Custody Road is a 2018 drama about a struggling stand up comic who kidnaps his party-girl ex-wife to prevent her from winning sole custody of their young son.
Chances are that if you’ve spent any amount of time at your local multiplex or in front of the television you’ve seen John Lacy in one thing or another. John is a character actor in the fine tradition of such greats as Thomas Mitchell, Martin Balsam, Lee J.Cobb and Ward Bond and his credits read like a Who’s Who of great film and television work (Dogfight, Criminal Minds, Sons of Anarchy, Zodiac, Grey’s Anatomy and Hell on Wheels). Now, after years in front of the camera, this well-respected actor is making his feature film directorial debut with Custody Road, a “desert gothic noir” in which a down on his luck comedian fights for custody of his son even if it means employing some dubious means in which to do so. I recently had the opportunity to sit down and chat with John about Custody Road and what it means to him.
I know this has to be a pretty hectic and exciting time for you with the release of your directorial debut Custody Road. How are you handling it?
John Lacy: There is a daily focus that is required to kind of keep the train on track and to make sure that all of the parties involved – my cast and the crew that are still intimately involved in the film – are staying focused and promoting the film and talking up the film; one of the primary goals for any independent filmmaker is to get their money back and pay their investors back. Getting the film to the market place is only half the battle; it’s just a chapter in the novel. You need to promote it every day because if you don’t you can’t expect anyone else to. So I’m kind of equal parts carnival barker, the chairman of the board and the grand marshal of the parade. It’s easy to do in the respect that the response from audiences and the people who have taken the time to download and watch the film have unanimously embraced it. The reward is that the audience response thus far has been overwhelming. It’s the film I set out to make and it’s landing exactly the way I wanted it to with our viewers.
READ MORE: Our review of the John Lacy film Custody Road
You’re a very well-known and respected character actor, John. What motivated you to segue way from acting and into writing and directing?
JL: I said this at the L.A. premiere with my wife and three sons in attendance, I joked that we had seemingly been in production since the day we met, and we literally had been. When my wife and I had met I was working on a script that I had written called Out From the Shadow, which was a very derivative story about two brothers; one brother was from the right side of the tracks, so to speak, and the other has gone to the dark side. It was a very Cain and Abel sort of story. It was the first thing I had written which was long form and when I met my wife I was in the middle of casting it and preparing to shoot it on beta video; and I turned it into a two and a half hour epic slog that I actually screened for an audience, half of who walked out. And they were friends of mine! But I did parlay that effort into a development deal with a low budget film company that strung me out for three years before I realized that it was never actually going to go anywhere. My point is that I’ve been aspirational as a filmmaker and a storyteller for as long as I’ve been in L.A. My mother and father are both writers and writing comes naturally to me…To be a good filmmaker you need to be a constant student, you need to know who and what came before you and have an understanding of composition, pacing, editing and the basic three act structure. Filmmaking is a craft that I need to continue to evolve in and work on and I’m doing that all of the time. I tell my acting students every day is “film school.” I’m constantly watching director’s commentaries, reading interviews of filmmakers who I admire to see what they did and how they did it. So I guess you could say I’ve been directing my entire career, it’s just taken me this long to deliver something to the marketplace.
The confidence to write and to jump into production on Custody Road came from two things: One was the success I had with two different web series that I wrote. One was extremely ambitious. It was called The Reveal… I call it a “morphine drip;” this was right when people were starting to use that word “binge watch.” I saw the writing on the wall of what was happening and that that was the way storytelling was going and so I set out to write a film noir thirteen installment web series and when you would stack it all up it would be about the equivalent of a feature film, about ninety minutes. I wrote it in ten and eleven page episodes that all had a cliffhanger or a reveal, something that you learned at the end of each episode. I was aching to do something in black and white and I wanted The Reveal… to just be this collage of film noir characters that almost lived in a comic book world; Marvel meets Dashiell Hammett. For instance, my character was called “The Hammer.” I was a hitman that didn’t to carry a gun because I had an enormous ‘Hulk’ fist as a right hand; that was my weapon. That’s how I pitched it to my actors: ‘Look, here’s my character and here’s what I’m giving myself. What are you going to bring to your character, what can you do to make your character just slightly out of the realm of reality?’ I wanted to go for something Lynch, for something akin to True Romance in terms of ensemble boldness. I went out to a dozen actors initially and I propositioned them: ‘Here’s what I’m doing: I’m going to write you something really rich and we’re going to have a blast. I can’t guarantee you that I’m going to be able to do anything with it; it’s a web series and there’s really no market for it…I’m not going to try and turn it into a commodity with a revenue stream at all. I’m going to ask each of you to invest in it. What you’re investing in will be relationships and the process of making something special.’
