Director: Marshall Lewy

Stars: Robert Carlyle, Alexia Rasmussen and Kathleen Wilhoite

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

The core of CALIFORNIA SOLO is the character of Lachlan MacAldonich. I wrote
Lachlan specifically for Robert Carlyle, an actor whom I’ve always admired immensely,
and I thought it would be interesting to put him at the center of an American indie film. It
was easy to write the character with Carlyle’s voice in my head, and I wrote the first draft
of this script furiously, in just 16 days. I have heard two different acronyms for the word
fear. One is “Face Everything and Recover;” the other is “F*** Everything and Run.” For
me, CALIFORNIA SOLO is about Lachlan’s taking the first tentative and difficult steps
towards recovering the life he ran away from years ago.
I had written the script for Robert Carlyle, but I didn’t know how we would get it to him.
When we managed to reach him, he signed on to play Lachlan within a few days. It
turns out he had known a lot of these ex-rocker types from Britpop’s heyday–he had
hung out with them in London, and at the Hacienda nightclub in Manchester. He was
part of their glory days, but also familiar with some of the demons that assailed them
afterward. Many of the shirts Robert wears in the film are his own from the days when
“Trainspotting” first came out. ‘90s Britpop is the music scene that Lachlan and his
fictional former band, The Cranks, grew up and flourished in, and I listened to Britpop
non-stop while writing CALIFORNIA SOLO. I was first introduced to it while visiting
friends in Ireland during college. Britpop is, I think, an underappreciated movement. The
songs have aged well – simple rock with an epic feel and great emotion. But besides
Oasis and maybe the Verve, Britpop didn’t hit it quite as big in the US as it did back in
the UK, which is why an organic farm in Southern California is a perfect place for
Lachlan to hide out from his past.
The other thread that inspired me to make this film was realizing how immigration laws
can wreak havoc on the lives of longtime residents of the United States, even legal
residents. The deeper I dug into U.S. immigration law, the more disturbing I found the
bureaucracy. Immigration lawyers told me about immigrants with green cards who
become separated from their children and grandchildren because of an unexpected legal
turn; and of endless and unpredictable twists of fate along the path to removal from the
country. There is heartbreak in the tension between the straightforward nature of
Lachlan’s DUI and the extent and unpredictability of its consequences.
We shot CALIFORNIA SOLO in 21 days in and around Los Angeles. Many of the
locations were within walking distance from my home. After making my first feature,
BLUE STATE, in Winnipeg, I wanted to shoot in a place I knew well, and to portray Los
Angeles in a light we don’t always see in movies, from the beautiful farms that surround
the city, to the farmers markets that pop up each weekend, to the hipster neighborhoods
and clubs. The cinematographer James Laxton and I strove to give Los Angeles a
cooler, earthier, less plastic treatment than it often gets in films.
My inspirations for performance and visual style were character-driven films like The
Verdict, Tender Mercies, The Visitor, and the films of Mike Leigh. These movies
manage to tell a dramatic story through nuance and attention to human detail – to let the
actors be the main event – and that’s what I’ve tried to accomplish in CALIFORNIA SOLO.

– Marshall Lewy

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