‘Breakwater’ Interview: James Rowe Talks Indie Filmmaking, Shooting in Corolla, And ‘The Night of the Hunter’

Now out in theaters and availabe On Demand, Breakwater is an immersive thriller about a recently paroled ex-con (Darrren Mann) who gets in over his head by keeping a promise. Co-starring Dermot Mulroney and Alyssa Goss, Breakwater has much more layers than your standard thriller. Director/writer James Rowe talked to Deepest Dream about Breakwater, working with Mann, and finding inspiration in Corolla, North Carolina.

Just out of prison, Dovey (Darren Mann) is piecing his life back together by living his father (JD Evermore) and making sure he complies with his parole officer’s (The Wire’s Sonja Sohn) wishes. Dovey takes a huge risk by attempting to contact Eve (Alyssa Goss), the daughter of Ray (Dermot Mulroney), a fellow convict who is a father figure to Dovey.

Breakwater makes beautiful use of the Currituck Beach Lighthouse in Corolla, California. Filmmaker James Rowe discusses his movie in detail and elaborates why the Outer Banks was the perfect setting for his thriller. He closes the interview mentioning The Night of the Hunter as one of his favorite movies, and that film serves as a perfect companion piece to Breakwater.

Check out my review of Breakwater on this week’s CinemAddicts and check out my Q&A with Rowe below!

Breakwater is a very visually expansive movie. You said most of it was shot in Wilmington, but there’s also this small town in the Outer Banks, which I think is a complete find. 

James Rowe: Well thank you, Greg, for talking about the scope of the film because that was one of the things I really wanted to achieve.

The movie starts in a prison, which is very confined. But I wanted (the film) to get bigger and bigger as (the story) went. All of the action kind of culminates on the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and it’s in this town (named) Corolla. 

There’s a well-known lighthouse up there, the Currituck Beach Lighthouse. I had visited that lighthouse maybe 5 or 6 years ago before I started writing the script. I loved it because it was sort of secluded (and) surrounded by trees. And it was mysterious. I thought, there’s really something to be built around this lighthouse as a location character. 

That area is fairly popular during the summer. But in the off season, it gets a little creepy up there. It’s isolated. The tourists are all gone. It’s cold and windswept. And I thought, this is a perfect place to to set a thriller. 

Speaking of windswept, there is a sequence between Dovey (Darren Mann) and Eve (Alyssa Goss) out in the rocky beach shore that was really well executed. It’s one of your film’s standout visual sequences. Can you talk about shooting that scene?

James Rowe: Thanks. It was a real challenge. There were a lot of challenging shoots. We had boats on the water and we had underwater work. But this particular scene I think that you’re referring to is the one on the breakwater where she loses something and he gets it for her . . . those were some huge rocks with these deep gaps in between. 

It was almost like stunt work, even though it’s a scene with dialogue with them sitting on the rocks. So they had to come out onto the rocks. She has to lose this thing. He has to go scrambling for it. And there’s some underwater work actually, in that sequence as well. 

The first time we shot it, I thought we had about 80% because it was just that challenging. On an independent film, you don’t have three days to shoot it. We would have normally done that over a few days on a studio movie, and we only had part of one day to shoot that sequence. 

So I did go back and get some pickup shots a little bit later near Los Angeles. It was pieced together over a couple of days of shooting. I’m glad that that you thought it was compelling because it was a challenge to do. And we knew we had to get it right. 

What made Dovey such a compelling character for you? As far as this movie goes, the theme of “no good deed goes unpunished” applies. Although Dovey may be a bit naive, he is also a very thoughtful person.  

James Rowe: So I think part of that is, was where I grew up in the South, in Western North Carolina. It’s a progressive enough place. Asheville, North Carolina. But there’s also a feeling of you help your neighbor and you are loyal to your friends. 

So I kind of grew up with that. I’m drawn to characters like that. They’re not complete angels, but they try to do their best. I think there used to be more movies made, especially thrillers with characters who are caught up in circumstances beyond their control. 

They may be trying to do the right thing, but they keep digging and digging themselves deeper. And I love this idea of no good deed goes unpunished. It’s an antithesis to what we see in Ray, played by Dermot Mulroney. 

I just love how Darren Mann as Dovey has gone to fulfill this request from a friend. He’s gotten out of prison, and he’s going to find this prisoner’s daughter (Alyssa Goss) who’s estranged from him. 

He feels like he owes this man for helping him through his time in prison. That one choice leads to the cascading series of events that leads him to a decision. 

Do I just give up and go back home and leave all this behind, or do I confront these things that are in front of me? I am drawn to characters who maybe we can relate to. Sometimes thrillers involve characters who are very capable (like the Taken films), (Liam Neeson) talks about a particular set of skills that he has and he’s going to kill everybody. 

Sometimes I want to see what what would your average person do in a situation like this? And I think that’s what we try to explore in this film. 

I’m a very simple cinephile. I see Dermot Mulroney in a cast and I just watch it sight unseen. So that was an obvious choice for you as a filmmaker. But with Darren Mann and Alyssa Goss, what was that thinking process in casting them as they are pretty much the heart and soul of your story?

James Rowe: So I do think that Darren is very close to the character that we meet at the beginning of the film. He’s the kind of guy who would do something like that for a friend. And then as he progresses through the movie, we realize he’s in a place where he has to step up and make a decision to do some things he would never do. 

Darren has the ability to create that arc because of where he starts. He’s an empathetic character and an empathetic guy. I loved working with him. He also ithe kind of guy that just goes in full force (such as when he) had to do underwater sequences and action set pieces. fun to see a guy who maybe seems a little bit beaten down, a little bit naive, then come into his kind of movie star quality later in the film and step up. 

