EXCLUSIVE: Is Bellflower The Most Dangerous Movie Ever Made?

by uInterviewSeptember 16, 2011, 12:00 amNews >

Usually, when actors talk about going out on a limb for their roles, they describe dropping or gaining twenty pounds, studying up on a day's worth of YouTube footage, or taking red-eye flights back and forth from exotic shooting locations. What Hollywood actors call grueling or dangerous is, to the makers of the new indie flick Bellflower, nothing but a walk in the park. In an exclusive interview, writer/director/actor Evan Glodell joined his costars Jessie Wiseman and Tyler Dawson in describing the experience of working on a film that may very well be the most dangerous ever made.

One scene in Bellflower, which is about two friends who share a penchant for explosions and not much else, required them to blow up a propane tank, which turned out to be more difficult than some might think. "It was just me and my friend Jonathan Keevil, who did the test run on the propane tank, and it almost killed him. The bullets sort of bounced off and whizzed past his head," Glodell recounted. "You don’t realize propane tanks are very well designed, because it could not blow up. We shot it with a .45 handgun and it just bounced off twice, so we had to get a more powerful gun to get through it."

Determined to shoot the propane explosion, Glodell and his team resorted to even more dangerous means to pierce through tank. "We managed to do it with a slug … not 'managed to,' I mean, a 12-inch slug is pretty hardcore," Glodell said, adding that he had to use makeshift artillery. "But the one I used in the test to go through, I didn’t have a slug, so I kind of fashioned one. The day we were shooting, I was really worried that it might ricochet or something bad would happen. I think that was stressful for me, because that was near the end of the whole shoot."

It's one thing to film dangerous explosions; it's quite another to do it without a budget. In the days when Hollywood action flicks can command budgets upwards of $100 million, the makers of Bellflower explained how, with essentially no money, they were left to rummage and scrounge just to get the movie made. "Every day was a challenge, just because we didn’t have money," said Dawson. "Oftentimes, we’d have to borrow money from people on the crew to drive to set or sell equipment so we could keep shooting."