The upcoming Carolina Caroline is all the more reason why you should keep a close eye on the work of American filmmaker Adam Carter Rehmeier. 

Premiering this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, Carolina Caroline is an outlaw road movie that chronicles the crime spree and romance of a young West Texas woman named Caroline (Samara Weaving) and an effortlessly cool conman known as Oliver (Kyle Gallner). The film may be set at the turn of the 21st century, but as a ‘70s-inspired throwback, Carolina Caroline continues Rehmeier’s streak of timeless Americana that he established with his Gallner-led cult hit Dinner in America (2020) and last year’s underseen gem, Snack Shack. (The latter is based on Rehmeier’s own Nebraska City childhood.)

Rehmeier’s three most recent films explore underrepresented corners of America, be it the Midwest, or the South in Carolina’s case. They’re each united by coming-of-age themes including first love and first heartbreak, as well as varying degrees of anarchy, rebellion and mischief. Weaving’s Caroline may be in her mid-to-late twenties, but she’s actively prevented herself from leaving the nest, specifically her single father’s house. That is until Oliver and his grifting lifestyle become too tempting to resist.

“There’s just something about being an American filmmaker. So I see that [Americana] quality in my work, and I don’t want to shy away from it. I want to embrace it,” Rehmeier tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Carolina Caroline’s September 5 world premiere at TIFF. “I am inspired by David Lynch and the Coen brothers’ bodies of work and their takes on America. I want to work in that space, and there’s merit in working with what you know.”

Rehmeier is especially proud of what his Carolina Caroline team was able to accomplish on a three-and-a-half week schedule in Kentucky. 

“We’re an independent, low-budget film. We did 92 sets on a 25-day schedule. Just do the math, and if that doesn’t make your heart palpitate, you’re in trouble,” Rehemier shares. “I had so many line producers tell me this was impossible to do, but I was able to pull it off with this really amazing team.”

Rehmeier’s story is especially fascinating when you consider the manner in which he began his feature directorial career. His 2011 debut, The Bunny Game, is an avant-garde horror film that realistically portrays the abduction and torture of a sex worker (Rodleen Getsic’s Bunny) by a sadistic trucker. The controversial film literally pulled no punches, so much so that it was banned in the U.K. 

14 years later, Rehmeier now believes he’s made his most commercial film yet. “The performances that Kyle Gallner and Samara Weaving deliver are very much a part of a more mainstream type of film,” Rehmeier says. “Of my three recent films, I feel like Carolina Caroline is the most accessible for a larger [moviegoing] audience.”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Rehmeier also discusses his origin story in the camera department, as well as how he helped reshape screenwriter Tom Dean’s Carolina Caroline script.

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You’re about to premiere Carolina Caroline at TIFF. Is this the ideal launchpad for you and your entire team?

100 percent. With a film like this, you hope for a festival like TIFF. It was absolutely the goalpost. 

Relative to Dinner in America and Snack Shack, when did the script for Carolina Caroline first reach your inbox?

It was in between Dinner and Snack Shack. I was in prep for Snack Shack when I found out that I got Carolina Caroline. So the plan was to shoot it right after Snack Shack, but then the strikes happened.

You often wear a lot of hats on your films: writer, director, producer and editor. But you didn’t shoulder everything yourself on this one. What led to the rare delegation?

I’ve just built out an amazing team over these last three films. Francesca Palombo, my production designer, and my French-Canadian DP, Jean-Philippe Bernier, have such a deep love of Americana. So we plan everything out, shot for shot, in prep, but we allow ourselves to be surprised on the day.

We’re an independent, low-budget film, so there’s a lot of give and take that you have to overcome. We did 92 sets on a 25-day schedule. Just do the math, and if that doesn’t make your heart palpitate, you’re in trouble. I had so many line producers tell me this was impossible to do, but I was able to pull it off with this really amazing team.

Your editor was a college friend?

Yeah, Justin Krohn and I were college roommates, and I’ve known him for 30 years. He wasn’t a member of the team until Snack Shack, but he knows me and my taste really well. He emotionally mines the footage and has such great attention to detail. He was directly responsible for the country music needle drops in Carolina. 90 percent of those are Justin and his sensibilities. So he really went above and beyond, soundtrack-wise, and it’s sublime.

You mentioned the keyword of “Americana” moments ago. Of your three recent films, it’s been said that you’re trying to bring back a type of Americana movie that isn’t made that much anymore. Is there actually a strategy behind it all?

My interests are wide, and while I will branch out again, there’s just something about being an American filmmaker. So I see that [Americana] quality in my work, and I don’t want to shy away from it. I want to embrace it. I love films like [David Lynch’s] Blue Velvet that are about the underbelly of Middle America. So I am inspired by David Lynch and the Coen brothers’ bodies of work and their takes on America. I want to work in that space, and there’s merit in working with what you know.

