MARFA — For filmmaker Chris Sibley, it seems like every time he decides to move across the country — or even halfway around the world — he ends up moving back to his former home base to start a new film project.
There were years when he bounced back and forth between Los Angeles and Austin. Then, six months ago he moved from Austin to New Zealand so that his Australian wife could be closer to family. “That’s when I found out I got hired for the project here,” he said, producing Marfa Lights, a feature that launches filming next month at locations in Alpine, Marfa and Marathon.
Far West Texas is a familiar place for Sibley, since he spent a good deal of time growing up in Alpine before getting a scholarship to a boarding school in Austin. His mother and father — Liz and Hiram Sibley — are well known in the city, with a small gallery, Galleria Sibley, and Liz spearheading the Alpine Alley Art (Mural Alley) project long ago. The Marfa Lights team includes producers Javier Gonzalez, and Tyler Savage. Jamie Meyer is the writer and director.
Sibley said he is looking forward to filming in the area — from October 16 to November 10 — on what he calls “a coming-of-age drama and love letter to West Texas.”
“It’s this bright-eyed young man who’s trying to come from the big city to sell solar panels to a small community,” Sibley said. “But when he finds some buyers and installs some panels, he finds out the antagonist, his boss, has given him faulty panels. So, it becomes a house of falling cards when he has to figure out how to navigate a small-town community with a faulty business model.”
When interviewed by The Big Bend Sentinel, Sibley was unaware of recent incidents of solar panel door-to-door salespeople being reported as suspicious to the Marfa Police Department, which ended with the police confirming they were legitimate. “Wow, real life inspiration is always the best, right?” Sibley said.
“And there’s a fun Chinati [Foundation] artist featured in there,” Sibley said. “One of our lead characters, Eric Balfour, plays our resident artist. He’ll be staying in town for about a week, wandering around.” The film will also feature James Urbaniak (Oppenheimer, American Splendor), Eric Balfour (Six Feet Under, The Offer), Mary Lynn Rajskub (24, Little Miss Sunshine), and musician Steve Earle.
Sibley has produced and worked in various roles on a variety of films, most recently Dance Dads, what he calls “a mockumentary about single dads getting over their emotional problems through dance,” and Buck Alamo or (A Phantasmagorical Ballad), which follows a man’s mystical journey through an “old Austin vibe” when confronting mortality. Sibley, Savage and Meyer all worked on Buck Alamo, which won the Audience Award for best Independent Texas Feature at the Austin Film Festival in 2021. That led to their current collaboration on Marfa Lights.
Sibley said selling him on Marfa Lights was easy when he considered the talent behind it. “You do it because you love it and you believe in the people,” he said. “But also just the excuse to come back and see my family. I’m staying with my parents at their guest house. I’ll be out here for three months, hanging out with my family that I otherwise wouldn’t see for probably several years. For me, that was a big boon to the cause of this project as well.”
Sibley said he is usually immersed in creating documentaries but likes to divert to working on one independent feature film a year. “One scrappy feature is what I like to call them,” he said — films with budgets under $5 million. “I feel like these projects are what keep me juiced up, like psychic income. Sometimes just peace of mind is psychic income — not sitting in traffic on I-35 [in Austin].”
The filmmaker said he’s still amazed he was more than 7,000 miles away when he got the offer to produce Marfa Lights. “So, it just takes moving across the world to then book a big film in your hometown,” he said. “I got in from New Zealand and landed in El Paso, and I was like, what a different vibe. It was a bit of a culture shock returning. But once I get out here, I notice that I start getting into ‘relax.’ I even talk a little slower than when I’m in the city. It’s funny how that adjustment happens.”
The film producers put out a casting call in the area for speaking and non-speaking roles. “Part of doing this project was that I told the producers I wouldn’t take it unless we try to cast and crew up some local folks,” Sibley said. “I want to be supporting the region. We’re going to have a team of 50 to 60 people here buying things, eating here, all of that. But we really want to feature locals. We have some of the usual suspects we’ve already gone on to, but there’s other people that might be interesting that we don’t know about.”
Vickey Boone Casting is looking for locals to fill a wide variety of roles (speaking roles paid), and all ages and genders are welcome to apply. See www.facebook.com/vickyboonecast for more details and contact information.