Hollywood has made good use of Atlanta as a malleable film location that can stand in for just about anywhere.
But it’s rare for a film to embrace the authentic, idiosyncratic character of Atlanta the way independent filmmaker Kirby McClure, 39, does in his first feature film, “Spaghetti Junction,” which premieres Jan. 5 at the Plaza Theatre.
“Spaghetti Junction” was shot on locations around Doraville — where McClure lives with his wife and two young children — and Arabia Mountain. The film makes full use of Atlanta’s sprawling visual dissonance of dead strip malls, vape stores, kudzu-ravaged vacant lots and a collision of cultures from South Asian to deep South.
Credit: Courtesy of Kirby McClure
Credit: Courtesy of Kirby McClure
A kind of “Alice in Wonderland” transposed from Victorian England to the postindustrial scrum of Atlanta, “Spaghetti Junction” focuses on 16-year-old August (Cate Hughes). August’s rich fantasy life transports her out of an often grim existence living in a ramshackle ranch house with her hard-drinking father (Cameron McHarg) and alienated sister Shiny (Eleanore Miechkowski). August finds adventure and escape by forging a relationship with another teenager, known as The Traveler (Tyler Rainey), she discovers living in a drainage tunnel under Spaghetti Junction. Whether imagined or real, in McClure’s modern fairy tale the Traveler represents an exciting, mystical pipeline to something more interesting than August’s dysfunctional family.
Credit: Courtesy of Kirby McClure
Credit: Courtesy of Kirby McClure
The inspiration for “Spaghetti Junction” were the fairy tales that McClure read to his son. The challenge was “how do you take the language and the stuff of fairy tales, but then translate it into something that’s modern, and about the world we live in?”
He decided to make “Spaghetti Junction’s” heroine a spin on the usual fairy tale waif by casting a disabled teenager for the part. Growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, McClure was inspired by a one-legged skateboarder who was the most technically proficient on the city’s skateboard scene. As he wrote the screenplay, his mind kept going back to the memory of that virtuoso skateboarder.
But finding the right disabled actress to embody both August’s dreamy fragility and mettle proved daunting. McClure combed the country, reaching out to prosthetic clinics, children’s hospitals, amputee and rehabilitation clinics. He eventually connected with 16-year-old Hughes, who had little acting experience beyond a high school production. McClure flew Hughes and her mother from their home in Queens, New York, to the Doraville rental house that also became her family’s home in the film.
Credit: Courtesy of Kirby McClure
Credit: Courtesy of Kirby McClure
Made on a shoestring budget for $125,000, “Spaghetti Junction” also marked McClure’s return to Atlanta. He studied video art at the Atlanta College of Art and then motion graphics at SCAD Atlanta before moving to Los Angeles in 2007. In LA he worked with production company Partizan for 10 years as a commercial and music video director for clients like Honda, Adidas, Netflix and Taco Bell.
He left Los Angeles when he saw the cost of living rising and a lot of the indie art scene that initially drew him to the city disappearing as gentrification accelerated.
Returning to Atlanta in 2019, McClure found himself mesmerized by the unique juxtapositions of his new home in Doraville. Atlanta-based cinematographer Kristian Zuniga’s gorgeous camerawork invests the neighborhood’s tree-lined streets and urban blight with a haunting gravitas.
“Spaghetti Junction” serendipitously wrapped just before the pandemic shut down film production. Though Partizan CEO Georges Bermann served as executive producer on “Spaghetti Junction,” and McClure was able to find multiple investors for the film, in some ways “Spaghetti Junction” felt like a return to his bootstrap student days. He had to find and rent many of the locations for his film, arrange airfare for his stars and even convince a neighbor down the street in Doraville to rent him his muscle car for a featured role in the film.
“It is like going back to the beginning for me. I had traveled doing these big commercials with decent budgets and flying on airplanes and staying in nice hotels and stuff, but then making my little movie was going back to how it was when I was 19 at ACA making stuff,” said McClure.
But Atlanta also marked a kind of creative rebirth for McClure.
He found the Atlanta of 2019 very different from the one he had left. “It felt like it had grown up,” he said. His fellow art school friends were now working in the film industry here, which meant McClure had a ready crew of highly-skilled locals willing to help with his film.
Despite Atlanta’s own struggles with gentrification, McClure saw a city that had managed to hang on to its shagginess and creativity. “There was still this kind of rawness to it,” he said.
“I’ve played festivals in Austin, in Boston, in the UK. But to me it means more to be screening [”Spaghetti Junction”] at the Plaza. Because it has been this place where I’ve been so inspired by films that I’ve seen over the years, going back to when I first moved here to go to ACA, seeing films there that turned me on to the idea of making weird, interesting films.
“I feel like the stories I wanted to tell were always here.”
FILM PREMIERE
“Spaghetti Junction”
Now screening on Netflix, debuts locally Jan. 5-10 at 8 p.m. Kirby McClure will be featured in a Q&A opening night with Atlanta Film Society’s Jon Kieran. The Plaza Theatre, 1049 Ponce de Leon Ave. NE, Atlanta. 470-410-1939, plazaatlanta.com.
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