Filmmaker Geremy Jasper laughs a little when asked for the origin story of “O’Dessa,” a rock opera set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Its teen heroine sings, plays the guitar and rambles around – ultimately toppling the dictatorial TV host whose cruel reign has enslaved the populace.
“I had this idea, I don’t know what it was, delusions of grandeur, to make this theatrical experience,” Jasper says on a recent video call. “I was very into Robert Wilson and Tom Waits, who had collaborated on this thing called ‘The Black Rider,’ and I was obsessed with it at the time.
“I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, they’re taking old German folk tales and modernizing them and doing this thing,’” he says of the 1990 musical created by the avant-garde theater director Wilson, singer-songwriter Waits, and Beat writer William S. Burroughs. “I was like, ‘I’ll do Orpheus in the underworld, but it’s going to be a rock version of it.’”
It was all very loose and abstract at the time, Jasper says of the ideas that first surfaced more than two decades ago. But of one thing he was certain: The character that would become O’Dessa had a powerful potential.
“She didn’t have a name, but I knew she was this kind of waif-y, kind of Chaplin-esque, runty young woman with a pompadour and a guitar,” Jasper says. “I had that because I’m deep into Bob Dylan, early Dylan, and the Harry Smith American folk anthology, Woody Guthrie and the Carter Family.
“I just loved all that American folklore and myth,” he says. “I also had a love for science fiction and world-building.”
Years passed. Jasper spent most of the 2000s as the frontman of the New York City-based indie rock band The Fever. Now, “O’Dessa” arrives on Hulu on Thursday, March 20, starring Sadie Sink, Regina Hall, Kelvin Harrison Jr., and Murray Bartlett.
Finally, Jasper says, his fear that his lead character would never make it from his imagination to the screen has ended.
“I thought I wrote a character that’s un-castable,” he says. “And I got pretty depressed. There was a while where I was just like it’s not going to happen because that person with the skillset doesn’t exist. A person with this look doesn’t exist.
“It was a very specifically written character, and I had a very strong idea of what I wanted her to look and feel like,” Jasper says. “And then I got very, very lucky.”
‘Patti Cake$’ to ‘O’Dessa’
With Jasper’s 2017 feature film debut “Patti Cake$,” the writer-director made a name for himself. The story about a young White woman in New Jersey with dreams of becoming a rap star earned him nominations for best first feature from both the Directors Guild of America and the Film Independent Spirit Awards.
“‘Patti Cake$’ is about New Jersey where I grew up, and it was all hip-hop based because hip-hop was my first love,” he says. “After that, I was like, ‘What if I can make any movie now?’ O’Dessa just popped into my head. I remembered the world.
“It was stuff that I’d been playing with for years and years,” Jasper says. “I had started off as a collage artist and had always made images that felt very close to what we ended up with in ‘O’Dessa.’ Taking images from the ’50s or ’60s and matching them with something that feels futuristic and sci-fi, and these ideas of the ’30s.
“And the Depression and the Dust Bowl and a Guthrie-esque kind of troubadour roaming through this wasteland lined up quite nicely with a dystopian hellhole.”
In “O’Dessa,” the title character played by Sink of “Stranger Things,” leaves her isolated homestead after the death of her mother, taking with her a small knapsack and the guitar her late father had left her along with a prophecy that she would achieve great things with its strings and her voice.
In Satylite City, she encounters and befriends Euri Dervish, played by Kelvin Harrison Jr., who sings and dances and works as an escort in a club run by Neon Dion, played by Regina Hall. Dion oversees the drug trade that numbs the minds and spirits of its residents, sending the profits to the island fortress of the dictator Plutonovich, played by Murray Bartlett, whose cruel and violent reality TV empire beams nonstop onto every screen in the city.
For Jasper, the look of the film, and to a degree its story, was inspired by his boyhood love for such ’80s movies as “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior,” “Brazil,” “Labyrinth,” and “Legend.”
“We’re all in the shadow of George Miller,” the 49-year-old says of the creator of the Mad Max franchise. “I grew up in a time when you’d go and rent VHSs from the ShopRite. There were all these low-budget ‘Mad Max’ ripoff movies that we used to watch all the time.
“‘Brazil’ was a huge, huge moment for me. I was a little older when I got into it and I couldn’t believe that a film like this could be made,” Jasper says of director Terry Gilliam’s film. “It just opened up the potential of what a movie could be because at that time it didn’t seem like you could make something that imaginative and be that playful and weird and surreal.”
