Putty Hill

Matt Porterfield on PUTTY HILL

I was raised in a Baltimore suburb wild with unkempt hedges, disheveled lawns and porches, yards full of car parts and swimming pools, and a church or a bar on every corner. This neighborhood, located just inside the city line, is the inspiration for much of my work and sets the scene for PUTTY HILL.
From 2007 through 2009, I was at work writing and developing an original screenplay, METAL GODS, a coming-of-age tale about a group of metal-heads skirting the fringes of Baltimore city. It was a timely script. And we were poised to make it in the summer of ’09, but financing fell through. In its wake, I developed another scenario, using many of the actors cast for METAL GODS and others I’d found along the way and wished to work with. On paper, it was a five-page treatment anchored by one line of written dialogue and 15 precise locations in which I wanted to shoot. During production, however, it became something else entirely: a work of intense collaboration and magic.
PUTTY HILL is not quite like anything I’ve ever seen. On a most basic level, it is an amalgam of traditional forms of documentary and narrative realism. But it is an approach to realism in opposition to the anthropological, lyrical, and romantic currents present in most of the genre. More importantly, though the structure of the film was plotted, the details of individual scenes were largely improvised, breathing life into the dialogue and bringing an enhanced degree of naturalism to the relationships between characters. I had already established firm bonds with my cast working with them on METAL GODS, so they trusted me enough to take risks and bring a level of emotional honesty to the material that will resonate with audiences.