‘Long December’ Director Talks Film, Local Music and Chasing the Dream

When you hear that a new movie is a musical, what comes to mind? Members of the Sharks and Jets aggressively snapping at one another? The Von Trapps frolicking in a meadow while lip syncing? 

Thomas Torrey’s new movie Long December is a far cry from either. It’s certainly a film that revolves around music, however, so is it a musical? 

Though we don’t have the data to confirm, it’s safe to say that a majority of the scripted film’s 80-minute runtime features music being played live on screen, none of it prerecorded or lip synced. Characters may break into song together as a family pastime at a holiday gathering, but not as a mode of conversation. 

We turned to Torrey, who wrote and directed the film, for the answer. Does he consider Long December a musical? 

“Yeah, absolutely I would. I don’t shy away from the musical genre labeling,” Torrey told us. “Sometimes, depending on the audience, I’ll even say, ‘Hey, it’s a Christmas musical,’ just because that gets an eyebrow raise and a laugh. And I don’t mind people’s preconceptions of what a Christmas musical might imply. Hopefully, we subvert that.”  

Long December tells the tale of Gabe Lovell, an up-and-coming musician stuck between the responsibilities placed upon him as a new father in need of money and his ongoing pursuit of stardom, plugging along for next to nothing on the DIY scene. 

Inspired by John Carney’s 2007 Irish Oscar-winning romantic musical Once, Torrey’s new project has already drawn comparisons not only to that source of inspiration but also the famed musical A Star Is Born. 

If we had to give it a label, we’d call it an Americana musical in the neorealist style (mention of Christmas optional).   

Filmed on location in the Charlotte area at venues including Connolly’s on 5th and Booth Playhouse, the movie stars a mix of veteran actors and bona fide musicians who had never acted on screen before filming started. 

Long December centers one such musician; Stephen Williams playing Gabe, the singer-songwriter struggling to provide for his family, supplementing his wife’s Etsy income with gigs playing Christmas covers for uninterested mall patrons. 

Williams is known in the Charlotte music scene as vocalist and guitarist with local Americana four-piece Jude Moses. He stars alongside real-life brother-in-law and platinum-selling singer-songwriter John Mark McMillan, who plays Gabe’s famous cousin and sometime band leader. 

Torrey, who’s known McMillan since they became high school buddies in 2000 and met Williams through that friendship, wrote the two roles for the non-actors that ended up filling them, but it wasn’t always a given that they would take the gig. As Torrey described at a recent screening of the film in the upstairs room at Connolly’s, where Gabe works in the movie, “I wrote the movie for them, and if they didn’t want to be in the movie, there wasn’t a movie.”  

Both musicians were hesitant to join the cast, preferring to stay behind the microphone rather than jump in front of the camera, but they began to warm up to the idea in a sort of “I’ll do it if you do it” type of way. When they got together for a screen test, however, the vision became apparent to the two reluctant stars of the film. 

“We filmed some scenes of them just reading from the script, and they realized these characters were very close to themselves, at least in terms of life experiences,” Torrey recalled. “They realized, ‘Oh, I’ve said these words before. I’ve had these conversations. I know this world … I just have to say the words.’ And that day confirmed for all of us, ‘Alright, we can do this.’” 

Ambition, art and knowing what’s important

As much as Williams fit perfectly into the role of Gabe, with Torrey even writing his real-life day job of laying tile into the part, the character was actually autobiographical for the writer-director. 

“He’s not Gabe,” Torrey said of Williams. “He’s not as ambitious as Gabe, who’s very much a proxy for myself and my own ambitions. He’s very content being a local market musician who played for his brother-in-law and also laid tile.” 

In fact, Gabe’s grappling with the pursuits of fame, happiness and stability — sometimes on parallel paths, other times perpendicular to one another — was based on Torrey’s experience with his previous film project. 

Having moved to Charlotte in 2008 after earning a film degree from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, Torrey has worked in the local film industry since, making a living doing corporate, nonprofit and commercial work, “flexing those muscles and building the skill set of making film and video content.” 

In 2015, he launched indie production company Bad Theology with longtime friend Justin Moretto and released his first feature, a micro-budget thriller called Fare, which premiered at the 2016 Newport Beach Film Festival and was released in 2017 by Random Media and The Orchard. Written and directed by Torrey, the flick was called “stunning” by the LA Times.

