During the coming year, if you see a camera crew around Charleston, don’t automatically assume it belongs to Army Wives. Instead, it might be filming scenes for Southern Comfort, a feature-length film with a couple of University of South Carolina grads on its crew.
Filmmaker Ryan Phillips will be making his directorial debut on Southern Comfort, which will be produced by his friend Adrian Westendorff, who’s worked in the past on Army Wives, as well as Eastbound and Down and Homeland,. The script was written Bruce Rubenstein, who co-wrote the 1996 film Bullet with star Mickey Rourke. The story focuses on an out-of-work former child actor who travels to a small Southern town for professional research and some unplanned personal soul searching.
While Southern Comfort is officially set in Franklin, Ga., Phillips and Westendorff decided to film it in Charleston. “The locations I’ve scouted will depict a small, rural, country, simple town — very scenic and very colorful,” Westendorff says. So far he’s scouted out locations like Waterfront Park, Hampton Park, Boone Hall, and others, but a lot is still tentative with property owners. And they plan to fill most of the acting and production roles with local talent, but you will see some familiar faces, including Andrew Dice Clay.
Westendorff says they plan to submit Southern Comfort to festivals like Sundance and Cannes, and they hope it’ll find a distributor for theatrical release.
For more info, visit the film’s Facebook page.
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