The summer of 2023 marked something new for the San Luis Valley. A film crew came around and shot a movie that is currently making its way through the festival circuit and headed for nationwide release.
“Rebuilding,” written and directed by Telluride local Max Walker-Silverman, is about a rancher named Dusty who loses everything in a fire. He’s relocated to a FEMA camp in the shadow of Mt. Blanca. The destruction of his ranch puts Dusty in a vulnerable place, but in his time of need he rekindles his relationship with his ex-wife and their daughter, Callie-Rose.
It’s a slice-of-life film that tells the story of our born family and our found family. Its heart is community and how we can all help each other and nobody has to scratch anybody’s back in return. A shared burden is half a burden.
San Luis Valley locals and residents will recognize the towns and the mountains. Alamosa locals will recognize the beautiful blue home that sits on First Street. A lot of locals will recognize the people in front of the camera. Besides the big name stars like Josh O’Connor and Amy Madigan, most of the faces seen on screen are Valley residents.
A private screening was held in early November for the friends and family of those who helped make the movie happen. It was a nearly packed theater.
“The truth is,” Walker-Silverman said, “this movie owes the debt of gratitude to people and places in the Valley so deeply it truly was just made by so many people here.”
The following day, Alamosa Citizen welcomed Walker-Silverman into its southside studio in Alamosa. Here’s our conversation with Walker-Silverman. It has been edited for length and clarity. You can also listen to the Valley Pod episode HERE.
Alamosa Citizen: I want to get into a little bit of your background before we get into the movie. Tell me about yourself, where you grew up and yeah, how you got into film.
Max Walker-Silverman: I grew up in Telluride, Colorado, so only about 70 miles as the crow flies to the other side of San Juans, but of course, kind of a different world in many ways. It’s been a tourist sort of town for a long time.
But when I was a kid, there was still a really funky sort of artsy scene there. I think, in hindsight, I was raised by, whatever they were, rednecks or they were hippies or whatever they were, but everyone worked, but everyone made art, too.
Grew up doing sports, but also doing theater and just had a lot of good teachers and was raised by the village in a nice way.
Even though the town was kind of changing and gentrifying, and that was like a constant losing struggle, which continues, there was a sense of community and a sense of funk that made it a pretty cool place to grow up.
I went to college in California and dug it and then sort of stumbled into graduate film school in New York. Not because cinema was like a dream necessarily, but just because art and writing and making things, that seemed sort of like the medium of its time and like a good thing to learn how to do, and while there I began coming back home to Colorado doing short films.
And bringing some friends from school they wound up mixing with my friends from home, sort of both in front of and behind the camera.
We did a short in Norwood and then a short in Telluride, and then during COVID we did a feature film in Norwood with the same sort of approach of just a really small crew of friends. Then this movie “Rebuilding,” which we filmed here in the Valley. Which I hadn’t hadn’t been to since high school for soccer games and camping at the Sand Dunes and stuff, but wound up just driving through kind of by accident, coming back home from New Mexico one day and was like, man, it was one of those days when there was snow on the Sand Dunes and just… this place is unreal.
So familiar, but so different too.
It was really moving to me hanging out in the Valley again because there’s kind of this sense of history and community here that’s really, in many ways, been lost in the ski towns especially. Of course, there’s pros and cons to all the money, but it made me, I don’t know, it kind of reminded me of a different version, or an older version, or even a more naive version, of my town.
So, it’s cool. It’s like, yeah, this would be a good place to make a film.
AC: It’s a hell of a place to make a film and it’s untapped, too. I think the film potential here is pretty crazy. There’s some places I would go mountain biking up by Del Norte, and I’m like, you could make a western here for nothing, you know, like no power lines, no buildings out in the distance, nothing. If it’s 1650, 1850, 1950, it doesn’t make a difference. Do you have any desire to continue to lens this place at all?
MWS: I mean, I would love to. The whole film thing has kind of come about in reverse as it’s largely such a social art form, I guess, you know? With the short films and stuff I realized I could… Like I would bring my good friends from film school and then I would cast all my best friends from childhood. I’m able to put all my favorite people together in one place and they have to be here. I’m like, wow, what a great selfish thing for me.
And then now I’ve been able to sort of pay people to do that as well, which is even better. Then sort of be able to kind of be in a place one likes to be while assembling all your favorite people is better still. And I would love to keep working in the Valley if possible.
