Get him to the Greek

Are you willing to ride in a canoe?

Are you willing to camp out in the woods?

Are you willing to grow a beard?

These were just a few of the questions facing Church Point native Paul Batiste in early 2009 as he stared at a casting call for LSU screenwriting instructor Zack Godshall’s new film Lord Byron. This is not for me, Batiste thought at first. But when Godshall noticed Batiste in the hallway and assumed he was there to audition, the middle-aged barber agreed to give movies a try.

Like the rest of those auditioning, Batiste was asked to read back a difficult monologue from Beowulf. His unlikely reading, his odd cadence and threadbare demeanor struck Godshall and his writing partner Ross Brupbacher as wholly unique. They knew Batiste could make for one memorable character on screen, but it wasn’t until the following day that they hit on the idea to hand this untrained actor—Batiste had done only small community theatre roles beforehand—the lead part they had originally written for a 28-year-old white guy.

A month earlier, as Godshall finished his critically acclaimed documentary God’s Architects and stressed over financing for his next narrative feature, he, like Batiste, faced a new set of questions laid down like some strange gauntlet.

Are you willing to forget about financing?

Are you willing to throw out the rulebook?

Are you willing to let go?

One night while half asleep and wrestling his restlessness, Godshall heard a voice. Maybe it was Werner Herzog, he says, thinking of the narrative-giving documentarian. “Rid yourself of lofty aspirations and just be totally vulnerable,” was the message. He wrote those words down on a notecard and carried the card in his wallet for the entire Lord Byron shoot. This would be a film about discovery, and it would vault Godshall out of his rut.

Armed only with a 15-page outline, a $1,000 budget, Batiste in the lead and a handful of similarly inexperienced actors, Godshall and Brupbacher began telling the story of a middle-aged cad and weed smoker who lives with his ex-wife and her children but feels called to change his life completely.

He wants to become a monk.

God’s Architects followed a handful of individuals who believe they have received divine instructions to build unique monuments to their faith. With Lord Byron, the filmmaker himself and the film’s lothario protagonist set out on similarly quixotic missions.

“That’s the idea I am drawn to,” Godshall says. “This idea that he’s an unlikely candidate for the monastic life. He feels this deep spiritual calling, but he loves the ladies.”

Filmed over the course of several months on location near Lafayette, Lord Byron is a micro-budget indie with macro-ambition as large and spectacular as Batiste’s imposing frame, as sprawling as his waywardly charming thoughts that narrate the story like a river flow. This is, in some ways, a challenging film, and yet a deeply engrossing one if audiences only choose to immerse themselves in its ramshackle charms and its satirical spin on the traditional Greek tragedy. “It’s a tragic story, but handled comedically,” Godshall says.

Lord Byron screened at Sundance in January and is the 31-year-old filmmaker’s second feature to be accepted into Robert Redford’s prestigious Park City festival. Throughout filming, Godshall remained open to narrative revisions and improvisation. He let the actors bring so much to their characters, and the result created a more realistic, if idiosyncratic, comedy of collaboration.

“I don’t want to try to repeat this exactly in our next film, but the process of being open to things is something I’ve realized is a lot of fun,” Godshall says. “This is a $1,000 movie, but it doesn’t look that way. It has a quality to it, a strong style. It feels like you’re in the hands of something that has a purpose.”

As part of Manship Theatre’s new Homegrown Film series, Lord Byron will screen April 1. For tickets visit manshiptheatre.org.

lordbyronfilm.com