The costars sign on
Hall says that as she read Jasper’s screenplay she was drawn into the world it portrayed, its futuristic sci-fi trappings, and the sampling of songs that arrived with the script.
“I was very excited when I met Geremy because I didn’t know what he was going to be like,” she says on a video call with both her and Harrison on camera. “I was like, ‘He must be a madman’ when I read the script. So it was quite interesting to meet someone who I was like, ‘Wait, what’s wrong with him?’ He was so kind and warm.
“To have him have that much joy and that much optimism, and honestly, the musicality, too,” she says. “I think hearing the songs was great because I could then hear the intention of the story.”
Harrison said he was drawn to the “disruptive” nature of the screenplay.
“I get so much of a specific type of role or movie,” he says. “I read that script and I was like, ‘This is not playing by any of the rules.’ Even down to the characters and their love story, I was like, ‘This is turning it completely on its head.’
“I wanted to see where he was coming from,” Harrison continues. “I think the movie is a lot about our discovery of human nature and behavior and the patterns that we recreate in life. At the end of the day, it’s about human connection.”
For Hall, the movie was also a rare chance to be the villain on screen.
“It was a lot of fun; I have to tell you,” she says. “I can’t say getting dressed was much fun, but it was fun to watch the whole department with the prosthetic, the hair, the makeup team.”
Early on, Hall decided to create a new voice as Neon Dion, something harder and more ominous than her normally sweet tones.
“Regina is a fantastic actress, but I’ve seen her be intimidating or scary,” Jasper says. “She just gets focused and she’ll bring it. What she did, though, kept me on some sleepless nights, because she’d been working on this Dion voice, but she wouldn’t really show me the voice until we were on set. So I was anxious.”
Hall laughs when told that Jasper was worried about it.
“I was scared,” she says, laughing. “What if Geremy’s like, ‘That’s all wrong’? So I waited to the end where he would have just been stuck, you know? Where he was like, ‘Well, I’ve already cast her. Now we’re in Croatia. I have no choice but to work with it.’”
Jasper says that Harrison was always on his list of actors for Euri, and when he accepted the role he quickly made it his own.
“I was a fan but you never know what someone’s going to be like until you meet them and see how they’re going to respond to the material,” he says. “He just got it. He understood this character in a way that I didn’t even, and he brought so many ideas and so much of a fresh perspective to who this character can be.”
Harrison also admits he told a little white lie to ensure he got the role, he says.
“I can’t dance,” Harrison says, laughing. “When Geremy first talked to me about the role he was like, ‘Well, Euri’s more of a dancer than he is a singer.’ I said, ‘Well, you know I’m definitely more of a dancer than I am a singer.’ Which is just not true.
“I was in my parent’s house in New Orleans, it was during Thanksgiving, and told them I was lying in that meeting,” he says. “My mom’s a professional dancer, she’s a ballerina. She was like, ‘Boy, why are you telling that man that? You should have told him you have two left feet.’”
A leading lady
Jasper wrote O’Dessa as a 19-year-old, which was almost the same age as Sadie Sink was when she sent the writer-director an unsolicited audition tape.
“Someone slipped Sadie the script and a couple of songs,” he says. “She read it on the sly and she fell in love with it.
“From what she said, she was like, “OK, I’m gonna do this,’” he says. “Then I got sent out of nowhere a little clip of her in a hotel room, just filming herself with a guitar, singing one of my tunes.
“And it just rocked my world. Like, my eyes started welling up with tears. It was the first time that I saw the character, saw the film. It had been years and years and here she was.”
From there, the project finally fell into place, with Hall and Harrison, once they were cast, also joining the chorus of admiration for Sink, now 22.
“She’s wonderful,” Harrison says. “What I really respect about her was her professionalism and her selflessness. She had to record about 15 songs, if not more, in addition to learn how to play the guitar. At one point her fingers were bleeding. She didn’t complain once.
“She was the beacon of light and hope on the set,” he adds.
“Sadie, she has such a sweetness about her and a shyness,” Hall says. “She certainly made me want this to be great for her and show up and support the journey of O’dess-slash-Sadie.”
For Jasper, the long wait to make the movie more than paid off with the discovery of his star.
“It takes time,” he says of the quest to find and make “O’Dessa.” “It takes ups and downs and many heartbreaks, and then you settle on the right human being to bring this to life.
“Seeing her face on screen, she just lights it up,” he adds. “I think of her almost like a silent movie star. You could take out the sound and the singing. You just want to watch that face.”