Huffing gasoline affords a lovesick trucker a delirious high, but consequently inspires both inner homilies and attempted homicides in this raw but arresting surrealist southern gothic.
Allen Phillips is from De Kalb, Tx, a small farming community in North East Texas. His family has owned a sawmill there for over 60 years which is now the oldest family owned sawmill in the state of Texas. Allen started making films at an early age with his friend Trampas Smith using Trampas’ mom’s Beta Cam.
Allen studied history and government at the University of Texas at Austin for his bachelors and studied Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design for his masters.
Today, he lives in De Kalb, Tx where he headquarters Archfern, a multifaceted design firm with foci on film, furniture, and architecture.
Trampas and I decided to make a short film after many many years of saying we were going to. We were both 36 at that time, both done with our graduate work, and both had children, so we felt it was time.
We had about five stories we were interested in turning into a short film, some written by Trampas, some by me. We chose Trampas’ ‘Liquid Soul’ because we believed it was the one we could complete with the most success. It had the least amount of characters and the least amount of locations.
We were very lucky, the president of the local college was visiting the Archfern studio to discuss developing a woodworking program and noticed the green screen Trampas had built, he inquired.
He told us the college had a vacant television studio and allowed us to use it, this made this project possible, we could not have done it without that resource.
What we didn’t see coming was the voice over, we tried seven different voices, they were all good, just not quite right.
Then we asked Joe Burke, who was actually with us from first night of filming, and when his voice came through the monitors, we knew that was it.