A quick peek at Kevin James McMullin’s Facebook page shows you that he is all about his movie Exit 117. The profile picture is the Polaroid covered corkboard poster for the film showing sunny, impromptu shots of the ensemble cast. And only websites are listed under his information box:
The website for his movie, a YouTube link to Feist’s music video for the song “Intuition” which bears a striking resemblance to Exit 117 in its combination animation and childlike narrations that display a wonder for the world, and finally another plug for the film with the link to view the full length feature at its new home on Hulu. His debut film follows a handful of New Jersey kids fresh out of high school and ready to get out of town and start their lives (check out our review here).
Much like the friend group in his movie, Kevin is really making sure that Exit 117 is getting out there. It’s no wonder that at the University of Pennsylvania, which he graduated from in 2009, his major was not only communications but consumer psychology. He knows how to appeal to an audience even if he is humble about it.
“It’s been really wild heading all over the country with Exit 117,” Kevin said, “and I am still amazed that people we have never met actually show up to watch it. I remember when I read our first few reviews in San Jose and they were all extremely positive.”
Right now he still thinks it’s too early to know exactly what kind of filmmaker he is. As a graduate student enrolled in Columbia’s MFA program in film his main concern is explore, educate, and tell good stories. It is an admirable goal, again with humble beginnings.
Kevin explained, “We began principal photography two weeks after I graduated college in late May 2009. It took 3 months to film 15 days, but by nature of our sporadic shooting schedule, I had the luxury of editing the film as we went.”
Exit 117 premiered in San Jose, CA at the Cinequest Film Festival in February 2010, and then played at 10 more festivals over the next 7 months before being released on Hulu, Netflix and DVD.
Although Kevin was involved in every step of the production process – writing, directing, and editing it – he hadn’t planned on acting in the film when he last minute stepped in as Grady. He never thought of himself as an actor, but when a few of his friends couldn’t commit to the shooting schedule he shuffled the remaining cast around and rewrote to build up the other characters. If nothing else, Kevin knew that acting in the film himself would make his life easier as a producer since he knew that he would always be available to shoot anytime he wanted.
The rest of the cast, made up by his high school friends, was a large support system backing him during the entire process.
He said, “Exit 117 is just an extension of these backyard movies we have been creating since middle school. Everyone was comfortable with each other in a way that would be hard for a group of professional actors to emulate. And I knew my friends would all do it for free! The film was shot 3 years after the summer most of us graduated high school. I knew everyone would still be around, living with their parents for one last summer before they graduated college and moved somewhere else, so it seemed like my last shot to go for it.”
He also credited his high school friend Sean Emer with making any shot he had in mind come alive on screen. And truly the individual shot is really what makes the movie. Every image in Exit 117 could stand alone in its own right. The colors and angles that are allowed to be included in the frame all serve strong aesthetic functions. This attention to picture detail makes sense for Kevin who used to draw a lot as a kid. Making the transition to film was an artistic opportunity for him to play with more colors, light, reflections, and shadows to create texture. The visual style of the film was what he was most proud of by the end of the project.
The filmic eye that Kevin is developing along with cinematographer Sean Emer continues this year as Kevin works on his second feature film Aboard the Carousel, which he shot over the summer. His second film is an evolution of style that is different for him in genre and tone from Exit 117, which he wrote when he was 19 partly as an experiment to see if he could even sustain a feature length film. In February he and his production team will be starting a Kickstarter.com campaign to raise money for sound design, score and other post-production costs.
Even in his second venture, Kevin is an artist tempered with a distributive genius. His future of getting films out looks highly promising given the success of Exit 117. It’s not every twenty-something that can say they have made a feature length film for the festival circuit that has landed them on IMDB, Hulu, and Netflix all in the span of a year.
“If I learned anything from my movie,” Kevin said, “it is that I will probably end up sounding kind of stupid if I sincerely tell you where I see myself in thirty years. Suffice to say that I hope to be happy.”
