It’s 1969, during the height of the Vietnam War and Charlie is on his way to Michigan Tech University while his best friend Derek is anxiously counting the days until he becomes eligible for the draft. Before the two friends are forced to face their inevitable futures they decide to take a final adventure as kids. Together they embark on a 1,300 mile bike ride along Lake Superior. Thus begins the epic adventure that is director Edd Benda’s feature film debut, “Superior.”

The film debuted at the Dances with Films Festival in Los Angeles on June 5th. Hollywood Times Square recently got the chance to sit down with Benda, producer Alex Bell and cast members, Thatcher Robinson and Paul Stanko to discuss the film, shooting on-location, and making the world a better place.

So the film is set in Michigan, are you all from the Midwest?
Benda: I’m from the Midwest and one of our producers Steven Halstead is also a Midwest guy, but yeah as the writer and director that’s where I drew my inspiration.

I read that the film is inspired by a true story?
Benda: It is, it’s inspired by my uncle Carl and his cousin who took this bike ride in 1971, this 1,300-mile ride around Lake Superior. That kind of became the backdrop for me to tell a lot of stories within one. My dad is one of nine kids and they grew up, as Paul described it, in the “Footloose” household with no dancing and kind of a lot of restrictions on entertainment, so their source of adventure was to go out and create their own. And so what “Superior” became was kind of a conduit, a patchwork quilt if you will, of all their respective childhood adventures.

 Since the original bike ride was in 1971 was there a particular reason why you set the movie in 1969?
Benda: In setting it against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Vietnam War draft, in researching and really beginning to understand that time period, 1969 kind of became an important crux for all of that in the United States. While the film isn’t about that and isn’t singularly dealing with that, it was important to create that environment and that community.

I appreciated that the film didn’t favor the Michigan Tech path, but it kind of paints a bleak picture of both paths, with all the imagery of death and literally sleeping in coffins…
Stanko: It’s interesting, when I got the script I actually saw it as an incredibly optimistic story, where it’s two young men seizing this moment in their lives to either surrender themselves to their futures and just go their separate ways, or you know, to take one last great adventure and really quite literally take their story into their own hands. I think particularly for my character Derek, there’s a big crossroads that he’s at in life and the choice is either a bleak future where people continue to force him in the directions that they believe he’s only suited for or there’s a chance to break free and be his own man. I think that the story and Ed’s directions and Alex’s cinematography really do a wonderful job of capturing those moments that we all have in our lives where we can either choose to continue down the path that’s easy or the path that’s been set for us, or break away and try to make our own adventure in this world. To me it’s a story of optimism and hope and that you’re never locked on to one road, there’s always a divergent path to take.

Yeah, you see that in the cinematography, there’s always literally crossroads and other paths.
Stanko: Crossroads! Yeah totally!

Benda: Alex here is our cinematographer so he certainly had that in mind.

What was the filming process like for you, on location in Michigan?
Stanko: Oh man, how much time do you have?

Robinson: How many bugs can you write about?
Benda: It’s a story that spans almost a month, on June 19^th 2014 we loaded up three sedans, a pickup truck, and a trailer and we drove 3600 miles 3.5 days to this remote region in the upper peninsula of Michigan, where the reward for everybody weathering that journey was the 11 of us then crammed into a tiny little cabin where we got to live for the next month. So then we were in Michigan for 28 days; we filmed for 21 of them. We really built in a lot of time to kind of enjoy where we were, which was important to me and I think reflected a lot in the film is everybody had a strong sensibility of where we were and what we were doing. And then at the end of those 28 days we loaded up our 3 sedans and our pickup truck and our trailer that all had nicknames, and drove back to Los Angeles and I think one of my favorite moments of that road trip and simultaneously one of the most heartbreaking was we stopped in Barstow at a Chipotle to have lunch, and it was an unnecessary stop. We could have continued all the way to Los Angeles but we stopped to have this meal that we didn’t need because I believe, and I think that was reflected by a lot of our crew, is it was hard to come to grips with being back in Los Angeles and being back in the urban sprawl in the city because we lived this adventure for a month and I loved every minute of it, and it was hard to come back to reality.

Robinson: I’d say the buzzword if you need to describe or if you even can describe this whole process, the filming process, the production process in just a word it’s adventure. There’s no part of this film that isn’t an adventure and it continues! Even here at dances with films!

So what are you guys working on next?
Benda: Alex Bell and I have been working together for a while now and we have a few potential films down the pipeline, none of them far enough down the road to discuss at great lengths. Superior has been our singular focus for the last year and a half and will continue to be for the time being, but I look forward to having another Beyond the Porch production for the two of us. And certainly working with Paul and Thatcher a whole lot more in my career. This isn’t the last film. This is just the first one.