Prior to the 2020s, you spent most of your career in the camera department, save for a couple experimental films you directed in the early 2010s. What do you make of your career arc?

It took a lot of persistence. That’s the number-one thing. My interests and tastes in what I want to do have grown and expanded. I’ve had a lot of long-term projects that haven’t fully come to fruition. They’ve been optioned, or they’re in the TV space and things like that. Design-wise, they are huge, so I’ve been very busy while also working as a camera operator. I’m outside of Hollywood now after living in L.A. for 16 or 17 years, but I’m still working in it. And a lot of what I’ve done was to provide for my family and stay afloat, whether it was working as an operator, a writer, a director or an editor. I’ve done all of those elements professionally.

Between your three most recent films in the 2020s and your two companion films from the early 2010s, each era feels like a completely different filmmaker. I actually wondered if you added the “Carter” to your professional name as a way to signify you’re now a completely different filmmaker. Does The Bunny Game (2011) side of your filmmaking personality still exist in you?

I don’t think I added Carter for any reason other than I thought the flow was better. My last name [Rehmeier: pronounced ray-myer] gets pretty butchered most of the time. But the era of using Carter does coincide with me actually scripting films, starting with [the unproduced] Save a Bullet For Me and Dinner in America. Prior to that, I was more interested in documentary and improvisational filmmaking, and I did not work with scripts like I do now. 

Regarding the Bunny Game side of my filmmaking personality, that film was a special, one-off collaboration with my friend Rodleen Getsic, and it was a fully improvised experience. There was no crew. I shot/cut/scored the film alone. Each project is really different, but there’s still a side of me that wants to run and gun — and create like you can when you don’t have 100 people around. It’s a totally different experience altogether. It’s much quieter and more intimate. This is quite true for documentary filmmaking too.

For how well-received Dinner in America and Snack Shack are, neither got the type of release that they deserved. 

Agreed.

To ask the obvious, do you hope Carolina Caroline lands something more substantial? 

Absolutely. The performances that Kyle Gallner and Samara Weaving deliver are very accessible, and they’re very much a part of a more mainstream type of film. Dinner is very spiky and buoyant. It’s a grindhouse-adjacent love story, so it plays well with the crowds at the New Beverly and Vidiots. Those are the people that champion it and love it. But of my three recent films, I feel like Carolina Caroline is the most accessible for a larger audience.

The pairing of Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner makes so much sense, both on screen and on paper. They’ve done plenty of studio work between the two of them, but they’ve also become these cult figures in the indie and genre spaces. You know that firsthand having worked with Kyle on Dinner in America. Assuming you went straight to him, how quickly did you arrive at Samara for Caroline?

I met with people for Caroline, and Sam was a part of those very early conversations. We went to Great White in L.A. to have breakfast, and she was amazing right out of the box. She really felt like Caroline. Sam ended up bringing so much nuance to her performance. She’s very physically funny. There’s not a ton of comedic beats in this, but she’s very adept at physical comedy, And then she’ll do emotional work that’s just stunning, heartbreaking and tragic. So she really has it all, talent-wise, and she and Kyle both have a really wide range.

I already knew what Kyle was capable of, and post-Dinner in America, we’ve had a hundred nights where we talked on the phone about the work we want to do. Kyle’s work ethic is fantastic. He’s always the most prepped on set, and I really have a lot of respect for his professionalism. Like I said earlier, when you have 92 sets on a 25-day schedule, you don’t have any room for error at all. In Dinner in America, he’s so heightened, splashy and over the top, but Oliver in Carolina is such a quiet cool. It reminds me of a Paul Newman or Steve McQueen-type performance. 

Oliver and Caroline meet by sheer happenstance at her small West Texas town’s filling station, and she spots him running a cash con that trades smaller bills for a larger one. I actually ran the numbers in my head a few times while watching. Anyway, is that a real confidence game?

You’re not the only one. I literally did that game for the crew. People would say, “I don’t quite understand it,” and that’s where you want them. It was very quiet in the scene we introduced it, but in reality, if you were going to run that game, you’d be doing it during a noisy, busy time with a line of people behind you. You want a clerk to not really pay attention and just be like, “Here, take it.” You want to catch somebody off guard. So this does happen and people do get scammed. When we were prepping this, I was like, “Fuck, should I go run it a couple times at a store and see if I can pull it off?” I kind of feel like I could, and while I wanted to do it, I haven’t actually done it.

The cons that Oliver teaches Caroline escalate until they pursue all-out bank robbery. What outlaw road movies did you and your crew use as a frame of reference?

In Tom Dean’s original draft, Oliver drove a Mercedes and wore fancy suits, but I wanted it to feel more lived-in than that. So Tom and I worked on it after the fact and modified it into the country-western thing that it became. I really wanted to have the sensations of a ‘70s-style road movie, but have the backdrop be the early 2000s era. 

