The Last Stop in Yuma County is a riotous, cynical and neatly self-contained film about greed, the American dream and Rhubarb pie. Gaining massive popularity among independent circles, the film reached the eyes of Sam Raimi, who hired writer-editor-director Francis Galluppi to helm the next Evil Dead instalment.

FILMHOUNDS had the opportunity to chat to Galluppi ahead of the UK Blu-Ray release of The Last Stop in Yuma County from Arrow Video. He greeted us wearing an aptly themed cap embroidered with the words “physical media.”

The Last Stop in Yuma County is a wonderful, beautiful, perfect hour and a half. Well, an hour and a half and a minute. Was that part of the conversation or the editing process?

Yeah, definitely. You're the first person that's asked that – that's funny. I remember constantly going back to the script and being like, oh shit, it's 60 pages and 60 minutes. While I was editing, anytime I would fall behind the runtime, there would be a long wait and then I would catch up, and once I realized it was right around 90 minutes, I decided I was going to make this exactly 90 minutes. So I played with the scroll at the end to make it exactly 90 minutes, just because I just wanted to. Then the title cards got put in the beginning from the distributors, and it just made it slightly over fucking 90 minutes. I wanted so badly to go back and re-time the end credits to make just a tiny bit to make it work. 90 minute movies always, that's my goal.

You directly name a few inspirations within the script – there's a bit of Hitchcock, a bit of Malick, some Spielberg, some Cohen. Some viewers have described the film as mean, but there's comedy in it, too. What was your driving force behind it? 

I don't think I'm ever going to be able to write a quote-unquote happy ending. I just always have a more cynical take on things. I'm a pretty optimistic person, but when I write… yeah. It was written specifically for that location, so that was the first thing. The characters influenced the story in a way, and especially the actors. This script was always meant to be a dark comedy, but I don't know if I really ever had the amount of absurdity on the page as in the final film. Then when I cast Nicholas Logan and Connor Paolo, and they showed up and they did their thing, I found myself being like, go bigger. It was working.

I think movies, there's always an evolution to it. It's one thing on the page. It's one thing when you're shooting. It turns into another thing again in the edit. I work closely with my DP [Director of Photography], who's shot everything I've ever done, and I remember when Nick [Logan] showed up the second week and I was just having so much fun, I was telling him to go bigger. I remember Mac, my DP was like, “don't you want to do a take that's a normal fucking take? Like the thing we talked about?” and I remember saying, ‘Mac, you need to get on board with the movie we're making now, not the movie we talked about two, three weeks ago.' You prep and you prep and you prep and plan as much as you can, but then when you find that spontaneity on the day and it works, you got to fucking go for it. Otherwise, where's the fun, you know?

It's so exciting to hear you talk about making a film as fun. The technicalities are serious, but it is the fun, the excitement of making something, that's precious.

Oh  dude, with your friends, it's the coolest fucking thing. We have the coolest job in the world. We get to make play pretend for a living and you get to do it with your friends and people you enjoy being around. I do take it very seriously – in prep, we photoboarded everything. I was going to the location every week prior, in pre-production. It was planned out to the detail, because we had 20 days to shoot this thing and I wanted to do all practical effects, and squibs, and blanks, and explosions, so we had to move really quickly.

I think if you prep that much, then you can have fun. But if you show up on the day and you're like, let's figure it out, you're burning so much time and money. And it's really important to me to get all that stuff in prep. I've learned that when I get on the day, there's an actor that doesn't want to stand there and they don't want to do this. Luckily I didn't run into that, but I use this program called ShotDesigner, which is an overhead of where all the characters are in relation to the camera. It looks like a fucking football diagram. We would look at it and walk to the blocking and I think the actors were just like, ‘oh shit, you thought about all this. I don't want to fuck with it.' But if you got into a room and you just said, let's figure it out, all of a sudden everybody has an idea and that's six hours gone. There's always days, I would say pretty much every day on set, in which you're good on time, and then the last hour realise, holy shit, we need to do like 15 shots and we're so behind, even if you prep. It's so much easier to pivot when you have a plan, right? I know I need these things, let's throw it on a steadicam and try and get all this in a single take, or whatever the pivot is.

Working within the constraints of the scene you built or the blocking you've done can breed more creativity in a way. Because you're looking at it from that unique angle, and you might see more from that perspective. 

