Francis Galluppi’s feature directorial debut, The Last Stop in Yuma County, is the kind of movie that hasn’t been released much recently. It’s an intimate arrangement of character actors portraying individuals stuck in a roadside desert diner, waiting for a gas truck to show up so that they might refill their tanks and be on their respective ways. Within the group, there’s a waitress, a travelling knife salesman, criminals, and an elderly couple, among others, all portrayed by genre stalwarts such as Jim Cummings, Richard Brake, Jocelin Donahue, Faizon Love, Gene Jones, Sierra McCormick, Alex Essoe, Jon Proudstar, and Barbara Crampton.
It’s an embarrassment of riches, and the way in which the story unfolds feels much like the cinema of the ’70s in which the film’s story is set. It’s gritty and shot through with blackly comic threads to offset the almost unceasing tension. The Last Stop in Yuma County gets a deluxe Blu-ray release from Arrow Video this week, and we took the opportunity to speak with director Francis Galluppi and star Jim Cummings to discuss everything that makes this neo-noir tick.
STARBURST: The Last Stop in Yuma County is the sort of movie that we don’t get to see as much anymore, where it is just this showcase for character actors. Francis, when you were putting this together and getting it cast, was that the idea: to have so many people who are like, “I know this face”?
Francis Galluppi: Yeah. Yeah. 100%. I mean, 90% of the cast I had in mind when I was writing the script and Jim specifically. Oonce that idea popped into my head, it just wasn’t going away. Like, it just was like, “This has to fucking happen.” I obviously never saw it another way before and especially now that the movie is done, I just can’t imagine anybody else playing the knife salesman.
Jim, you seem like you have a real knack for playing characters who end up in, in some awkward situations. Is there an appeal to playing characters who get backed into a spot where they have to find a way out?
Jim Cummings: Oh yeah, that’s interesting: drama and comedy. Most of the best comedies that I know and best drama is watching somebody participate in polite society until they can’t anymore. Something is going on, and we’re all pretending like it’s not happening, and it’s actually a hostage situation, and we gotta fucking actually break out of this thing and survive.
That’s the kind of crux of public freakouts and human drama, which I find so interesting. Anything that’s very good that I end up acting in has that stuff in it because it’s very fun to do. I think there’s a lot of stuff you can mine about the human experience and the masculine experience doing. So yeah, I really do love playing these kinds of characters.
The film feels very big for a small-budget picture. What were the challenges in making this feel bigger than a million-dollar budget might have allowed?
Jim: All of the challenges. Every single one of them.
Francis: That’s very true. We were lucky because I wrote the script for that specific location. We were able to spend 19 of those days without a single company move. We were there the entire time, which helped a lot, but what were the challenges? Oh God. Yeah. Wanting to do everything practical and using squibs and blanks and explosions and all that shit eats up a lot of your day – safety meetings and all that stuff.
So that was definitely a challenge, but in terms of like making it look bigger, we have our cinematographer, the incredible Mac Fisken – Jim uses them, too – and it was really about just utilising this space, this single room and trying to explore every single corner of that space and trying to not make it feel like a stage play and making it feel cinematic in a space that was a challenge, but I think, yeah, I think we pulled it off.
Jim, you’ve made movies yourself, like The Wolf of Snow Hollow and others. When you’re an actor, but you’re working with someone like Francis who this is their first bigger feature, was there a discussion? Were there some tips and tricks shared back and forth?
Jim: I mean, really, everything was done by the time we showed up to set. Francis had done so much pre-visualization and heavy thinking about how each moment was going to work and then, my job was to execute that. I don’t know. I mean, there are times where he and I spoke the same language. There are moments where he’s talking about how a cut is going to work or how the tension is going to work, and we have a shorthand together because we’ve both done this kind of thing before.
This was Francis’s first time doing a feature, but he had already done many shorts, and he and I were making the same jokes. I feel kind of like a comedian being cast in a comedy part because the director respected my comedy, so I don’t think there was any stepping on toes. It was more like, “Hey, how can we do the thing that we do to make the thing work?” and that’s just how it always is when you’re making something: “What do I need to do with my body and my delivery of these things to give you what you need?”
And then I’m always trying to inject stupid bullshit and comedy into it, and Francis would die laughing and then be like, “Yeah, okay, cool, let’s figure out how we put that in.”
Francis: Yeah. Or tell you to do more or less. Yeah. Please, please. We would do this thing on set where – ’cause the whole time, his character is not saying much for a lot of the movie, but there’s this internal panic happening in the entire time – so before every day, Jim would just start doing pushups on set.