AC: I knew that it was a different level of filmmaking when you guys were filming on First Street at the Blue House and I saw your gaffing setups and all of your stuff. I was like, oh, this is the real deal, you know, I thought it was really cool to see because I went to film school, and so I spent a lot of time on film sets, and it was nice to kind of see the level of equipment that so many movies have, and not a lot of people realize that goes into the kinds of stuff that you have to do to set up a shot and all the the prep work and the amount of material that’s required to get certain shots. It was really cool, I think, for the community to kind of see that this is a real process. This is a real collaborative art form that requires so many different people knowing how to do things.
MWS: It is a funny craft, you know? Because sometimes it takes 100 people to get it. It’s kind of like the irony is ultimately you’re chasing something that looks and feels real. But it’s such a weird form that it takes a lot of dedicated, like insanely dedicated, artifice to come back around to something real. I find that very moving, you know, that a film set could have 50 people and each one of them has a very, very specific needle-sharp job that they do with so much care and dedication. And all of those things come back together into some simple viewing experience.
You hope, right? So I don’t know. It’s also, in many ways, ludicrously inefficient.
I like the team sport aspect of it. Kind of being on this adventure with so many odd people who wouldn’t be together and on the same street in Alamosa for any other reason.
AC: And to then say, OK, that’s a wrap for the day and then hoping all those people have the trust in you to deliver their hard work on the screen. That’s a lot of pressure for a director, for a filmmaker, but also they do trust you. They’re taking the leap of faith with you.
MWS: Well, yeah, that’s kind of the funny thing is no one has a single clue everything’s going to be any good. Myself included. You go out there and the actors do their best and the people light it and people put on the costumes and the camera goes where it goes and the lens films what it films and the sound records what it records, but it’s so abstracted. You’re not in the narrative.
You’re shooting this thing over many weeks and it’s all out of order. One little scene might take 2 days. You actually have really no idea how things are going to fit together.
It really is all a leap of faith.
AC: How long were you shooting in the San Luis Valley? What was your schedule like?
MWS: We were here in pre-production, so scouting and figuring out everything for a few months, I don’t know, 3 months or so, and then the actual filming was about 6 and a half weeks. Long enough to go from the end of winter to the fall.
AC: Yeah, how did you get Josh O’Connor for 6 weeks? He’s a busy guy, man.
MWS: I think he had been taking a little break. And I sent him the script and got an Instagram DM from him like 12 hours later saying, “Wow, this looks great. Let’s do it.”
And we chatted and he really, I think, resonated with the ecological themes of the film, even though he’s from a really different place. I brought him out here and put him to work on a farm for a while, got him sunburnt, and it was so special also to just see he’s someone who’s irrepressibly capable of wonder. Every day he was amazed by things. Amazed by Blanca, amazed by the cowboys. That’s such a nice energy to have at the center of a film set.
AC: I mean for an Englishman, this is probably quite the American place to be for a while. You know, this is a different part of America.
MWS: Yeah, I think he was surprised and delighted by how real rodeos are. How real ranching is. All these things that one might have imagined are kind of romantic and somewhat fictionalized are like, yes, there are people in cowboy hats all over the place.
AC: Pearl snaps and cowboy hats – that’s just part of the attire for a lot of people, you know?
MWS: Yeah, it was really nice to watch him.
AC: I thought he fit in very well. His dialogue was great. He was just a very quiet kind of guy and I thought that he fit really well into the Valley archetype of that kind of character. I thought that he could have been at any Monta Vista livestock auction and I wouldn’t have second guessed it, you know? You also worked with Amy Madigan, which, you know, she gave us a wild performance in “Weapons,” and this is the polar opposite. I really appreciated seeing her twice this year. What was working with her like?
MWS: It was cool. I mean, she’s just like a … she’s a cinema icon to me. That’s one of the really crazy things about this job is meeting people who feel like you know, or like even a child version of you from watching “Uncle Buck” feels like, you know? And then here they are at, like, the Hampton Inn or whatever.
I mean, she’s just so cool and she’s lived such an interesting life and it’s always kind of cool to be able to tap into a sort of a cinematic legacy that someone carries just within their presence and sort of plug that into your own little story. She’s sweet. She was so nice with Lily [LaTorre], who plays the little girl and one of those old school [actors] who arrives on set and learns everybody’s names within 5 minutes.
AC: She had people laughing one minute, then crying the next minute.
MWS: It’s such a luxury, especially with supporting roles, to be able to bring in a real sort of firepower like that. The idea is that it makes the smaller parts feel real and memorable and important, which, of course, they are.
AC: She lived in that house. That house very much reflected who she was as a character, and even though, again, we don’t see her for all that much time, you had her live in that world, and I thought it was really compelling.
MWS: Speaking of the house, I mean, and that’s important, you know, like that’s like an Alamosa house, but also was a huge art department project. Juliana [Berreto] and her art team totally repainted and redid it. And, you know, we found all sorts of antique local furniture and really made it an extension of that character. Which matters, you know.
