When Will Poulter’s agents sent him the script for “Union County” and writer-director Adam Meeks’ accompanying 2020 short film, he was struck by the filmmaker’s approach to telling a recovery story.
The thing that set it apart from other takes on the opioid crisis, Poulter told Variety, was “the fact that it didn’t really start with a story and then a search for a place, but rather the story that was being told was a reflection of the real work that was being done.”
“Union County” follows Poulter as Cody Parsons, a young man entering a court-ordered drug rehabilitation program in rural Ohio alongside his brother Jack (Noah Centineo). Meeks’ extended family lives in the area, and six years ago, he began developing the story after his uncle introduced him to the drug court judge, who invited him to sit in on a meeting. But what makes the filmmaker’s approach particularly unique is that the majority of his cast are nonprofessional actors; they’re real-life participants in the program, bearing their truths on camera.
“With Adam being from the area, and them having spent so much time within the community, making it in collaboration with folks who are part of the recovery community, it just meant that it was coming from such a respectful and responsible place,” Poulter explained, sitting beside the filmmaker for Variety’s “Anatomy of a Film: Union County” conversation at Sundance. “I felt very lucky to be the outsider coming in and being trusted with a part in it.”
The ultimate insider of this story is Annette Deao, who has worked as a therapist in the adult recovery court for more than 20 years.
“Annette is the heart and soul of this program and of recovery efforts in Ohio, and so the whole short film that became the feature was really born of our friendship,” Meeks said.
In the short, Deao played a counselor named “Debbie.” She had two scenes. “After we shot the second scene, I went up to you, and I was like, ‘I knew you’d be good, but I didn’t know you’d be this good,’” Meeks recalled. “And you said, ‘Oh, I didn’t tell you? I studied acting for four years before I ran this drug court program.’”
The crowd assembled at the Adobe House on Main Street laughed as Deao chimed in: “It was really the standing joke. My undergraduate [degree] was in theater and music, and then I went back to school to become a therapist, thinking I would become a music therapist at some point. But, you know, it led somewhere else.”
Through his own laughter, Meeks added: “Needless to say, I wrote a much larger role for her in the feature.”
As for how he developed “Union County’s” hybrid narrative, Meeks said that he’d always been interested in “ways that we can break down these dividing lines between fiction and nonfiction.”
He explained: “It was also important to fictionalize the core narrative, both as a way to get to a certain kind of intimacy of storytelling and a character portrait, but also to allow us as filmmakers to observe the difficult moments and the kind of treacherous nature and do it without imposing that on somebody who’s going through recovery. It’s an extremely difficult, long process that doesn’t need a camera crew alongside it.”
As the project evolved from the short film to the feature, the crew focused on building relationships with the people of Bellefontaine, Ohio (pronounced Bell Fountain).
“Between the short, and scout trips and research trips, we’ve been hanging around your world for so long that by the time it came to making the film, there was just a lot of comfort and a lot of trust there,” cinematographer Stefan Weinberger said. “We felt like we could blend in a bit with the scenery in the drug court, and people were just incredibly open and honest with their stories. That was such a beautiful privilege for us to be able to witness and to film.”
To play the role, Poulter had to drop his British accent and master a Midwest drawl. To do so, he worked with dialect coach Sonja Field and studied documentary footage the team had shot of the locals. Most helpful, though, was the time Poulter spent in Ohio getting to know the community at large.
“The year prior [to filming], we went out and spent some time, and that I was important to fortify the trust and the relationships that you see on screen, and in terms of getting a sense of how folks speak,” Poulter said. “It’s one of the friendliest places you could possibly imagine. That was quite shocking as a Londoner, people being nice to you in the street.”
Poulter would stick to the Midwest accent between takes, and he got so good, Meeks said, that he’d often forget the actor was British.
“There were so many moments — and I, hopefully, only expressed them out loud a few times — where, at the end of a week or at the end of a day, I’d be like, ‘Why is Will talking in a British accent?’” Meeks said, laughing.
Editor and producer Sean Weiner added: “I remember on Fridays at the end of the shoot, we would hear, ‘Wrap for the day,’ and the crew would yell out like, ‘Will’s British again!’”
Poulter and Centineo also shed a considerable amount of weight to portray young men coming out of the throes of addiction. But fasting grows tiresome and lonely, and they’d grown close to Deao. So, one day, the actors reached out to ask if they could come hang out.
“We live in an about 200-year-old bank barn that’s renovated into a house, so we have about 18 acres and some gardening and some animals,” Deao said, recounting the conversation. “My husband said, ‘Well, we have some mulch to lay…’ And they’re like, ‘We’re in!’ So, they come out to the farm, and they’re throwing mulch for us; we’re grilling on the barbecue, having a great time. But we invited the whole crew out — we have a lot of space — and we did a tie-dye party.”
Behind the scenes, the indie film production was a well-oiled machine, but it also felt like a family.
“We broke bread together; we laughed together; we threw mulch together,” Deao said, as her fellow panelists doubled over laughing at the memories. “It was beautiful. And I don’t think that Noah had ever seen a cow.”
Watch the full interview above to learn more about the cast and crew’s special bond, commemorated by a flock of chickens living on Deao’s farm.
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