So The Reveal…was actor driven, actor produced and actor financed. It became a beast for me to pull off because I ended up with a cast of thirty two and we shot from Los Angeles, all around the Pearblossom Highway and all the way to Las Vegas. It was just really ambitious. My ability to complete that to the vision that I had written and then to have it accepted at multiple web series festivals was just so validating for me. It confirmed that not only do I have interesting stories to tell but that I have the ability to herd a large cast and get people enlisted in my vision. That’s what it takes to be a filmmaker: you have to enlist people in your enthusiasm for the story you’re telling. The story you’re telling has to grab them. It all comes down to material. When you have the material and the ability to enthusiastically talk it up, you can get people onboard.
I then went from The Reveal… to the exact opposite: I wanted to make a slap-stick, screwball comedy web series with just two actors, two of the funniest actors I know Bret Anthony and Brendon Garrett. I pared it down from thirty two actors to two, from eleven minutes to three and film noir to comedy. It was called The Adventures of Hollywood and Vine and it was two actors living together, a modern day Odd Couple. The one character, “Hollywood,” is the stereotypical forty year old actor auditioning for NCIS and “Vine” the young Millennial who plays a variety of wacky characters and is immediately successful because he understands Social Media… We shot and released six episodes on YouTube and people loved it. So there were two web series where I took my idea and followed through and enlisted people and self-financed it. It was then that I said, ‘Okay, I’m ready to make a movie.’
How did that directly play into Custody Road?
JL: I teach an acting class in Burbank. I have a dynamic and talented group of actors in my studio. In the fall of 2015 I wrote Custody Road for four of my actors: Josh Daugherty, an actress named Tyne Stecklein who I originally wrote Ashley for, and then the “characters” of Otis and Loretta, Frank Crim and Andrea Muller. They were all very active in my studio and I wrote the script specifically for them. Particularly Josh and Tyne, I would send them ten pages at a time of the script and they were just salivating, they loved it. We developed it together and I really started to get into this story of male and female conflict and custody battles, fathers and mothers, nature versus nurture and all of the stuff that appeals to me; the type of stuff I want to spend time talking about and examining became more and more apparent as I dove into that concept. I finished the script and everyone loved it and I put together an entire cast table read and we started to fill in the gaps of who would play what role. I was almost entirely casting from my acting class. Tyne unfortunately had to pull out…And then Erin Fleming came to me from Frank Crim. Erin was a theater actor in L.A. who I had never met before and who I was not aware of. Frank brought Erin to me and the rest is history…She was able to bring that quality of a woman who had made some bad decisions in her life to the part.
Can you describe for me what it felt like to see what had begun life as words on a piece of paper turn into a celluloid reality? It must have been exciting for you.
JL: It was exciting. The process was an organic one, exactly how I feel a film should be made: A true collaboration. We spent three months rehearsing before shooting. It’s not normally how films are made.
For Hollywood that is very unusual.
JL: And it’s awesome. Do you know how the proof of that is in the pudding? The scene where Logan and Ashley are having the big conversation when she first realizes he’s the kidnapper is seven pages of dialogue. They’re sitting there squaring off and this sets up the whole conflict, it sets up the whole story; that scene has to work, right? That was the first day of shooting! This film took fourteen months to shoot. Do you know how much growth and how much better you get working as a team together after fourteen months? That scene was the very first day of shooting. You’re only going to get performances like that with that type of clarity and storytelling if you’ve rehearsed…
The way that you structured your scenes in Custody Road I almost had the sense of an intimate stage play. Is that what you were going for with the film and with the extended rehearsal time?
JL: Oh yeah. What you develop is a trust. Shorthand I already had with my actors through teaching them in class. Now Erin was not in my class, but my other actors for the most part know the language I speak when I talk to them about moments and emotional clarity that they need, about what’s happening in this scene or where this scene fits in the overall story. So that shorthand was already there because of the class. The rehearsal process gave us all the time to discuss and debate things in the script: ‘Why would he say this?’ ‘Why does he call her a tramp?’ ‘No one uses the word tramp anymore.’ We sat and talked about the tramp line for over an hour. Imagine if we were trying to have that conversation while we were shooting!
You would have some very nervous studio heads.
