Sam Ashdown, a 37-year-old actor from Oregon, has been working in Coronado at the Lamb’s Players Theatre for the past two years.
And, for the first time ever, one of his films will be premiering at the Coronado Island Film Festival this year – “The Bootstrap Cafe,” a 19-minute movie about time travel.
Ashdown has largely been a theater actor, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting from Southern Oregon University and a Master of Fine Arts in acting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked all over the country as an actor for organizations like the Utah Shakespeare Festival, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the Nashville Repertory Theater before finding his way to Coronado.
However, this film is one of the first films that he’s co-written, co-produced, co-directed and acted in with two of his theater friends – Natasha Harris and Marco Antonio Vega – and it’s been quite the learning journey for him, he says.
I love playing and I love collaborating with other people … Whether that’s on film or in theater, that’s what I love to do. So, I love writing with other creative people.
Sam Ashdown
“I love playing and I love collaborating with other people,” Ashdown says. “Whether that’s on film or in theater, that’s what I love to do. So, I love writing with other creative people.”
And that’s exactly what happened when COVID-19 hit.
“Theater, you’re like spitting on people and you’re breathing on people – that is obviously not happening during that time,” Ashdown says with a laugh. So he decided to invite Harris and Vega to start a writers group as a creative outlet to write scripts and screenplays.
Ashdown first introduced the bootstrap paradox to his colleagues as a story idea. The concept, also known as an information loop, is a time-travel paradox that occurs when an event, object or person causes itself.
“Out of that, like, writer’s room, came this short film that we were excited about and wanted to produce and believed in the story,” Ashdown says.
The idea slowly started building on itself with everyone contributing and reworking until it became an entire script. It evolved into a short film that explored topics of hopeless repetition and feeling powerless to stop cycles – themes close to the writers.
The story follows three friends played by Ashdown, Harris and Vega, as they travel on an endless desert highway where they encounter a strange phenomenon in which they couldn’t escape this stretch of highway. Initially, the characters are blind to the paradox, spending their time bickering. But soon they recognize patterns that they continue to fall into, prompting change and growth.
Once the script was completed, they had to make the film, but the three had never developed a movie like this before.
We didn’t know how to make a film … Every part of it was like a learning experience, and that was the goal.
Sam Ashdown
He said they decided to treat making this film as if they were in film school. “We didn’t know how to make a film,” Ashdown explains. “Every part of it was like a learning experience, and that was the goal.”
Ashdown and his friends ended up scouting the location themselves, a stretch of highway in Oregon, doing costume design, lighting, stunts, editing and even directing it as they were acting.
They did recruit a friend of theirs, Ishfaaq Jhaumeer, to be the director of photography and to help with the color grading of the film once it was put together, but this was an entire short film created by mainly Ashdown, Harris and Vega.
And they learned a lot, Ashdown says.
“It’s like a growing, living thing that you’re just participating in and getting to collaborate,” he says. Ashdown explains that when they found the location, some parts of the story had to be changed, and while they were editing it, the film changed again.
But Ashdown says he wants to keep doing it because, whether it’s theater or film, the thing he loves is storytelling.
“The goal was to be in this position, to now be around other creatives who we can learn from,” Ashdown says.
“The Bootstrap Cafe” premieres at the Coronado Island Film Festival on Nov. 7 at 10 a.m. Tickets can be found on the festival website.
