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When writer-director Bob Ahmed was scouting locations for his film, "Adam's Fire," he found himself lost in Lost Creek, West Virginia.
"He’s driving around, and he sees this farmhouse up on a hill, and he thought that would be the perfect location," Bob Ohmer, an actor and producer on the movie, told us. "So he walked up, knocked on the door, and Kevin, who lives there, answered, and Bob said, 'Hey, we want to shoot a movie here,' and that’s basically the way we found that location."
The film follows Adam and his father, Dan, after a tragic gun accident steals their mother and wife away. Chris Alvarez, who plays Dan, had never visited West Virginia before making this film. He told us, "I love driving through the back roads, not like the main roads when I am on a trip, and it was just so beautiful. I was like, 'Holy smoke, West Virginia’s got it going on!' And the people couldn’t have been more hospitable, more gracious. Just an all-around great time while we were here filming."
Adam is played by a young actor, Hudson Barry. Because one of the truisms of filmmaking is that you should never work with animals or kids, we asked Chris Alvarez what it was like working with Hudson. He shared, "I had never worked with a kid on a film up to this point. However, I am a dad, so what I try to do best is to make people around me feel comfortable."
But little of that was necessary for Hudson. "He’s such a like little rock star. I read for part of Dan's friends group. I did my audition for Tom and Bob, and then all of a sudden, a couple months later or something like that, Bob said, 'I want you to meet Hudson,' and we had a Zoom, and we played a scene together. And I just had a real connection with him. He’s such an easy kid to work with, but he’s an even more beautiful kid in terms of being a human being outside of what you see on camera."
As the two main characters, Adam and Dan, work through their grief, they meet Mariam (Zahra Jamal), a young Muslim girl Adam wants to be friends with. When Dan sees her hijab, he has a somewhat unkind knee-jerk reaction. We asked Chris about how he prepared for that. He shared, "I myself am a veteran, and we have several veterans on the film, Tom included, Jennifer (Marshall), and we had veterans working behind the line. Dan is a 20-year special operations guy, in the peak of the global war on terrorism, post 9/11, and so I tried to look at him through the lens of, 'Who is this man, what has he seen, what has he done?'"
The character has been away from his family, came home and experienced a significant tragedy. "There are these outside characters coming in that he doesn’t know how to deal with, or he doesn’t have the time for, and he thinks, 'I've got to deal with Adam.' You can see that with the dismissiveness a little bit there. But like all humans, once you start to get to know people, and there’s context, and you see everyone’s journey, regardless of where they come from. With military personnel, if you’re ever in a situation, you kind of let everything play out for a little bit and step back, so you can observe, make a decision that hopefully saves your teammate’s life, your life, or completes the mission. He didn’t do his pregnant pause, so to speak, in that situation. And I think once he did later on, you know, he came to his senses. He’s a good human being. He’s a good man at heart. He allowed it to unfold, and in doing so, something really beautiful came out of it."
"Adam's Fire" is now playing at AMC Morgantown 12.