JL: And I wouldn’t want to listen to it, I wouldn’t want to put up with it. I would have given it ten seconds of deliberation and I would have said, ‘I wrote the script, let’s go; action!’ But we had all of that time in rehearsal to talk about the specificity of the language and the trust that comes from knowing that you’ve heard everyone out and given everyone their day in court on things they like or don’t like, and that was huge. I’m a big Sydney Lumet fan and he was a big advocate of rehearsal and really walking through and creating the parameters of the set even if it’s just tape on the floor, understanding where you’re going to be when you say things, how the scene is going to flow…Another thing that was in our benefit was that the cabin that we shot in was the holding area for makeup in my web series The Reveal… When we shot The Reveal…we were out using a property that was connected to that double-wide trailer that we shot in. After spending six months using that trailer for practical purposes, I had it in the back of my mind that it would also be a great movie set if I could write a script that spent thirty to forty pages in a shitty little trailer like that it would be very cinematic. So I knew that trailer inside and out.
You mention Lumet who is also a hero of mine and he had a well-known style for how he directed his actors. I also am thinking about other directors, too, such as Clint Eastwood who is famous for keeping a very low key set, prompting a take from his actors not with a loud and verbose tone, but with a rather soft tone, using the word ‘Go’ quietly instead of the more traditional ‘Action!’ What is your process like as a director when you’re on set and directing a scene?
JL: I attempt to create a collaborative energy where all the department heads and obviously the actors know whose voice is the loudest…When you do it in the right tone and use a consistent vernacular that people understand you get results. What you don’t want to be is erratic and inconsistent. Just yelling out common film terms like ‘Lock it up’ or ‘Everybody be quiet’, I would rather be in charge of that because I know the intimacy level that is required. If it’s a scene that requires energy, instead of saying, ‘Alright, everyone settle in,’ I’m going to say ‘Everybody crank it up!’ When you start to use a consistent language with people in the same tone of voice, you get results. My actors know exactly what I mean when I speak to them. When I say ‘Load it up,’ that means to load up your emotions; whatever the emotional life of the character is in the scene, when I say ‘Load it up,’ that means they’re going to take those moments necessary before I call action to fill their vessel with that emotion…Also, we worked with kind of a revolving door of First A.D.s depending on the size of the day we were shooting...I’m just so happy with my actors in Custody Road. Obviously I’ve seen the film more than anyone else, but it just passes the test everytime when I’m watching my actors and seeing how engaged they are in the story.
Do you have a favorite scene in Custody Road?
JL: I do; it was the first scene we edited. I knew if that scene worked emotionally that the film was going to be great. It was among the first scenes we shot during our first weekend when we were in the cabin. So it was the first week that I sat and assembled with my Assistant Editor, Albert Ruis and we put some music to it and I just walked out of the editing room that weekend going, ‘Okay, this is going to be great.’ It’s the scene where Logan walks in the back door of the cabin and he pauses and just tilts his head down and the cowboy hat goes straight down to the ground with its pointer and just that tableaux still-image of a man in reflection filled with regret, filled with fear, caution, love, tenderness, just the way that Josh played through that stillness and the way I framed it with my cinematographer Gray Morrison, I just love that image. That’s always been the image that I think defines Custody Road when he walks in that backdoor, and then he walks down the hallway and he peeks in on his kids, and who are his kids? Otis and Loretta; they have become the de facto teenagers in this dysfunctional home. The only way we’re going to see how Logan and Ashley function as parents is through that situation. All of the scenes that are Mason related are strained and that’s where the conflict is, but we’re going to see these two people reveal the type of parents they would be through the way they handle Otis and Loretta. So when he’s walking down the hall and he peeks in on his kids the way any parent would do, he walks in and pours himself a drink and then he has that flashback where he comes to the realization of what went wrong: ‘Now I remember, this is when it went south, when I didn’t get the HBO deal and I could feel my wife no longer believing in me. I knew we were doomed.’ Most relationships, when you have that uncertainty and that lack of belief in one another, especially as an artist, it is very difficult to overcome that. That’s why that flashback is placed there. Just the way Ashley is laying there:
‘What are you doing, Logan?’
‘Good morning, beautiful…These are the moments I miss most, lying in bed talking.’
‘One of us should be with Mason.’
‘Mason’s fine.’
‘He’s two. Exactly the wrong age to start feeling like you’ve been abandoned.’
And then what does he say to her: ‘So smart…’ And that’s what men feel so often when their wives are lecturing them about something. Men just feel so bottled up…There are these little quiet moments of pillow talk with all of the conflict wrapped up into it and they’re not yelling at each other and you can totally see their past relationship. You can see maybe even how good they were together. You can see in his eyes that he wishes they could get back to that. And then no sooner is he landing in that sweet nostalgia than here comes Otis with his dirty socks…That was the first scene we edited and we put a piece of music to it from Road to Perdition which is just a great soundtrack by Thomas Newman.
