty challenging group to please. He says he lured them onto set with free weed and a steady supply of beers, supplied by the beer sponsor. Sam also had some directorial support from the legendary Stacy Peralta, who watched some early footage that ended up in the film and offered encouragement. Stacy’s involvement in the film was pretty minimal, but his name alone earned Sam some trust from the skaters involved.

The longer I talk to Sam about his film, the more it sounds like a clear case of art imitating life. The conflicts, relationship breakdowns and instances of substance abuse were all very real for him. One of the major tensions in the film is that while the male characters are mostly hedonistic, selfish and content to just skate and party, the female characters in the film tend to want something more, whether it’s a greener pasture, career progression or simply a holiday. Though every character is flawed in their own ways, the women on screen seem a little more ambitious.

In one scene, Miles and Sid are sitting on a stoop drinking beers and smoking cigarettes when Miles cautiously enquires about Sid’s relationship with his girlfriend.

“The thing I never realise is I’m always like, significantly more drunk than she is, and I don’t think I ever realise that while it’s happening. So, it’s fair enough, she’s going to get bummed, obviously, when I come banging on the door at whatever time… She also has a way better job, so she cares a little more.” While Sid seems aware that his girlfriend would like him to be more present and respectful, he speaks with total nonchalance, as if it doesn’t matter at all. “It’s great,” he says finally, “I don’t do shit.” Miles laughs this off, making no effort to encourage Sid to do better. Sam explains that in the film, he’s playing a younger version of himself, which meant confronting his own issues with substance abuse. Evidently, this was a difficult character to play, not because it was unfamiliar, but because he had to lean into his flaws and feel them viscerally, addressing some of the carnage from his past.

“It was very confronting for me to put that down on paper – the alcohol and the drugs and stuff – but it’s helped me immensely, doing it. Having to edit that film was a fucking nightmare for me. It was like sandpapering my ego.”

My final question for Sam is what he wants people to take away from the film. What was it all for, this beautiful, jazz-infused, black and white semi-autobiographical film that took four years of his life and, by his own account, nearly killed him? His answer boils down to authenticity.

“I didn't build these characters up to make them super likeable or anything, it was more important that they were authentic and real,” he says. “I was sick of Hollywood’s ideals of love that we’ve been fucking suffocated with our whole lives. They’re just not the love stories that I know.”

Rather than providing a clear message or a social comment, Miles Away, seeks to authentically represent a group of friends and their subculture on screen. It’s a story of minimum wage retail and hospitality jobs, of drinking and drugs, and of the tensions that arise in friendships and romantic relationships. Of course, real life events rarely end with neat and happy conclusions. Real stories are usually messy and complex and open to interpretation, with a bit of beauty and humour along the way. And, in the case of Miles Away, that’s infinitely more interesting than a happy ending.

WATCH THE TRAILER >>>