Clatskanie native shopping film about young monks at Cannes

Last week, Brian Perkins got to schmooze with movie stars at the Cannes Film Festival in France. "You run into people," he said in a phone interview from Cannes. "It's pretty much how you'd imagine it," with star sightings on red carpets.

Perkins was being interviewed by a French TV reporter when the camera man politely said he had to go when Mickey Rourke arrived. "I will gladly get pre-empted for Mickey Rourke any day," Perkins said.

It was no star-watching vacation for Perkins, however. The Clatskanie native was shopping around his feature film, "Golden Kingdom," which he had finished only a few days before after 18-hour work days. If all goes well, he'll find a buyer for the film soon, and he hopes that will lead to its release in the United States in the fall.

The film about four orphan boys in Myanmar is the first feature-length production for Perkins, 33, though he's been involved in media since his school days in Clatskanie, when he was a reporter and photographer for the Clatskanie Chief.

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It's a long way from Clatskanie to Cannes -- and Perkins never showed signs of wanting to remain close to his roots.

During high school, he spent a summer as an exchange student in Finland. Perkins graduated from Clatskanie High School with a 4.0 grade-point average in 1998, and headed to New York University.

He majored in literature at NYU, where he delved into the esoteric. He won an award for writing a paper entitled "Toying With Thoughts: Redemption and Repression in Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight.' "

Perkins also started working on other NYU students' films. He starred in and helped produce a senior thesis project. "I was dead for most of the movie so it didn't really count" on his resume, he said.

After graduating from NYU, Perkins studied film at the University of California at Berkeley and later directed music videos in New York and Los Angeles.

Perkin's all-time favorite director is the late Ingmar Bergman, a Swede whose movies often dealt with death, bleakness and insanity. Bergman movies have "Lutheran ministers in the cold north where people aren't saying too much," Perkins said. "It reminded me of being from Oregon with a lot of Scandinavian Lutherans, men not saying too much."

Last year, Perkins started the Bank and Shoal production company in Portland, though he recently moved to Berlin and finished up "Golden Kingdom" there.

The movie was filmed in Myanmar, the southeast Asian country formerly known as Burma. "I'd been to Myanmar before and I'd gone on a trek into the mountains with a trekking guide," Perkins said. "We stayed overnight at a monastery in the middle of the mountains. You can only get there by foot." He saw boys 7 to 9 years old who were training to become monks. "Most of them are either orphans or their parents brought them there because they can't support them," he said.

"They don't have toys or video games. They're so full of life and love. They really spoke to me on a certain level."

That inspired Perkins to write "Golden Kingdom," which follows four orphan boys after they're left on their own and strange, magical occurrences begin to pass. He calls it a "narrative" film -- based on real characters but not a documentary.

Perkins and his film crew of five spent about six weeks in Myanmar filming last fall, even though his visa was only good for 10 days. "We had to fly under the radar," he said. "It was complicated and difficult."

Perkins said "Golden Kingdom" is the first narrative film shot in Myanmar since its recent opening to the outside world.

He's trying to sell the movie, which is in Burmese with subtitles, to a German TV network. Typically, films such as his get their first exposure in Europe before getting a foothold in this country, he said, though he expects it to find audiences in larger American cities. "When the time comes I'd love to show it in Longview and Astoria," he said. "It would be nice to show the community what I've been up to."

Perkins has already started working on another independently produced film, this one with a Northwest flavor.

He took a break from L.A. during the summer of 2010, staying in a cabin near Toutle to write the screenplay for "Barefoot Girl." "I really liked it up there," he said of his Toutle days. "It was very relaxing." Perkins spent a few months last year living near Clatskanie to continue outlining the movie.

"Barefoot Girl," set in Pendleton, is about a girl who inherits her grandmother's farm and makes friends with a murderer who's just been released from the state penitentiary. "It's kind of a cowboy thriller," he said.

Some of the scenes are in mills, so Perkins will scout for locations close to home. "There's plenty of closed mills in Columbia County," he noted.

As with "Golden Kingdom," Perkins expects getting "Barefoot Girl" to screens will be a challenge. But the fledgling film producer said he was inspired by rubbing elbows with some of his heroes in Cannes, such as British director Mike Leigh and the Dardenne brothers from Belgium.

"It's great to be here and be around all these other filmmakers," he said. "It's so hard to even make a film -- less make a good film.

"Filmmaking requires devotion," he said. "If you're not devoted to it 24 hours a day, you're not going to make it. It requires blood, sweat and tears. It's nice to be around people who have those same dreams."

Source: http://www.news.myanmaronlinecentre.com/2014/05/26/clatskanie-native-shopping-film-about-young-monks-at-cannes/