Brandon Freeman grew up in Longview, TX, he went to the University of Texas and then Southern Methodist University for law school. But while he always had an interest in movies, his career took him down a path of high-stakes finances, working for venture capital firms at the height of the dot com boom and then starting his own businesses and managing multiple funds. Then, in 2008, he urged his brother, actor Heath Freeman, and friend from Austin, director Anthony Burns, to finally sit down and write the script they had always talked about. That launched a rapid paced writing process that found the brothers shooting their East Texas in 1983-based script, called Skateland, by the fall, premiering at Sundance a little over a year later.

We spoke to Freeman at his Dallas office about making the film and the mood of the place and the time period he set his first film.

FrontRow: So how did your work on Skateland begin?

Brandon Freeman: In 2008 I finally convinced [my brother Heath] and Anthony Burns, and I said, “Guys, come on, let’s just do it.” So that whole summer we just sat down and wrote a script. We kind of banged it out.

FR: So you took a break from the rest of your businesses?

BF: Yeah, I took a long break from the spring of 2008 to the summer of 2009. I still had all my companies, but I have really good managers who run them. And I’d be back here [in Dallas] at least two days a week, like Monday, Tuesday in the office and then I’d be out. And I worked exclusively on the film. For one, it was just a really intense writing process because we did it in about three or four months. We did some research back home.

FR: Where’s home?

BF: Longview, which is kind of where it is loosely based.

FR: Where was it shot?

BF: It was shot in Marshall and Shreveport, which is really close to Longview – it is like 50, 60 miles, so it all looks the same. A couple of the scripts we had took place around East Texas, and once we decided on 1983 – we were all pretty young then, I was actually in 5^th grade, and my brother and Anthony were in first or second grade. I have a pretty vivid memory of that time period and the people in my neighborhood. We wanted to write about particular time period because it was such an interesting inflection point historically for our country from the standpoint of we went from this ‘70s malaise and a deep reception, and then everything really turned around. Upward mobility was kind of the new theme.  Pop culture just really blew up at that point. MTV started to get piped into homes all over the place.

In the film, we’re trying to be subtle about it, but the theme was the inflection point in the economy, or the inflection point in the feminist movement when woman started doing their own thing and going out and getting their own jobs and leaving their husbands and stuff like that. That was running rampant at that time. I mean every family that we grew up with got a divorce. For some reason, it was like “Oppression is over, we can do whatever we want at this point.”

That was really the backdrop about why we wanted to write about that period, and Skateland is just a metaphor for the change in time. It is like, Skateland is shutting down; it is the end of an era; it is time to move on. Whenever we see films that are a kind of retrospective of the 1980s, it is always Go-Go ‘80s. Everyone is wearing parachute pants and their hair is all flock-of-seagulled out, and it’s just a parody of the ‘80s. And we didn’t want to be a parody of the ‘80s, we wanted to be a story about people in East Texas and what it was like in this transition area.

FR: Even from a style perspective, the film captures that ‘70s to ‘80s blur.

BR: We tried to stay right on that theme. You don’t look at the costume design and say, “Oh, it is so clearly ‘80s, or oh it is so clearly ‘70s. And coming from a small town in East Texas, everything is quite a bit late anyway. Style trends are like five years later in East Texas, and it is still that way. It was that way back in ‘83 when we were growing, and we recognized it. And Michelle, she was the one character that kind of got it. She got the music, she was a little bit more forward thinking – “I’m not in this small town rut” mentality. And it is supposed to be reflected by the fact that she listens to cool music, and you get that. I knew girls that were beyond all the other guys that were running around listening to ACDC, and they were listening to Morrissey, and they were way out there. They read more, had more exposure. But most of the people we grew up with were just like ACDC.

FR: One of the critics I saw the film with complained about inconsistencies in how the period was portrayed, because in a shot in a music store there was a Rush “2112” album poster on the wall. But I thought, well, sure Rush was still hot and new there, even if the album was several years old at that point.

BF: Oh man, Rush never got old. You go to East Texas and you listen to 98 Rocks and you are going to hear Led Zeppelin and Rush played over and over and over again because people never get tired of it. And that is how it was back then. Some of that stuff that was late ‘70s rock, Pink Floyd “Dark Side of the Moon,” it is just always cool and it always will be. And those guys are still driving around in their trucks or their Trans-Ams and they are listening to “Dark Side of the Moon.”

FR: You mentioned the prevalence of divorce at the time, is there an autobiographical element to the story?

BF: I would say so. There’s not one character; we’re not writing about us. But what we did was created characters that were like people that we knew, that we grew up with. And then we built a story around those characters, and a lot of those stories came from our personal lives. The car accident, for example, I had a really good friend that died in a car accident, same age. And when we shot that scene, I actually storyboarded it out with Anthony and our cinematographer, the whole set up was very similar to what actually happened. And in a small town, everyone shows up on scene really quick. The dad was there, and then just a little bit later the friends were there. It was just a very traumatic experience. But those are those things, you write what you know.

FR: That scene really captured a sense of inescapability of small town life, how at that age it feels like you are staring down an inevitable life time of just working on an oil rig.

BF: The film has a lot of texture to it, we tried to make it have a lot weight, and a lot of it is mood of that time period. It is more of a feeling we were trying to create of that time. It is a different kind of angst of that time then maybe what teenagers or young adults have now. It is just a different set of problems. And we really wanted to paint a portrait. We didn’t just want to say, “Here it is – surface.” We wanted to create this mood that kind of drew you in to feeling like you can feel what these guys are going through and it is different than what kids experience today. And it is different from what I experienced when I graduated n 1991 from high school. Like, when guys had their cars back then, everyday they would wash their car. You’d cruse 80, that’s all you had. Maybe not every day, but come Friday night you’re car was going to shine and you would cruise 80 and park somewhere, smoke cigarettes and talk to girls.