Pop-Culturalist.com

George Loomis is leaving his mark on the world as an actor, director, producer, and writer. His latest project, Unthinkable, finds all the different facets of his talent on full display. Pop Culturalist caught up with George to learn more about his career, Unthinkable, his journey with the film, and how it will keep you guessing until the very end.

Career

PC: How did you discover your passion for the arts?
George: I was actually a soap opera child actor. The funny story is my parents are really uninterested in entertainment. They went to Princeton and Yale. They’ve liked a couple of films that they’ve seen. The last one that they really liked was The Vast of Night. They just don’t care about entertainment. They had a friend in Manhattan who was an ABC producer. Her name was Barbara Duggan. She knew her main characters on her soap opera were having a baby. She didn’t want to deal with stage parents, so she begged my parents to give them their baby. [laughs]

The characters on the soap opera gave birth to a very large baby, and I did it for three years. I was in the union ever since I was really little. That’s what paid for me to go to NYU Film School. I actually entered acting and film from a really skewed perspective of “Oh, this makes me a lot of money. This paid for me to go to college. Better go back to it and do some more commercials or do whatever.” I was overly confident because everybody knows that it’s really not like that. Overall, it’s not a reliable way to make a lot of cash.

But I saw it that way because it paid for me to go to a really great school. Then life chipped away, but I was always acting. I grew up in Russia and was going to school in Moscow when I was ten to fourteen. But I was always acting in school plays and then going home and writing screenplays. I always wanted to write screenplays. I was always throwing them at my parents’ successful friends and producers.

David O. Russell visited my high school film class. I literally solicited him, and I think I was only seventeen when I did that. I’ve always been like this. I sometimes wonder if I hadn’t been on that soap opera as a kid, if I would have still been like this. I think I probably would’ve been, to be honest. [laughs] It’s just how my brain works. I have the brain of an actor and screenwriter. I’m always constructing stories.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your career?
George: David Fincher has probably been the most influential for me. His work really lights my spirits up. I really like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network, and Gone Girl. I was really lucky to have Missi Pyle from Gone Girl in my film. If I’m having a bad day or feeling low, I can pretty much go to some David Fincher film and it lights me up again.

Sam Raimi does the same thing for me. I could watch Drag Me to Hell, any of his Spider-Man movies. I really liked Crawl. I know he produced that. So I would have to say David Fincher and Sam Raimi. They are reliable directors who really get me. You know those artists who really make you feel understood. I feel embraced by their work.

In terms of family members, I really love my family on the East Coast. I’ve got a lot of cousins there. I have like twelve and I’m really inspired by their lives there. I’m alone on the West Coast, so it’s always nice to talk to somebody on the East Coast. It makes me feel a little better being three hours behind.

Then places like Moscow. Any film that I watch with Moscow in it or Russia immediately inspires me because I have a lot of memories there that I can’t really talk about with anybody because I don’t know anybody else who grew up there.

Unthinkable

PC: Tell us about Unthinkable and the inspiration behind the story.
George: I was working with an actor named Mark Mathabane to make his book Kaffir Boy into a film. We were getting really close. I was meeting with some A-list producers and their production companies. Kaffir Boy is a book that’s taught in school curriculums all over the country. It’s such a great book about this young boy who escaped apartheid by learning how to play tennis. He gets a tennis scholarship to Princeton and escapes South Africa and escapes apartheid by developing a talent in tennis. I wanted to make it into a film so badly. I still do. It was so tough and I was broke buying copies of this book with every cent that I had. I was going to Soho House and meeting with great people—really famous people who produce films.

I was like, “You know what? If I buy one more book, someone’s going to come on board and we’re going to have a budget here.” But making a film like that is difficult, even though the content is famous. I had some investors who really wanted to work with me based on some viral YouTube videos I had. But it wasn’t happening. I was starting to wonder if I wanted to be a doctor or something.

I was like, “If it’s not going to happen with this award-winning book, I don’t understand how I’m going to be some sort of film producer.” This book has been on Oprah several times—not just one show but a reunion show and a book club show. I was making a decent living with acting at the time, but it wasn’t fulfilling.

So I was really starting to wonder if I should have just been a doctor. I was like, “You know what? I could still go to medical school.” I think that’s why I ended up writing this medical thriller because of my real-life doubts. I wanted to make a huge impact in the world, so I thought I should be a doctor. I knew it was going to be a SAG microbudget film. I’m always flattered that people don’t realize that because it does look more expensive. It was a really, really low budget.

I knew that I had to set it in only a couple of locations because we wouldn’t be able to afford all the moves. I was already in a medical place in my mind, and setting it in the hospital was easy. The genre is popular and it sells. It really started from there.

I work out really early in the morning. There are a lot of doctors and RNs in one of the lifting classes that I do. They have to wake up so early. I asked them for books to read and I started reading books on transplants. I found out from my friends at Cedars-Sinai that there weren’t many transplant films that were respected and portrayed how much these transplant patients need support systems.