In summer 2018, Bad Theology partnered with Relic Pictures to produce the sci-fi thriller Minor Premise, which premiered in 2020 at Fantasia and Sitges. Directed by Relic founder Eric Schultz and written by Torrey, Moretto and Schultz, Minor Premise was called “one of the best sci-fi films in the last few years” by Forbes. 

Then in 2020, Torrey was all set to produce and direct his biggest film yet, a high-profile Southern thriller that had garnered some pre-production buzz. He expected it could be his big break. Then COVID-19 clamped down on the country and the film was delayed, only to be completely scrapped later in the summer. 

“So when it fell apart, I had an identity crisis and was just struggling with, ‘When is it going to happen for me?’” Torrey explained. 

As rough an experience as that was, it served as the inspiration for Long December. Torrey had wanted to make a movie with his many musician friends, and the scrapped movie served as inspiration for a plot. 

“I wrote it quickly and, of course, infused it with all the creative themes that I was dealing with of an artist wondering if his break is around the corner,” he said. “I wanted to make it a music film and shoot it here in Charlotte where I live and where my friends live, and use my friends as cast and crew and just make a very community homegrown film. 

“So once I committed to doing it, it came together real fast,” he continued. “The money came together, the cast and crew came together, and we filmed it during Christmas of 2021.” 

A couple of days after the Dec. 1 screening at Connolly’s, we caught up with Torrey to talk about the filming process and his experience in Charlotte’s film and music scenes. 

Queen City Nerve: After your sci-fi projects, what made you want to make a film about the music scene? 

Thomas Torrey: I’ve known John Mark McMillan for 25 years, and our circle of friends had a lot of incredible musicians and it was just a big part of our culture and identity — film, music, all of that, all of the arts. I played with John Mark a handful of times in various capacities. I never really tried to pursue it on my own, but I loved writing songs. I played the drums, I played guitar and grew up having a band with my brother in high school. So I was always very much a music lover and a side-hustle musician. 

But over the years, as I’ve really grown as a filmmaker and watched friends like John Mark actually become successful recording artists. I mean, John Mark’s by far the most successful recording artist I know. He’s a platinum-selling songwriter; he’s gotten quite large. And there’s other friends of mine who I’ve seen have similar success. And so keeping friends with these guys, it was always a dream of like, “Man, I would love to feature them in a film somehow.” I’ve used his music in the past on soundtracks and it was always just a hope to make a film about music. 

I was just selfishly like, I want to play in the music world for a little bit. And I want to showcase people like John Mark, Stephen and then even the peripheral artists like Drake Margolnik, Sarah DeShields, Ethan Nathaniel, these other folks who show up in these small performances. They’re all people who live here, people I’ve known over the years, and I really feel a great sense of pride to show them off to the larger world. 

You’ve cut your teeth in the film scene here and had been working already in North Carolina when the tax incentives were allowed to sunset in 2014. What has your experience been like since then, just in terms of the strength of the scene for people who don’t move to Atlanta or whatever they need to do, but the folks who have stayed here? 

Gosh, it feels like in some ways it’s been hard to separate what’s going on in Charlotte with what’s going on in the industry in general. I mean, we’re talking here in the end of 2024 in probably the bleakest year in independent film ever. And that’s from a New York and LA perspective and my partners there and what’s going on there, especially trying to sell Long December and how difficult that was, trying to raise money for the next one. So that certainly has trickled down to Charlotte and has made it challenging. 

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I was always a producer of content as opposed to a day player. I’m hiring the crews, and the impact has been strongest on them, my friends, many of them moved to Atlanta years ago when all the work went there. But a lot of them have started to come back now. I actually live in Fort Mill now on the South Carolina side of the city. So I’m a South Carolina resident here in the suburbs of Charlotte, and there’s a lot of us in upstate South Carolina trying to change things with South Carolina, which has been a hard place to make independent films. 

There is a certain parallel there because I’ve been covering music in this city for many years and one constant topic of conversation revolves around whether artists feel like they need to leave Charlotte to become bigger, and that’s a parallel with the film scene here and even the plot of the movie. 