And Darren also has the ability to do that because he’s very athletic and he could do some of that physical action. 

(With Alyssa Goss), I needed somebody a little bit mysterious. She’s enticing to him. Her love of the Outer Banks and the water and the lighthouse where she works is apparent. But there’s also something that she’s hiding. And I think that quality of someone who’s maybe got some things that are not being expressed in her character early on, and then she has to step up later in the film and really face a past that is not done with her. (A past) that has now followed her to this place that she was trying to make a new home out of. So I think Alyssa does a fantastic job as well. 

With Breakwater, I get to learn a little bit about the area, the Outer Banks, it just seems to me you can as a viewer, you can enjoy it on an entertainment level. But I feel that it really has a real connection to place. So you as a director, how connected are you to the location? 

James Rowe: On a personal level, I love when the place is a character, and in a way, the place inspired this film, you know, because I had visited the place and I seen that lighthouse, and I’d been to the Outer Banks when I was a kid, and I thought, let’s populate this place with some characters and have them be here for a reason. 

That allows the place to kind of work on them a little bit. The weather, you know, the fact that one character is trying to get to, uh, to meet up with some other characters and he’s having a hard time getting there because it’s not that accessible for him. 

Sometimes the physical nature of a place (and its) landscape provides its own kind of conflict. So there’s the atmosphere of of the place of the Outer Banks, but there’s also the fact that it is isolated enough to where it actually provides some interesting plot turns for us in the sense that, you can’t just drive right up to it. Especially for somebody crossing the border from Virginia to North Carolina, which is just part of the setup for this film. 

What have you learned as a filmmaker by sharing your craft with just as passionate students? As far as teaching people, whether it’s screenwriting or filmmaking, do you learn something else within the dialogue and your experience as a teacher, and does that feed into your filmmaking?

So much. I went to AFI, I came up through film schools. It was, first of all, you’re thinking about movies every day, and I think that most filmmakers are I’m a writer as well. And and sometimes I think of myself as a writer first because I enjoy that process. And then I want to see the movie made the way I have it on the page. So I hold on to it very tightly, and I decide I’m going to direct this thing. And I have had one of my scripts directed by it, by somebody else. 

But I started off writing and directing my own work and then as I started to teach after that, I really enjoyed what different generations who were in my classroom were bringing to the classroom in terms of the films that they loved, the film experiences that they loved, (whether it’s) one genre or another. You’re just living in that every day. 

It makes you go back and watch more movies and I think that any great director is a student of film. When you’re teaching, you also have to continue to be a student of film because you’re looking for ways to express certain ideas about how to craft something, about how to work with an actor, about how to manage a particular set piece that’s written in a film. As a director, you’re thinking about those things. How would I do that? And so, you know, it allows you to kind of hone in and focus your own work in a way. 

And honestly, the students that end up doing really, really surprising work, It’s also inspiring. 

Can you name one of your maybe all time favorite movies for our listeners to watch after seeing Breakwater? 

James Rowe: Yeah, this goes back a ways though, so they’re going to have to go back and dig it up. I love The Night of the Hunter. I think that film with Robert Mitchum is brilliant. It’s so expressive visually. It deals with this idea of morality and conflicting morality, not within one character as much as our film does, but just society versus a man who’s a bit of a hypocrite. (He’s) a preacher (and) also a murderer. And there was there was some inspiration for the character of Ray in the Robert Mitchum character with The Night of the Hunter. So check out that movie. You won’t be disappointed.

I think it’s one of the most beautiful movies ever made in cinema. Plus, it’s a screenplay by James Agee, who’s a great writer. Is that kind of the stuff that you want to approach with your own filmmaking, making it sort of a sleight of hand where you think it’s one thing, but there’s so many other things beneath the surface?

James Rowe: I think especially in this genre and the thriller genre, there were a lot more sort of what I would think of as like literary thrillers made, you know, in the 70s and 80s and even into the 90s, where it’s it’s complex layering of character and we don’t know everybody’s intentions right away. 

At the same time, we get a chance to kind of learn about them through their actions, rather than defining them all right away in the first ten minutes of the movie and saying, okay, here’s our hero and here’s what he or she is after. I think there’s a literary quality to what I do. And I don’t mean that in the sense that it deserves to be a great novel. 

I just mean it in the sense that I do think that a good movie can be like reading a good book in its complexity and its layering. And yes, you can go too far. You can go one one turn or twist too far. But I think that audiences are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. 

And it’s what inspired me to to write movies. Getting deeper into these characters and what motivates them to do what they do. 

And as you’re leaving James just some writing insights. Do you just write really early in the morning before you have to start your day with all your other responsibilities? Is there an unlock as far as your own workflow as a writer? 

James Rowe: I wish I could do that. I have an eight year old son, so it’s sort of a lot of like getting into school and there’s a lot of stuff (to do) in the morning. I will sometimes, when things are quiet, I’ll head to the coffee shop early in the morning after I’ve dropped him at school. But I’m sort of more of an evening writer. Maybe it impacts the kinds of stories I tell. 

I like to get into the world. One of the things I love to do in writing, and this comes with what I said about literary cinema. I like to not know what’s going to happen next and I don’t do a full story outline before I write. I know the big turning points (and) the big moments that I’m shooting for and that I’m writing toward. 

But I really enjoy sitting down and (wondering) what’s going to happen today, and I wonder what this character is going to say, and I wonder what this character is going to do about (what) that other character said. 

In a way, it’s like sitting down with a good book. You don’t know what’s going to happen next. And for me, as tough as writing can be sometimes, the joy of doing it is surprising yourself by what happens next. 

James really enjoyed your film. Thank you so much for your time. 

James Rowe: Thank you Greg, really appreciate it. Great questions.

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