Make Your Donations: Filmmaker from Little Compton Returns Home for New Project

Gabriel Long, a filmmaker and Little Compton native, is returning home to shoot a new movie called The Passing Season.

Long, who now lives in Brooklyn, has worked on various projects as a writer, director and sometimes a combination of the two. Those completions include a commercial, PSA, music video, and multiple short films. The latter led to NewFest, Inside Out Film Festival and PBS screenings.

The Passing Season, Long’s first feature film credit, is about Sam Alden, a 28-year-old hockey pro who returns to his hometown of Little Compton after getting cut from the team. According to the film’s website, Sam Alden’s “journey touches on questions of masculinity, confidence, and identity as they play out through friendship, romance, and the desire to be someone else.”

Long and company have put together a Kickstarter campaign for those who would like to help The Passing Season come to fruition. The campaign aims to raise at least $32,000 by Wednesday, Dec. 3. Filming is scheduled to begin in June 2015.

I had the chance to speak to the transplant New Yorker about The Passing Season and what Little Compton means to him.

MB: The Passing Season is your first feature film, and you take on duel roles as writer/director. How is your approach to creating this project different than that of your previous completions?

GL: The biggest difference between a feature film and short work is that there’s a lot more pressure. With a feature there’s more money, more people involved, and you’re trying to reach a wider audience. In writing this film and planning the production I’ve had to be very aware of all our constraints.

MB: Sam Alden, the main character of the film, is a hockey player from Little Compton. You hail from the same town and played competitive hockey in the past. How else is The Passing Season autobiographical (if at all)?

GL: I wanted to write something that I knew, and I knew I could bring authenticity to Sam’s character, but I wanted to avoid creating a fictionalized version of myself. Once you do that it’s easy to lose perspective and start writing a fantasy version of your own life that won’t be very interesting for anyone else to watch. So I was careful to create Sam as a character who is quite distinct from me, but certainly the root of Sam’s struggle is based on my feelings and experiences and those of my friends.

MB: Is there some post-quarter-life crisis concern in there?

GL: Sam in some ways follows through on taking a road that was tempting to me. In my early and mid-twenties I bounced around between jobs and apartments. There was this idea in the back of my mind that in the future I’d figure out who I wanted to be but I didn’t need to worry about that now. Then I got engaged, and in a variety of other ways my life suddenly became much more settled and I had this moment where I realized, wow, ready or not, everything counts now.

MB: What was it like growing up in Little Compton? Has filming there reignited your relationship with the town in some way?

GL: Growing up in Little Compton was great, and it’s even better bringing friends there and getting to see it anew through their eyes. It’s been wonderful getting to spend time there doing pre-production work on the film, and a lot of people in the community have been wonderfully supportive of the project. In an ideal world I would split my time between New York and Little Compton, I really love it there.

MB: Tell me about your Kickstarter campaign.

GL: We’ve worked really hard to create one that captures the spirit of the project and gives people a sense of the film. I hope people connect with that and see this as a universal story. I’m incredibly lucky to have such a talented team of Alonso Homs, Dan Delorenzo, Rebecca Atwood, Bruce Mason, Matthew-Lee Erlbach and Henry Russell Bergstein. I’m also very grateful for all the help I’ve gotten from my parents and other people in Little Compton. I feel very lucky to have so much support, and I hope the community we’ve built around the project inspires people to help us make this film a reality.

Become a backer for The Passing Season through the film’s Kickstarter campaign. Backers will receive perks for their donations.

Watch the video to learn more about The Passing Season:

Photo Credit: Gabriel Long