Robinson: As of now I have a tiny role in a film in August which I’m shooting for about a day in the bay area and from there on out there’s stuff maybe next year. But right now [the focus is] getting better in acting class. There’s always something to do, it’s never something where you can sit back and wait for the next thing.

Stanko: I am in a Harry Potter fan franchise called “Severus Snape and the Marauders,” and I play a young Remus Lupin in that, so that’s coming out in October. I’m also in a play right now called “Might as Well Live” that’s going up at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. It’s been amazing. That’s one of the great things about being in Los Angeles and I think these guys will agree with me, as an independent artist and that’s very much the circuit we’re a part of, there are wonderful opportunities. Dances with Films is a great one for film and Fringe is great for theater, but this is a city that really allows people to make art and to tell stories and it’s just cool to be here.

Bell: I do a lot of documentary work with the Salvation Army, so when the Nepal earthquake struck, they sent a team out to do disaster relief work and to set up displacement camps and get food distributions and medical aid, so I was part of a team that went out there to document that. Less than a week after the earthquake hit I was on the ground for 10 days getting to capture people making a difference in this world, so that was pretty cool and I’m right now preparing for a big event in London this month.

Stanko: See, Alex is out there making the world a better place while I’m pretending to be a wizard.

You know, everybody makes the world a better place in their own way.
Stanko: Yeah, right? That’s great.

There’s a scene where you, Paul, stop by the river and you leave something there and the camera pans on it but then it never really cuts back to what was left.
Benda: Earlier in the film they talk about being pragmatic with what they pack and we have kind of a brief little joke where Paul as the character Derek has severely overburdened his bicycle so when we stop by the stream it’s Derek acknowledging, ‘Alright I packed way too much stuff’ and he had to leave some stuff behind, he had to leave a lot of what he brought and really simplify his ride.
Stanko: It kind of was like in my mind, that was the moment that I let go of all the comforts and the things that I think I need to be successful and to survive, and the reality is all you need is a best friend and a bike and a hell of a lot of gumption. So that’s Paul Stanko’s esoteric and philosophical answer, that was the burden of life that we left behind.
Benda: That’s how I wrote it of course.

As a first time writer and director you only get one chance to make a first impression and for many the outcome isn’t pleasant. But director Oliver Thompson managed to make a visually beautiful film with a unique plot in “Welcome to Happiness.”

The film follows Woody, a children’s book writer who is also the gatekeeper to a mysterious door in his apartment that changes the lives of those who enter it.

We were recently given the opportunity to sit down with Thompson and other cast and crew members during the Dances with Films festival in Los Angeles, to see what they had to say about the striking film.

Producer Bay Dariz, actress Chauntal Lewis, and director Oliver Thompson attend the “Welcome to Happiness” premiere in Los Angeles

The film is so visually stunning, the set design and art direction are so beautiful, I really loved it. I heard that Woody’s apartment is actually your apartment?

Oliver Thompson: Yeah, Woody’s apartment is my apartment. The mural idea came to me pretty early on. We needed something visually compelling and I’d just been seeing a lot of murals, and I thought ok this would be cool if this is just something that’s there and becomes part of the story and part of the fabric of the story. He doesn’t even really know the story behind the mural, and then the mural seems to shift and grow and change but I knew how extravagant I wanted it to be, that it would take a while to do. And that was painted primarily by Bay, we designed the whole thing and I was like his painter apprentice, so he would just tell me like paint this whole big chunk blue and then he’d come in and turn it into waves you know, and I guess we knew that would take a long time, so I thought the only way to really realistically do this is to sacrifice my own place. We didn’t have the budget to rent someplace that we could just go work. That would have been ideal, to be able to rent a place and be working on it for three months of pre-production and then go home to a place that’s not a set.

Bay Dariz (producer): It was about 200 hours of painting.

Thompson: Yeah, , and then during the shooting I was sleeping on [Bay’s] futon, at his house, because my house was a hot set, it was not usable, it was not functioning as a home. Once they put all the gear in there you couldn’t even walk. So my house now is fun because clearly the mural is still there. It’s a fantastic hybrid now, it’s Woody’s apartment and mine, we kind of cohabitate. A lot of his stuff is still there because it was sort of just gifted to me after the film.

Paget Brewster (cast – Priscilla): I have a quick question, who was the art director? Was it you guys? Like did you do most of the decisions with the colors and the furniture?

Thompson: Yes I did that. We’ve credited my brother as production designer because my brother is an interior designer by profession, not in movies, in the real world. So what he was able to do for us was he would take my designs, my ideas that were all just sketched and then he put them in a CAD then you have a 3D rendering of the room. But I mean yeah I was the one on Lowes and Home Depots websites looking at wallpaper.

Brendan Sexton III (cast – Nyles): Good. It paid off.

