This fall, film professor Elias Daughdrill released “Faith,” a film about one man’s struggle with personal tragedy.
Daughdrill has led the film department of Long Beach City College for nearly the past decade.
“I grew up where the movie is set. I grew up an Evangelical Christian and so I wanted to write a story about somebody from that place, with that belief system, who then goes through a change where their world views are flipped upside down,” Daughdrill said.
“Faith” is a long-time passion project for Daughdrill.
He said, “I wrote the script for this over ten years ago.”
“I am really interested in how our sense of self and how the sense of who we are can be changed and where your sense of identity comes from. It generated from my background and my own move away from that as my central identity,” Daughdrill said.
Daughdrill grew up on an almond farm in Atwater in the central California region. So it is no surprise that Atwater served as the setting and production set for the film.
“We aren’t doing crazy stuff where we don’t have insurance or don’t have permits. We had permits and insurance and all that stuff. There were lots of places in the town, both in Atwater and in Merced that let us come in and film. Just because there’s a kind of novelty to it where movies don’t typically get made. So they were all interested and open to the process,” Daughdrill said.
Some of the Daughdrill family are credited at the end of the film.
Daughdrill continued, “It was little stuff, they would be in crowd scenes or in the dinner scenes. You have to just stuff the space with bodies and we were so low-budget that we didn’t have any money to pay extras. But we did have other extras. We had other people who were kind of interested in being in a movie. So they would come and hangout for a few hours.”
Brian Geraghty, currently starring on ABC7’s “Big Sky,” stars as Chris in “Faith.” Chris is a troubled man questioning his faith in God.
Daughdrill explained the process of casting Geraghty in the starring role.
“We had a casting director that helped us. Casting directors make it easier to get the scripts to agents and managers of actors. We got some actors attached, but the way we got Brian though was Nora-Jane, who plays his wife Carol (in the film). We had another actor attached to the part and we had to change the schedule and it didn’t fit his schedule anymore. So then we had to find somebody else. Nora-Jane’s husband is an actor named Chris Marquette, and he knows Brian. I said Brian would be great because I knew him from “Hurt Locker” and “Boardwalk Empire” and other stuff. He’d be great, he was available, it fit his schedule, and he liked the script. So we met and off we went.”
For Daughdrill, the questioning of faith is not to cast doubt on faith in general as the film is not “faith-based” but more a rumination on how we can derive faith in other aspects of our lives.
Daughdrill explained, “It’s definitely not a ‘faith-based’ movie. It’s about a character who is very religious, absolutely. It has a bunch of ambiguity about that as a way of living…Faith-based movies have very easy answers.”
The film was released on November 27 and is currently available for rent and purchase on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.