Jim: Yeah, it was just to be out of breath and Francis was like, “Yeah, exactly.” He was like, “Come on, let’s do it. Let’s do a round of pushups.” I’m like, “Jesus Christ, okay, let’s do it.” It’s the best.
All of the songs in this film work so well, as though they’re almost commenting on the plot. Were those part of the script from the beginning?
Francis: Yes. Yeah. Everything was written into the script. We had to make sure that we would be able to afford the songs because I knew I wanted the actors singing along. It was still really stressful. And the whole time, I think everybody was like, “You should do a safety where they’re not singing along in case something happens,” and I just was, “No, we’re going to get it. Let’s just do it,” which was a really dumb decision.
I should have had a safety, but thank God it worked out. We were able to get all the songs, but yeah, everything was written into the script. The Roy Orbison [“Crying”] sequence was basically like all those shots were timestamped, and we shot it in my living room, cut it together, and made sure it was going to work. Essentially, as Jim would put it, we put a music video in the middle of the feature film. That’s kind of what we were doing.
How do you balance brutal violence and brutal carnage with comedy? What were the inspirations you had for trying to go from just some slapstick comedy of somebody having coffee spilt on them to literally like the Mexican standoff to end Mexican standoffs?
Francis: Oh, God, that’s a tough question. I don’t know. I mean, it’s one of those things where I just write what I think is funny, and sometimes you don’t know if it’s going to work. I mean, I remember I called Jim after I had a very rough cut, and I think what I told you, Jim, I was like, “I fucked up, dude. I think I made a movie that only me, you and Scott, like my best friend, are going to think is funny,” and then Jim said, “No, dude. You must remember that some people think Fargo is a serious movie. This will find its audience.”
I think it’s always about writing what your specific tastes are, what you think is funny, what you think like, and you kind of just got to go with it, but in terms of balancing the sort of brutality and the comedy? I don’t know. Jim, do you have a comment on that?
Jim: So, as a film kind of theorist and myself, I think like Francis and I grew up watching South Park, and we have a very specific sense of humour, which is to not take the medium too seriously. I think that we think that modern film audiences are so media literate and understand what’s happening that it’s like the Coen brothers can do No Country for Old Men. You can be fully immersed in this serious story, a period piece about violence in the South, which is kind of what we do.
There are good jokes throughout No Country, but with this, I feel like with modern audiences – this is the movie that ruins the title. The titular line of the film phrase only half says the title of the movie before it cuts to the next scene. This is for an audience that gets that we’re having fun. So, really, the fact that all of the violence and the tension is excellent is rare inside of this kind of movie, I do feel, in the same way, that Bong Joon Ho does it.
In order to win a modern audience, you have to be guiding them on the roller coaster and hitting different lobes of their brains. It’s got to be excellent as a pressure cooker engine of a thriller and then you also have to acknowledge that hostage situations are sometimes comical and pathetic and that not everybody’s a good hero. Sometimes, there’s a coward who’s supposed to be the protagonist. I think, really, it’s a really thoughtful response to the desires and the diet of the modern audience – especially for cinephile perverts, which is our core audience.
Being as how you are cinephile perverts, and I am a cinephile pervert, the reason we’re talking is because Arrow is putting out this deluxe Blu-ray of this. When you were making the film, did you have in mind a physical release and the sort of things you would like to see on it?
Francis: I mean, honestly, physical media, bonus features, all that stuff – that was my film school.
Jim: That’s what he thinks about. From the beginning, he’s like, “We’re gonna have this cool thing. It’s gonna be this physical thing.” He is such a collector in his mind. That’s how he fantasises about this thing. That is the end goal. It’s crazy.
Francis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I got the actual physical copies of this movie, it was literally a bucket list thing where I’m like, “Oh my God, Arrow physical release. It’s so cool,” but yeah, I mean that because that was my film school. I mean, I’ve spent more money on physical media than I would have if I would have paid to go to film school and it paid off.
I learned a lot, and in terms of specifics, there is a documentary I talk about all the time – The Snowball Effect, the Clerks documentary, is fucking amazing. That was a huge inspiration. There’s a few really funny ones that I love. There’s one on Tales from the Crypt presents Bordello of Blood, and it’s called Tainted Blood, and it’s you, if you haven’t seen it, it’s on the Shout Factory release.
Yeah, well, we actually have. Jim just saw a cut of a documentary that’s coming out on the making of Last Stop, which is going to be two hours long. It’s called Sell Your House. It’s a crazy fucking story.
The Last Stop in Yuma County is out now on Blu-ray from Arrow Video.