So that particular idea is something I used to think about all the time. And I was quite self-conscious of the fact that I lived in Charlotte while working towards being a filmmaker. And I lived in New York, and so I would go back to New York or I would go to LA and I was always wondering, “Should I be living in these other places?” And I’ll never forget, when I made my first film, Fare, we shot it here in Charlotte but I did the sound mix and color grade out in LA. So I was out there, and I’d been out there plenty this particular trip, I just remember being at some party with a lot of other young filmmakers — because in LA, everyone’s an aspiring filmmaker — and I was the coolest guy in the room because I had actually made a film.

I realized, “Oh, it’s not that the city is filled with filmmakers. It’s full of people trying to make it, and it’s just as hard to make it here as it is back home.” I was making something just because I was able to scrape together a film and get something done. 

And that was very eye-opening because I realized you either get something done, you either have that in your DNA, you’re either a get-shit-done person or you’re not. And if you are, it doesn’t really matter where you live. I mean, John Mark is the most successful musician that I know, partly because he’s talented, but the guy hustles and is smarter than 90% of other musicians. I just watched him build this music career because he just gets shit done and he hustled.

And that was really eye-opening for me as a young artist and gave me a lot of peace of just like, you know what, I’m not going to lie, maybe things could have gone a little easier for me in some areas if I lived closer to the action. But certainly, post-COVID I mean, everybody I know in LA has moved away because it’s no longer the central hub that it used to be, and COVID really decentralized everything. So we’re definitely in an era where location is less important than it ever has been. 

Pivoting to your shooting style, I noticed you implemented some interesting tactics with Stephen’s monologues in the form of self-recorded cellphone videos interspersed throughout the film, which feels so natural now in the social media age but was certainly a choice. Where did that idea come from?

This is a really interesting answer because the original script, we certainly incorporated the modern age of being a musician and an artist and to what degree you have to bow to the algorithm and try to put content out there for social media. That was in the script, and we filmed that, but the only time you saw an iPhone video was one scene in the middle of the film where he’s trying to play, and he’s like, “Hey, everybody, This is Gabe here,” and then he gives up. He’s like, “That’s stupid.” That’s the only one we filmed. That’s the only one that was scripted. Everything else was just there in the background as an idea. 

After I edited the first draft of the film, there was a lot wrong with it because no first draft is good, but it was very clear it was taking too long for us to really latch on to this lead character’s internal struggle and we needed to get a handle on that sooner. So we realized we had to create an internal monologue. And because we had already established social media as a conceit, it occurred to us that, hey, we could film him talking to his phone as a device for him to have this internal monologue where he can express the themes and the things he’s going through. And it will be very germane to the film itself because you won’t quite know who he’s talking to. Is this social media? Is this YouTube? And the mystery of it was very much by design. 

What was the experience like shooting at Booth Playhouse?

We had one day at Booth. And so it was the one scene in the middle of the film where [John Mark McMillan’s character] Darren gives the floor to Gabe and Gabe performs his song … In order to do it, I was like, “We need to rent a venue and stage a concert so I have full control and I can get close-ups and retakes and all of those things.” So the Booth Playhouse was surprisingly affordable, and they were very accommodating and hospitable. And we rented it. We picked a day … It was our final day of shooting, but it was separate from everything else. 

We rented the Playhouse. We got John Mark’s band in there. We sent an email to John Mark’s mailing list of fans and said, “Hey, if anyone wants to be in a movie and watch John Mark and the band perform for free…” and they basically RSVPed. We could seat 400 in the Booth; we got like 80 people who came and we just kept moving them around the room to make it look full. And we just played the same two songs over and over for 10 hours and filmed it with all of our angles. But it was a one-camera shoot. I mean, all those angles you’re seeing in that scene, those are take after take after take where we’re moving the camera around. 

And the music was live? No lip syncing? 

Yeah, and that goes for the whole movie. All of the performances were captured live. And that’s its own story because we chose to do that for both economic and creative purposes. Creatively, because I wanted the feeling of authenticity that only a live performance can bring. Lip syncing is just so obviously fake almost every time you see it. But also we were writing new songs, we were 

repurposing old ones, and if we were going to lip sync, we were going to have to prerecord all the songs anyway. And so I was like, “Let’s just record them live on the day, and even if they sound live and we’re getting mic bleed from all the mics, that’s fine because we want it to sound live.” 

