WRITER AND DIRECTOR Derek Kimball directs the shooting of a scene for his coming-of-age film, “Neptune,” Wednesday afternoon at The Town Landing restaurant on Main Street in Bowdoinham.
Over and over, they ran it from the top.
Bill McDonough and Jane Ackermann — she clad in orange rubber overalls despite the heat, presumably just off a lobster boat — walk into a historic Bowdoinham store and restaurant and sit with some “regulars” in the back.
To patrons of The Town Landing, it was quite a spectacle Wednesday afternoon seeing cameras and a sound technician with strategically placed equipment capturing voices and images from every angle during a three-hour shoot as two actors ran the scene over and over.
The Town Landing was chosen as a location for shooting “Neptune,” a feature film by Last House Productions, a Portland-based independent film company.
Writer and director Derek Kimball watched every detail of the shoot, working with his director of photography and cameramen to get the best angles for the coming-of-age film.
“Neptune,” set in the late 1980s, is “a tale set on a small isle off the coast of Maine. Fourteen-year-old Hannah Newcombe (played by Ackermann, 15) is an orphan who has been raised by the church under the scrutiny and overbearing influence of its resident cleric, the insular Jerry Cook,” the film synopsis states.
“At the film’s open, a boy Hannah’s age goes missing. He is presumed drowned and swallowed by the sea. Initially striving to attend a prestigious pious school on the mainland at summer’s end, Hannah instead becomes ever more obsessed with the boy’s disappearance. When haunting dreams and visions begin to occupy Hannah’s subconscious she is moved to pacify them. She vies to work as a bait boy on Herb Quinn’s lobster boat, a position previously held by Herb’s son, the missing boy.”
Kimball said Wednesday said the inspiration came from a true story in Gardiner.
“I was born and raised in Maine but spend the better part of my 20s in Boston and New York and never did a film that I thought did the state justice, and really wanted to kind of write a love letter to the state in a film.
“I wanted to try to embody all of those things that I think about when I think about Maine, and this story was about a 14-year-old woman who was a stern man on a lobster boat, and that was kind of the initial spark.
“I also wanted to do something that played to the kind of natural wonder of Maine and the spiritual edge of that and not in the religious sense, but as somebody who is a great admirer of the outdoors, I think there is a certain spiritual reverence that people in Maine have for the outdoors, so I wanted to play around with that.”
Last House Productions — which won several film festival awards for “The Bully” in 2011 — began shooting “Neptune” in June 2012, filming 30 scenes in order to show investors and obtain funding.
Kimball moved back to Maine five years ago and works in Portland. “This is my passion,” he said.
All the actors are from Maine. At an open audition in April 2011, a couple of hundred people showed up; the rest of the casting was through word of mouth.
“I think there’s the misconception that the quality, the caliber that can be done in the state because it’s something that doesn’t already have an established infrastructure for filmmaking means that it’s amateur or whatever,” Kimball said, “and I think we’ve all set out to prove that wrong, that we can do really good work here and that it can be professional and that there is room for a lucrative industry.
“We’re hoping with a couple feature films like ‘Neptune,’ that we can convince the State House that passing tax incentives doesn’t mean you’re just going to bring in New York and L.A. film studios who are going to take the towns over,” Kimball said. “There are a lot of townspeople working right here and those tax incentives should be cast with those people in mind; the people who are already here working in the state. It’s about fostering the community that’s already right here and we could do better and better work with more resources; but without much support from the state and statewide grant issuers …”
Kimball said it’s a little easier to film in states other than Maine.
“In fact, most of the films that are set in Maine are not filmed here,” he said, “because you can shoot in Massachusetts and get a huge tax break; you can film in Rhode Island, you can shoot in Nova Scotia; there’s no incentive to shoot in Maine because they’re not getting any assistance and it’s an extremely expensive industry.”
Kimball said he posted on Facebook that he was looking for a place just like The Town Landing, and one of the actors in Wednesday’s shoot led him to the little restaurant, owned and operated by Lynn Spiro, who still served and rang up customers Wednesday, holding her finger to her lips to hush customers who came in during filming.
Many of the team members involved in the shoot got menus and stayed for dinner.
“People who film in Maine film in Maine because of places like this,” Kimball said. “There’s a history here that stays intact because people don’t become homogenized so readily, and people aren’t coming here to rewrite that or to mess with that, so the money gets spent in places like this.”
Kimball is looking to have “Neptune” done by next April.
To donate, view the trailer or learn more about the film, visit www.lasthouseproductions.com. Everyone who donates gets a special thanks in the credits.
dmoore@timesrecord.com
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