AC: How was it working with the real family of that house? How did you approach them to say, hey, can we use your house?
MWS: I remember them being very nice. I mean, it’s always kind of shocking when you explain, like, hi, would you mind, we’ll get you some hotel rooms for a little while and we’re gonna completely repaint and rearrange your house, and then we’re gonna completely put it back the way it was. We’ll pay you, but how does that sound?
And it’s always shocking when people say, sure. So I think it was kind of weird and fun for them. We took good care of the chickens.
AC: Speaking of kind of working with people who are unfamiliar with this world. You worked with a lot of non-actors, a lot of locals. How do you find that process to be? I always think of this quote by Taika Waititi when he worked on his movie “Boy,” he said you can only work with non-actors and non-acting children once because then you ruin them. How was your experience working with some non-actors here in the Valley?
MWS: I mean, good. Like, I don’t know, it kind of comes back to this social approach of it’s just fun. Like it is nice to work with people. It’s weird too, you know, to bring in a professional actor and put them in some blue jeans and a cowboy hat. It’s also weird to bring in a rancher and put a camera in his face and a microphone above his head and tell him where to stand. The hope is that somehow those different versions of weird mix together into something that starts to approximate reality. But what I can say for sure is that it’s fun for me to get to work with people who might be able to check me if I’m having a character do something that they wouldn’t actually do.
Like having a rancher do something that they wouldn’t actually do. And I think it’s fun for people to get to just do something so weird as being in a movie. You know, it pays good and it’s nice. I just can’t help it. I like working with all kinds of different people.
AC: Lily LaTorre, who plays Callie Rose, she was incredible, man. How did you find her?
MWS: Well, ironically, we found her in Australia. We did a huge search for this part. She’s like an 8-year-old girl, this character. We got sent thousands of audition tapes, and this one specific tape really was so striking. So then it’s like alright, let’s meet this girl. Where do I go? You gotta go to a small town in Australia. Which was pretty amazing. She’d never been to the United States before, but grew up in a rural place with chickens and dogs. The drive to go visit her grandparents was totally blackened by wildfires and it was cool and kind of realized, like Josh too, who’s from the rural United Kingdom that there was kind of an experiment in the casting of the professionals of almost prioritizing like a shared sort of non-urban experience over nationality, which I don’t know, it’s interesting to me.
Lily is such a great professional actor, man, and we all, I think, had to up our games to work with her because she was really on it and really prepared.
AC: Yeah, and what a compelling American accent, I never would have guessed she was Australian.
MWS: I don’t know how she does it. Especially for that age. Working with her was like, wow, there are some people who are truly talented, like actually talented at this thing.
There’s a lot about acting that is practiced and that is learning and that is like learning the tricks and the crafts and then, and then you meet someone like Lily and you’re like, oh yeah, just like anything they’re kind of our savants also. … I don’t know how else to describe it.
AC: I kind of want to change course here a little bit to talk about some conversations you had with your director of photography, Alfonso Herrera Salcedo. You have really beautiful cinematography in this movie. I thought your lighting was great, your shots, but what the challenge I’ve always had as a filmmaker in the San Luis Valley is capturing people and Mt. Blanca at the same time. I know sometimes it comes down to lenses. But how did you and your director of photography kind of land on your camera and lighting setups? And what kind of conversations did you have to capture the San Luis Valley as you did, kind of that process of cinematography, of lighting.
MWS: We filmed digitally, which was new for us. We’d always been on film before – on celluloid. And I think it was, yeah, partially like a curiosity to try something new, but also to keep the film feeling contemporary because there’s a lot of slightly anachronistic characters and people who are out of time in the movie, but it’s a modern story, it’s contemporary. I wanted to keep it that way and make it feel like it’s now, which it is.
The lensing also, I think they’re like really quite modern Leicas that are really pretty, pretty sharp. We were able to test a lot of different setups. And that was the combination we landed on of a very contemporary setup that later in color correction we undid some of the sharpness. It’s like we know we’re in such a beautiful place. There’s these crazy ass mountains. There’s this crazy-ass prairie, you get crazy sunsets, you get crazy sunrises, you get crazy thunderstorms, you get crazy clouds. It is just beautiful naturally.
So almost one of the challenges is we’re always telling ourselves if someone is watching a scene and thinking, wow, what a beautiful shot. Like, oh, what great camera work. To us, there’s a small failure in that, actually. That means that they’re not fully paying attention to the story.
Especially in such a beautiful place. Weirdly, one of the challenges is keeping the camera quiet, almost. Because it can easily take over, especially with such a quiet story, it can easily overwhelm the characters and the plot.