Exactly. Especially with this, because it was a single location, we didn't want it to look like a stage play, so we didn't want to block shoot the thing and so it was just about utilising every fucking corner of that space and doing something different throughout.

I think your narrative helps with that too because when you start, it feels like you're following the knife salesman. Then for about half of the film, you almost forget that he's sitting there. How did you build that into the writing? Did you start knowing this film would be about the knife salesman, and then all these characters started popping up, and it became an ensemble piece? Can you talk about that process? 

It was always the Knife Salesman story. I grew up with Cutco knives, salesmen would always come to our house and try to sell knives. It was always supposed to be his story and descent into greed. From the get go, I knew I wanted to have this massive standoff in which we don't know who we're rooting for. And then… everybody fucking dies, and it is his story. I remember I just had so much fun writing these characters and I knew there was going to be a standoff. And I usually don't start writing until I have everything planned, but I wasn't sure how this standoff was gonna play out, and thank God it worked. I remember just thinking through it, ‘and then Miles would actually want the money. So he would pull the gun on Pete.' And it all just came together in the moment on the page. 

You are the editor on this as well. A triple threat. What was your experience of editing The Last Stop? What does that process look like for you? Is it important for you to have that creative control?

It's so important. I feel like every filmmaker should be editing their own stuff, at least in the beginning. I love it. Making a film, I kind of love the juxtaposition of one second you're just alone in a room writing in a bubble, not talking to anybody, and then you try and make the thing and you have to become this business person trying to put it all together, talk and answer questions, and then you go back to just being alone in a room editing, and then you decompress and you start talking to get people to watch it. I just constantly need that anytime I've been alone in a room for too long. So both are always something to look forward to.

I hope I get the opportunity to edit everything I do. And honestly, for me, this sounds fucking lame, it's really like paint by numbers in a way, because we planned so much that we didn't just get coverage. I had a cut for this movie three weeks after principal photography. And honestly, a week of that was organizing, processing and labeling footage. I didn't have an assistant editor or anything. That was the hardest part, just organizing everything and then screaming when my computer would crash. I think that's the one thing, if I had an editor that I wouldn't miss, how many times your hard drive fails. My background is music and specifically drums, so I have an internal clock and a metronome built in because I've been playing music my whole life. So that's always very important to me, when I'm editing; I'll play around with one, two, one or two frames and it makes all the difference for me. It's like having a rhythm to dialogue and cutting. 

This is a small independent film, and it has become quite the success story. You worked with Jim Cummings too, who is a champion of the scene. How important is it to make these independent films and push the industry that direction? 

It's extremely important. I'm always preaching, anytime somebody DMs me or asks for advice – I try and talk to as many filmmakers as possible –, how important it is to put your vision out there, and you don't need a shit ton of money to do it. I hear a lot of filmmakers coming out of school thinking they need 50 grand to make a short. And it's just not true, you know? All these programs are free. DaVinci is free. You can edit yourself. You can color yourself. You can do sound design yourself. You do all this shit yourself and save so much money. ‘Oh, I need an editor' – down the line, sure, but now it's only going to make you a better filmmaker. If you're forcing yourself to watch all the footage, forcing yourself to watch your mistakes. You really can shoot a movie on an iPhone. You hear everybody say it, but everyone thinks it's bullshit and it's not. I would prefer to shoot on an iPhone with good lighting versus an Alexa with bad lighting, right? I want to encourage everybody to just pick up a camera and fucking make shit. Make independent cinema, we need it more than ever. I didn't know shit, my background is music, I got my bandmates and my friends together and I was like, you're going to be a grip and you're going to be an AC and you're going to be this. And we just learned everything on YouTube. Just do it. And that's what's the most fun. It's the fucking best. 

Does it feel amazing that Sam Raimi saw this film and was like, yep, he's the guy? It may not be exactly what happened. But that's how it happened in my head. 

Yeah. It's wild. That's kind of how it happened. It was pretty nuts. You're not far off at all. Sam is a huge hero of mine. I remember making my first short film and we went out to the desert. Me, my friend, Scott and my other friend Matt took a photo on that set, trying to replicate a photo of Sam, Bruce [Campbell] and Rob [Tapert] shooting The Evil Dead (1981). That was the movie that was so inspiring – they just got their friends together and went out to the fucking woods and shot something. When it's done or whenever I can talk about it, we should talk again and I'll tell you everything.

You can purchase a limited edition Blu-ray copy of The Last Stop in Yuma County from Arrow Video now.

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