And Kevin Dailey was my composer and music producer and co-writer, and he really shepherded the whole music production. And Jacob Early, our sound engineer, we had our production sound team who obviously recorded the dialogue, but then when we were recording a song they would step aside and our live music guys would step in and hide mics in the rooms at Connolly’s or, at the Booth, those microphones are actually real. They’re on camera. They’re actually serving a normal purpose of capturing the audio.

But then we had all the audio captured. We, of course, had to edit that music just like you would a live album, and it had to be in line with the edit of the film, and then we had to mix and master it separately. So it was a very unique process that we were learning as we went. And hopefully, we pulled it off, and hopefully, the authenticity comes through. 

How did you decide on Connolly’s for the pub scenes?  

I wanted this character to be a bartender and I just have an affinity for Irish pubs. So I just wanted him to be an Irish pub bartender. And then there was a handful within the Charlotte area and Fort Mill that I was looking at and scouting. I had known about Connolly’s. I don’t think I’d filmed in there before, but I certainly was familiar with it, and I just was reminded of their upstairs bar. And I was like, gosh, this is so unique, and it’s going to be almost impossible to beat this because any other pub I’m either filming during business hours, which is a nightmare, or I’m asking them to close or trying to film during off hours and it’s a whole thing. 

But for Connolly’s, all that went out the window because I could just reserve their room that already looks incredible. It’s just so fully dressed. I didn’t know what it was going to cost. I was just so blown away by Amanda [Wood], their manager at how receptive they were, how hospitable, and she treated it just like a normal party. Basically, they don’t charge us a reservation fee. They’re making money off of beer sales. And it helped us out incredibly by doing that because we were a small film. We didn’t have a lot of money. 

They gave me two full days and we were there 10-plus hours for two days. And we spent plenty on drinks, plenty on food, we patronized the bar in other ways to make it worth their while … It was a very cost-effective solution for us and just an incredible visual one. 

What’s been special is the friendship that has grown from that relationship. It started out, we were strangers. But we were good guests for them. They were incredible hosts. They were there at our cast-and-crew screening back in 2022 and Amanda had a tear in her eyes. She’s like, “I feel like I’m watching one of my kids!” They were just so proud of how their bar was portrayed.

So it’s really grown into a lovely friendship, and that’s not always the case. I mean, half the time you end up breaking something or the host is like, “Why did I ever rent my place to a film crew?” Because it’s the most invasive thing in the world. But this was just a really special partnership and I’m grateful to them. 

And the last music venue I wanted to ask about, you at least shot an exterior of the Evening Muse when the characters were supposedly in Nashville, but the interior after they walk in doesn’t appear to be shot in Evening Muse. 

We didn’t. So that interior bar is actually in Rock Hill. It’s called The Hideaway, and it’s incredible. It’s a dive bar. It’s actually an LGBTQ bar in Rock Hill. I’ve filmed there myself two or three times. It’s the best spot because it’s only open three nights a week and there’s no windows so you can film day or night. It’s just the best location because most of the week it’s empty, so you just give them 500 bucks and they’re happy to let you film in there. And you can be filming at 10 in the morning and it doesn’t matter what time it is outside. 

So when I needed a dive bar for this Nashville dive bar, I actually was considering Evening Muse. I talked to the owner there, and they were one of several bars. Petra’s was another. We scouted a few for that scene and ended up choosing The Hideaway, partly for visual and partly just logistics. It’s a large space and we could really move around. It worked the best with our schedule and it ended up really working for us. But when we did a pickup day for all of our exteriors, I wanted something that looked like a South or East Nashville sub-neighborhood. We grabbed that one in NoDa. There’s a couple of NoDa shots, actually, like the recording studio exterior is just up the road in an apartment building. So we were just stealing these exteriors around town. 

Visit the Long December website to learn about how you can stream the film. The soundtrack is available on Spotify or anywhere that you stream music. A virtual watch party and live cast chat is scheduled for Dec. 15 at 9 p.m.