5 Questions with Adam Meeks ("Union County")
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
My dad is a photographer, so I grew up surrounded by cameras and photobooks and movies. His enthusiasm for art and cinema has always been infectious, but I don’t think I took the potential for an artistic career very seriously until I got to college as a business major and lost sight of myself pretty quickly. I enrolled in a documentary filmmaking class which changed the game for me, and then transferred to NYU film school the following summer to give it a real go.
2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?
My family is originally from central Ohio where the film is set, and I still visit my relatives there every year. Ohio has been hit incredibly hard by opioid issues, and I came to know more and more people — through family and friends — who were losing loved ones and facing tragedies. I wanted to take a direct look at what was going on in my home state, so I immersed in research and met with people on all sides of the epidemic. In the process, I realized that despite the overdose statistics dominating the headlines, there were people in recovery getting better as well. I ultimately became aware of the Ohio drug court programs which are saving people’s lives, and was invited to sit in on one particular courtroom in Bellefontaine, Ohio, led by the judge whose voice you hear in the film. After a meeting one day, a young man around my age told me he was living in his car on the outskirts of town, and that the hardest part of his recovery journey was having to distance himself from his ex-girlfriend who was still using. For a myriad of conscious and subconscious reasons, his circumstance encompassed everything I was eager to explore and express, and I began writing with him in mind.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?
I think there were some documentary ethics challenges inherent in the subject matter. How do I tell a story of addiction and recovery when I’m not an addict or person in recovery myself? What are the stigmas and stereotypes that only exploit or sensationalize, and how do I redirect the film towards something more specific and compassionate? A lot of these questions were on my mind from the start, and I was wrestling with them throughout.
Finding our lead actor was also a significant casting challenge. Knowing I’d be working with predominantly non-professional actors from the central Ohio recovery community, it felt important to have a trained actor at the center of everything. But finding someone who could also step seamlessly into these real-life locations, conditions and circumstances was difficult. We were 3 days out from the scheduled start of production, and minutes away from calling off the shoot completely, when we received Zachary Zamsky’s audition tape. He is an unbelievably sensitive, intelligent and intuitive performer and he fully embodied the role.
The easiest part was the collaboration with the crew. Everyone on set was either a frequent collaborator or a cherished loved one, or both. There was a total ease to the communication and the flow of the work.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I’ve had a bit of a hard time watching much lately, but I did see Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman last weekend. I absolutely love the subtlety and banality of her psychological exploration, and am always stunned by her entirely original use of sound. I also recently revisited Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, which is feeling more and more like a touchstone for me. I’m being drawn lately to cinema that is especially elusive or defies easy categorization, and both of those films (and filmmakers) really fit that bill.
5) What’s next for you?
I recently completed a short personal documentary with my parents called Bitterroot, and am working on a feature screenplay back in Ohio that is loosely expanding on Union County.
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