Tell me a little bit about the score for Custody Road.
JL: It was one of my greatest days, one of my ‘Eureka!’ days on the making of Custody Road when Rene Boscio walked into my editing room. We shook hands and we spoke and ten minutes into our conversation I said, ‘Holy shit, I found my composer!’ He gets all my film references, everything I say he eats it with a spoon, he can’t wait to go home and start the research and start to put together ideas based on our conversation and I knew immediately I had my composer. Thankfully it was very early in the process where he was able to watch the film being completed and being handheld all the way through post; Rene was intimately involved all the way through that. We are already in creative discussions on my next script. Rene is my guy. So happy we met.
A lot of directors like to carry over actors and crew from project to project such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Is that your goal, to have your own sort of ‘stock company’ to draw on from film to film?
JL: I’m a huge Sam Peckinpah fan and he always leaned on stable of reliable actors. The best directors always have, Cassavetes being probably the best example. You want people who you trust, who you value and you want people you don’t have to spend a lot of unnecessary time explaining your motivation and why you do things the way you do them. When you have actors who get you and that trust you, that’s just such a big part of the collaboration and you want that moving forward. So yes, moving forward, there will be many, many people who worked on Custody Road who will be moving into the next picture, without a doubt.
In a day and age where tent-pole franchises are the rule, is it becoming increasingly more difficult for films like Custody Road to get made?
JL: I wouldn’t know in terms of the studio system, just because I worked outside of it to make Custody Road. Obviously with my budget level and the way my film was financed and the way I delivered it to self-distribution and the video-on-demand marketplace, I am an ‘Indie’ in the purest sense of the word. I would obviously love to be seduced by the arm of a studio with a three million dollar budget and then have creative discussions about why my ideas are not marketable so I could make an argument for why they are. Right now for my follow-up to Custody Road I am proceeding very much like I did with my first film. At heart, I think I will always be a guerrilla filmmaker. I will cobble together the finances to the best of my ability. Obviously I’m going to go for a bigger whack at the piñata than I did with Custody Road, I’m going to up my game…I’m aiming to do something that is between five hundred and seven hundred thousand dollars. I’m not going to go for the million dollar film yet unless something really great happens…
Since we’re on the subject of your next film, could you give me an idea about what the story is?
JL: The two central characters are female. It’s another thriller, a love story about obsession and redemption. Big issues I want to examine; the consequences of actions. It’s darker than Custody Road for sure. I’m really excited about it.
What do you want audiences who watch Custody Road to get out of it?
JL: The goal was for the audience to look at it and realize that the inherent natural conflict between men and women are there and they are inevitable. It’s a big challenge for men and women to get on the same page. It’s certainly something to strive for, men and women need each other; but we can’t ignore that in today’s society with how much we have blurred the lines of definition in the way gender roles function compared to prior generations, it’s become increasingly more challenging for marriages to sustain; period.
Closing this out John, are there any movies that have had an impact or influence on you or your work?
JL: Funny you ask about inspirations….I’ve dedicated my social media promo push today to posts re: character/imagery inspirations from other films. Such as Logan staring in the mirror in the beginning of the film being a direct homage to Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull and Michael Keaton in Birdman. The ‘Ashley’ character look was inspired by Goldie Hawn‘s character in Steven Spielberg‘s The Sugarland Express. ‘Otis’ hunting look inspired by Lance Henriksen‘s menacing look in Kathryn Bigelow‘s Near Dark. Also, “Otis” is very much a Sam Peckinpah ‘Wild Bunch’ character, part Ernest Borgnine, part Warren Oates.
No Country for Old Men was a huge inspiration in terms of our overall desert color palette.
Favorite scenes: I always loved the climactic court room scene in Kramer vs Kramer where Dustin Hoffman just can’t bring himself to bash his ex-wife (Streep). Big inspiration for how our climactic courtroom scene needed to feel in Custody Road.
Carl Franklin‘s One False Move is a huge influence on me. When Otis is pinning Ashley down to give her her “medicine” the way he yells at ‘Loretta’ “Move on it, goddammit” is a nod to Billy Bob Thornton‘s character from One False Move.
The scene outside the library where ‘Logan’ is confronted by the fan is meant to convey a sudden sense of dread and paranoia – I referred to this as our ‘Jeremiah Johnson‘ scene, always loved that moment when Robert Redford was riding back to his family after helping the Union troops through the snowy pass and the sacred Indian burial ground…realizing he was going to pay for that mistake…suddenly riding off in a panic knowing that something horrible has happened to his family back home….
Custody Road is currently streaming on iTunes, Amazon and GooglePlay.