There’s every sort of camera trick in there, you know, there’s static, there’s dollies, there’s handheld, there’s sliders. There’s car work. I think all of it is designed to be, to be very subtle and not to call attention to itself.
AC: It was very invisible cinematography and that’s kind of one of the things that I always try to tell people is good cinematography is invisible, good editing is invisible because it is supposed to match your story.
MWS: That’s the whole idea of the work is the craft and then the art is hiding the craft.
Other than that, we sort of block the scenes first with the actors and then it’s a question of, with the camera, just how do we tell the story of this scene? A lot of the decisions are where to just where to put the camera. A lot of discussion about what lens and then a great gaffer named Andrew Hubbard and who’s the lighting technician. He and his team would figure out what the setup needs. Sometimes that was quite extensive. And sometimes it’s often nothing at all, also, when you’re outside.
It actually takes really experienced, confident technicians to say this doesn’t need anything, which is true of, of it all. It’s true of costumes. It’s true of makeup. It’s true of cinematography. It’s true of all pieces of the film. That’s always something I’m looking for. And people I work with are people who are going to have the confidence to say, “I don’t need to add anything to this.”
AC: Where do you find yourself in relation to the camera when you’re actually shooting? Are you standing next to the camera? Do you have a monitor? Are you in video village? Where are you in relation to the camera?
MWS: I don’t know, it depends. I guess usually I have a little monitor of my own and just tuck away somewhere close, but sometimes it’s depending on the setup. And this is partially from having shot so much with film. Where your monitoring is really limited. I’m very used to not seeing what the camera’s seeing and just watching it with my own eyes and trusting that the camera and the cameramen are seeing it properly.
There’s no video village. Definitely it’s important to try to provide monitors for your collaborators who need to know what’s going on, but no, I always will stay close to the camera and close to the actors and hopefully not be in the shot, which I often am.
AC: Do you ever get behind the camera yourself?
MWS: Sometimes. Alfonso is very polite about letting me do that, but he’s a great operator at the end of the day. It’s usually better to let him do that.
AC: Colorado has a lot of opportunity to support more filmmakers and more filmmaking. I wouldn’t say we’re competing with New Mexico, but New Mexico is ahead of the game. I think that Colorado’s starting to kind of maybe realize that there’s some filmmaking potential. In your view as somebody who’s making movies here, what is the future of filmmaking in Colorado? What do you see?
MWS: I honestly don’t know. I mean, there’s like, a few different levels to this question. There’s one level that’s just like filmmaking in Colorado is great. It’s beautiful, it’s varied. The parking is ample. And it’s been a great place to work and I have been supported by the state film office and their incentives.
It does all come down to incentives. And, you know, New Mexico has become what it was as a production base because they’ve spent huge amounts of taxpayer money. Same with Georgia.
That’s the same with anywhere. And even though it’s like a game that everyone kind of has to play at this point, I can’t at the end of the day come here and say, Colorado needs to spend more money to bring in film production. I don’t know, maybe we do, but also, is it kind of weird for me that, like, potato farmers’ tax dollars are gonna go to kind of subsidize a Netflix movie? I don’t know.
On the one hand, of course, I want more things to be here and more people to work. But, on the other, I can’t help but believe it’s somehow kind of like a losing game for all these state governments to sort of compete with who can help out these huge corporations most.
And I wish, of course, that there was a way for state governments or federal governments to support artists, you know, and smaller films, like the sorts that really need it, but the way it’s set up in the United States is that that isn’t how it works. It’s all purely, purely commercial. So, yeah, I don’t know. The tax stuff is all pretty fickle.
AC: Got any plans to go see a movie this weekend or anything like that? I know “Bugonia” is out. You going to go see anything?
MWS: There’s a lot I need to see, but we’re headed back to Telluride to show the movie there. So, yeah, still for a while, I’m stuck watching my own dang movie over and over again.
AC: Yeah, what is this, the 300th, 400th time you’ve seen it?
MWS: It doesn’t usually get better, but it’s always good to see what people respond to differently.
AC: What’s in your future? Got anything planned that you can share with us at all? Anything that you’re working on that you’d like to share?
MWS: I produced a film along with my partner, Jesse Hope, and our whole same crew largely that my friend Ramzi [Bashour] directed, who was an editor on this movie, that is partially shot around Crestone, actually, as well as many other states and places. So working on finishing that up and then hope to do another movie.
I mean, I’ll do them as long as they let me. So, I don’t know, but also every movie is your last one. If that’s how it is, that’s how it is, but I got some more in me if they’ll let me do them.
