Filmmaker Richard Bailey Captures Texas’ Surreal Beauty with Howler

It’s early morning on a small farm just 90 minutes south of Dallas. The sun’s peeking out over a nearby field while a gust of wind rustles nearby patches of grass. Twelve-year-old Richard Bailey marches out to this domain to endure a daily routine he now describes as “crucibles of experience, hardships and also moderate victories.”

At a young age, Bailey was tasked by his parents with taking care of “a herd of cattle,” a tremendous responsibility for someone not even in high school. Given the isolated nature of his parents’ farm, Bailey was truly on his own.

Decades later, the unique experiences of rural life and being surrounded by the natural world would profoundly shape Bailey’s modern artistic exploits.

“That’s where so much of me was defined, how I imagine the world, how I participate in it,” Bailey says.

Now a filmmaker, Bailey’s latest feature, Howler, continues his fascination with merging ominous atmospheres with rustic backdrops. The feature follows poet Leni (Rhonda Boutte), who goes out for a stroll in the woods before securing a prestigious award. In the wilderness, she experiences a devastating vision of the future that she feels compelled to share as a warning to the world. The result is a surrealist Southern gothic mystery.

“The whole movie unfurls like a dreamed – or bizarre vision,” says Bailey.

This cinematic collaboration between Bailey and producer Liz Sankarsingh is profoundly rooted in Dallas, even beyond the director’s memories of growing up on a Texas farm.

Before Howler, Bailey directed multiple feature-length movies, “very much shaped by the wide open spaces and light of Texas.”

Sankarsingh was born and raised in Garland, where she got “the acting bug at a young age.”

In an origin story that couldn’t be more Dallas if it tried, Bailey and Sankarsingh first crossed paths at Half-Price Books.

“There’s such a large creative community in the bookstore … it’s a place where we congregate and share ideas,” Sankarsingh says. The two developed a friendship that would come in handy years down the road.

Beyond her work as an actor, Sankarsingh is also experienced in the world of art grants and helped manage the South Asian film festival Tasveer. These achievements, among others, made Sankarsingh ideal for a key position on Howler. Eons after their initial Half-Price Books encounter, Bailey asked if Sankarsingh would like to apply her skills by producing Howler and she agreed. Having an esteemed artist guide the film’s post-production process further intertwined Howler with the thriving Dallas art scene.

Put Out to Pasture

Bailey’s impetus for creating the film was driven “by looking at and thinking about plays and visual arts on display throughout north Texas,” he says. The former field is one that especially captivates Bailey’s imagination.

“I see a lot of local theater, I try to see as much as I can,” Bailey says. “The anti-realistic elements … it’s those moments that are dreamlike or experimental in the play that gives it an unreality. Somehow, that gives a contour to the emotional life of these characters.”

When Dallasites sit down in places like the Kalita Humphreys Theater or the Watertower Theatre, it’s a chance to experience what Bailey describes as “a constructed thing and you feel like you’re having a relevant conversation.”

Involving Dallas plays into films, as well as other North Texas events like “art galleries, where realism and abstraction intersect,” send Bailey’s mind spinning. He wonders “about these combinations and how they work … how would you create a dialogue or create a scene within a motion picture that combines both of those things?”

Meanwhile, a more explicit mixture of the Dallas art scene and Howler comes from its cast. Dallas residents may recognize Rhonda Boutte, Jenny Ledel, Chistie Vela, John Flores and Abel Flores Jr., among others, from their work performing in places such as the Undermain Theatre, Second Thought Theatre and Theatre Three.

The specificity of Howler to the Dallas area was not lost on Sankarsingh when she joined the project as a producer.

“Howler was so exciting to me because it’s so hyper-local,” she says, “using such wonderful resources that we have here and such talent is what gives this quite the edge.”

While watching an early cut of the feature, Sankarsingh was also transfixed by “the idea of landscape as a character,” which also feels decidedly Texan. The wide range of terrain in Dallas (let alone in the state’s entirety) lends an innate sense of personality to the soil. Bailey’s landscape-oriented filmmaking echoed that element of Dallas reality in a way that Sankarsingh found enthralling.

Howler evoking Dallas and Texas also came from filming experiences that couldn’t happen anywhere else, like one fateful day that was anything but bovine, er, divine.

“To shoot the pastoral sequence or the edge of the forest sequence, we go to a friend of mine’s property, which is in Fairfield, Texas,” Bailey says. “Upon arriving in my truck, my friend’s cattle had not been moved to another section of the land.”

Bailey had to shoot a weighty sequence involving Ledel while “surrounded by not just by all these heifer cattle but also this 2,000-pound bull.”

Needless to say, it was a surreal experience as the assembled actors were “calmly going through their lines but at the same time wondering [whether they would] get gored and stuck in this place that’s so remote?” Bailey says.

Thankfully, everyone got out unharmed, and Bailey managed to secure dazzling footage of a perfect Texas sunset. This entire anecdote might sound like a fantastical tall tale, but for Bailey, it was just another day of shooting and a poetic full-circle moment. Here he was again, decades later, out in a field, having to surrender himself to the cattle.

Howler will screen at 7:30 p.m. on April 22, at The Violet Crown Cinema, 3699 McKinney Ave.