Tonally, the films that came to mind were Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Paris, Texas and Badlands. There’s even adjacent films like At Close Range. I love its take on first love and all of that. Then there’s Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and The Getaway. So the majority of my inspirations were ‘70s-style road movies, and I wanted to modify that design for an early 2000s time period.

Tom’s original draft was set in 1993, and for me, the cutoff was 9/11 and CCTV. After 9/11, everything started getting recorded everywhere. The idea of doing a contemporary bank-robbing movie, your Bonnie and Clyde are going to get caught. So, as far as believability, I wanted to keep it more in a time period where there wasn’t a camera on every corner. 

Oliver is from Orange County, so that early version of him tracks. And being from Orange County myself, I can confirm his claim that we are “made out of drywall.”

(Laughs.) That’s probably my favorite line that Tom had in the script. I remember just laughing at that fantastic line.

Kyra Sedgwick’s performance will likely garner some headlines, and she really serves as a turning point in the narrative. Did she knock everyone sideways on the day? 

Yeah, and I knew ahead of time that she was going to do just that. She was doing a play in New York, and we had been talking about the role leading up to the actual production. She then called me at one point, and I knew exactly why she was calling me. I was like, “You want to see if we can run the whole thing as one chunk, don’t you?” And she was like, “Yes.” 

For an actor, it’s so important to give them that full arc and not break it up over a couple of days. So I said, “I promise we will do all of your coverage in one day,” and we did all of her coverage in one day. It was important for her to come in like that and do the arc all at once because it’s such a powerful scene. It’s like its own little one-act play within the structure of the film.

As a director, that really appealed to me because it was outside of my wheelhouse. I hadn’t done that before, and I could visually see how to do it while I was reading. And knowing that everything was leading to this very emotionally charged midpoint of the movie, it was super exciting to treat it as its own contained beat. So Kyra delivered, and I’m just so thrilled for people to see where she goes with this performance. It’s dynamite.

“How do you know if we’re good people pretending to be bad, or bad ones pretending to be good?” Do you consider that the question of the film?

Morally, for Caroline, it is. That becomes a really good question for Caroline, and it’s the moral problem of the movie for her.

You thanked your Snack Shack leads, Gabriel LaBelle and Conor Sherry. Did they do some readings or watch an early cut for you? 

They did, yeah. Gabe is just so in love with this movie. He basically hangs out in the CAA screening room and watches everything. Carolina Caroline was his favorite movie that he saw last year. He came to a screening that we did at CAA in December, and then we went to Canter’s. Whenever I’m screening something, we always go to Canter’s after for sandwiches, pickles and whatnot. Conor, [Snack Shack female lead] Mika Abdalla, Gabe and Snack Shack producer Charles Cohen all watched it together and gave great feedback. I just adore Conor and Gabe, and I can’t wait to do more with both of them.

The title of the film is based on Jonathan Edwards’ song, “Carolina Caroline,” and given that the musician’s camp has all the leverage in this case, I would imagine that there’s a harder bargain than usual. Is that why you ultimately went with cover versions of the song? Could you not clear the original?

That is a thing that happens. I had my heart broken on Dinner in America and Snack Shack. We took a stab at some big songs that we ultimately didn’t get or the prices were astronomical. But it wasn’t an issue for this film. The choice to use [“Carolina Caroline”] covers was more of an emotional one. We tried the Jonathan Edwards version in one scene, but it wasn’t working, so we hired out and did covers. It was about finding the right emotion for the moment.

I hate to ask about the next thing before you’ve sent Carolina Caroline off to school, but is the next film already settled like Carolina was during Snack Shack?

I have quite a few different projects in different genres. I have a grindhouse-style film that I just shot, and then I have two true crime series that I’ve been working on for the last decade. I’m also attached to several bios; I’m really attracted to big, heightened personalities. I’m fielding other things that I didn’t write, as well as things that I’ve been commissioned to write. So I’m juggling a lot, and I’m looking to show my range as a filmmaker. 

I’m not interested in a specific genre. I love all movies and all genres, so I really want to do many different things. I’m attached to some serious dramas, and there’s also some quiet movies that I wanted to jump on just because they’re such a tone shift. They’re all so different from each other, and that’s exciting to me. I’m not going to just repeat myself. The next thing is going to be totally different, and so is the next thing after that.

Is the upcoming “grindhouse-style film” your way of reconnecting with the mode of your films from the 2010s?

It’s not a way for me to reconnect with that mode. It’s very scripted and precise in comparison to my early work. But it does incorporate my love of horror-grindhouse cinema of the ‘70s and ‘80s. In fact, I used the ARKOFF formula as inspiration for the draft.

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Carolina Caroline premieres Sept. 5 at the Toronto International Film Festival.