A lot of people don’t really know that you can’t just get a transplant. You have to be selected by a selection committee. It’s like getting into college. You have to prove that you have all of these ingredients. They don’t have organs for everybody, so you have to show why you’re going to be the best chance for this organ. You have a family behind you and hopefully that is there for you, actively there for you, and a really good attitude. I thought, “What if somebody really powerful had none of these things and was falling through the cracks?” I created this character in Unthinkable played by Christopher Cousins from Breaking Bad.

Christopher plays a former ambassador whose name is also Chris. He survived an embassy attack in Damascus and then a year later needs a transplant. His family distanced themselves from him because his wife was raped in the embassy attack. Every time she sees him, she just sees pain. So he doesn’t have any family support. He has a horrible attitude. He actually stops talking. He has decided to not even talk at all to anybody. So I thought that would be a really interesting place to start.

I really like to start in a real place. It really came from the books that my friends at Cedars-Sinai recommended. Then it’s a thriller with a twist ending. Hopefully, people have fun watching it. That’s definitely the point, is to really pack it with entertainment value. It does have a suspense to it that I really like, and there’s a twist ending, an M. Night Shyamalan twist that no one sees coming. I’m feeling pretty good that no one’s called it yet.

I knew that I had to make a suspense film because I saw how hard it was to make even award-winning material. I tried to make a fun suspenseful thriller with the money that I had, and I’m proud of it. There’s some really great character work, and Christopher is phenomenal. Missi Pyle’s performance is incredible. And Vivica A. Fox, her energy is always great. She has this presence. I was really lucky that I had a great cast. Natalija Nogulich also really delivers. Even though it’s a humble, humble beginning with a lower budget, I’m grateful that I had the people that I did.

PC: You cowrote, directed, produced, and starred in the film. How challenging was it for you to wear all of those different hats?
George: It was really difficult. I’m not sure I would recommend what I did, to be really honest. It was extremely challenging. Actually, I had to turn down offers on the film for a long time because they kept saying, “Get a bigger distributor. Keep doing film festivals. This is your first feature as a writer and director, so win as many awards as you can.” That’s what I was told. I didn’t want to necessarily keep flying to New Mexico, Montana, Kansas.

I love film festivals, but to do them for so long was not what I had in mind. But one of the first offers came from this company. I’m not going to say who they are because it would make it sound like I turned them down, which I guess technically I did. But it’s so much more complex than that. It’s not really like that when you get offers. It’s very complex. But I really appreciated getting an offer from this company because it’s a company that I’ve admired for a long time. They wrote me a letter and said, “This reminds me of Michael Douglas’ movie Coma.” They told me how great it was that I pulled off being in front of and behind the camera on my first outing. I was like, “Wow.” I really needed somebody to say that because I don’t recommend it.

I really want to focus more. It was so much work. It’s still a lot of work. When we finish this interview, I have to do more producing work. I really wouldn’t recommend it. I know that sounds weird. But what I would recommend is hiring one experienced producer and making sure that you have money for that so you can really focus on the story. I would do it all over again the way I did it because I think that I have a titanium core to me now that it is really hard to shake me after everything that I had thrown on my plate.

But I would say do what I did if that’s what you want to do and you’re inspired. But leave a line item for one experienced producer who’s done festivals before, who’s done distribution before, who has that knowledge. I’m not putting down anybody that I worked with, but we’re all pretty new to the producing side of things. If you want to do it this way, hire one experienced producer. You might not think you can afford it, but I think it’ll save you money in the long run. To answer your question, it’s an eleven out of ten in terms of how challenging it is.

PC: Like you were saying earlier, you’ve brought this film to a bunch of different film festivals and it’s been really well received. What do you think is resonating most with audiences? What do you hope audiences take away?
George: Thank you for that. I wanted to make a film with entertainment value, so I love to hear that people are having fun watching it. It’s a thriller. I did try to jam world issues. I really wanted to tell a story with the fabric of international affairs and world news. There was a lot going on in Syria at the time when I wrote this movie four and a half years ago. If you remember, there was so much going on in Syria. I couldn’t escape it. It was on my mind all the time. I would love it if people had a fun time watching it and were really blown away by the ending. That’s what I like hearing the most. I really didn’t have a lot of money.

I’ve gotten some good feedback, which is nice, but at the end of the day, it’s a fun thriller that people are going to watch at night and I hope they have a good time. It would be nice if it made people read more about what’s going on internationally.

I understand it might look a little more expensive than it was. You hear people like Jake Gyllenhaal talk about his movie Nightcrawler. He kept saying that they were broke and had very little money. They had an eight-and-a-half-million-dollar budget. So really they had a ton of money.

I had less than half a million dollars. We really had no money. If I can have people have a fun time watching it, everything else is just extra gratitude for me. I’m hoping people have fun and that I’ve already learned so much to do a better job on my next film. When people tell me that the film had a lot of entertainment value, that’s the highest compliment for me on this one because you’ve got to start somewhere.

To keep up with George, follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Watch Unthinkable today.