Thompson: My pre-production time was primarily art direction. [Bay] was crazy with the business aspect of things and pulled it together, I can’t do that. I don’t have the brain to do what he did, so I was spending that time working with my bro and being our production designer. And then we had Heidi Koleto as our art and she was very instrumental. Once she came on board it was so great because I could say “Nyles needs to have one of those small mini fridges with faux wood paneling”, then I’m not the one who has to go find that now. Because for the first few months that was me, it was really nice to work with someone else who was just so good at knowing “Oh yeah I know I go here and I know that there’s this auction happening where we’ll be able to get his desk for $7.”

Dariz: I was gonna say, Nyles, his apartment, most of his furniture came from this old woman in San Dimas.

Thompson: Yeah Woody has an awesome little cassette deck, I found that cassette deck on Craigslist and so I drove out to the house and I was like “No actually I want everything that’s in here, this all needs to be in the movie” and she’s like “Well this is a woman who’s now in hospice and we are just auctioning off all her stuff” so Bay and I just drove back out there with the van and got Nyles’ awesome TV, and a bunch of weird 70s stuff for the walls and it was just that kind of thing you know, finding things piece by piece and storing them. It was really fun.

In terms of the storyline what was your main inspiration?

Brewster: He very eloquently earlier said that it grew out of these sort of discussions about the meaning of life at 4 o’clock in the morning, where your brain can kind of go maybe down a rabbit hole.

Thompson: Yeah I mean, I’ve been having those kinds of discussions since I was like 13. My mother is hugely influential for me in talking about those kinds of things, so I come from just a world of people who enjoy talking about “deep things” I guess for lack of a less stupid way to say it, so I think it’s just in me to write something like that. We were trying to make this horror flick that was a little simpler, as a genre film. And ultimately that just wasn’t going anywhere and I sort of had a little inner voice, that sounds so ridiculous to say, but it was just kind of like, “Hey, stop slitting people throats, how about all that stuff that you believe and you have in your heart, say that, Oliver.” And so that’s’ when this idea came to me and it was actually able to turn into a movie, so there might be something to that, I dunno.

In the film I noticed a bunch of pairings, like Woody and Ripley are both orphans, and the Monet book from Ripley’s past shows up in Proctor’s house in that first scene where Nyles is drawing the cat. So with all the different mirroring things, was there an underlying metaphor there?

Thompson: Oh, I don’t know. Woody, Nyles and Ripley are all orphans, I think its just about all these similar connections you know. Bay do you have any thoughts on that?

Dayriz: I think its just sort of that that is such a thing that makes you sort of question everything, and puts that character in a position where they are sort of having trouble moving on in their lives because they sort of missed something or they’re stuck in something, they can’t let go of something. That’s just such a thing that stifles people.

Brewster: What I took from it as an audience member watching the film, if you ask the question “could you change what happened in the past”, that’s the one thing that I would want to change, if I had lost my parents I without hesitation would desire the ability to change that. So I think that was really compelling to me, that it’s not a cut and dried answer and it’s not easy to say “oh everything happens for a reason”, no, there are things that we would respond to deeply, emotionally, if we had the ability to change that.

Yeah I could see that, without your parents I would think that’s where you feel the most lost, because they know you, they know everything about you.

Brewster: They’re responsible for your survival! You’re more dependent on them than anyone.

Thompson: It’s a theme I keep coming back to as I write. The idea of them all being orphans also sort of levels the playing field for all three guys, so like what Bay says, they each have an obstacle so it’s like “ok how is each one of them going to overcome it?” and hopefully they all do, right?

So about the button, when everybody is actually confronted with the button they realize they don’t actually have to push it, but when Woody meets Leah on the street it kind of implies that she did push it? Or do you feel like she did?

Thompson: No I don’t think she did. But what makes you think that?

Just in the way she phrases it.

Thompson: I think she’s just saying, you know you have the option. I think that she’s being a little coy I suppose. She’s not gonna say the whole thing, like this gives you the opportunity to do that, and they’ll talk you through this long winded thing and convince you not to. But it leaves you with the idea, which I’m glad it did. Because [Nyles] asks “Does anyone ever push the button?” and their response is weird. It’s totally ambiguous.

What are you guys working on now? Any upcoming projects?

Thompson: I think we decided today that we’re all going to work together again.

Sexton: Yeah we’re pretty adamant about that.

Brewster: Yeah we’ve been talking to these guys all day about how we want to form an ensemble troupe and keep making movies with Bay and Oliver.

Dariz: Oliver and I have a bunch of projects we’re trying to get out right now. We just finished this one like seven weeks ago so it’s trying to get this thing sold and get the next one going. Paget’s got a new show.

Brewster: I started shooting this show called Grandfather for Fox, that’s gonna start in the fall starring John Stamos and Josh Peck, and then hopefully next hiatus we make another movie.

Thompson: Welcome to Happier-ness