“Bringing Up Bobby,” an independent film directed by model and actress Famke Janssen, includes scenes at the Round Barn and Pops along Route 66 in Arcadia, Okla., and other Oklahoma City-area locations, reported The Oklahoman newspaper.
Janssen’s film will screen at 8 p.m. Saturday during the deadCenter Film Festival at am Noble Theatre at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in Oklahoma City. Janssen, 47, has starred in several “X-Men” movies and a James Bond film, “Goldeneye.”
She told The Oklahoman about her directorial debut:
“To me, the scariest thing is to bring it home because you want to make sure that the people from Oklahoma like it,” she said. “And I was so taken by the place and I thought that certain things were so beautiful, and I loved putting Pop’s (on old Route 66) in there, which is so different-looking from any other building I’ve ever seen.” […]
Other locations used in the film include the postcard-famous Round Barn in Arcadia, Leadership Square in downtown Oklahoma City, a palatial private residence in Nichols Hills, and a couple of the metro area’s less elegant districts.
The screenplay by Janssen, based on a story by Janssen and Frates, centers on Olive (Milla Jovovich, “Resident Evil,” “The Three Musketeers”), a nomadic European con artist who settles in Oklahoma City with her 10-year-old American-born son Bobby (Spencer List), hoping to find a better life for him.
Janssen said she got the idea for her film when her boyfriend took her to Oklahoma to meet his family.
“I’d seen the Round Barn and I’d seen Pops and I’d seen all these places where I thought it would make it really interesting,” she said, “ … and there’s something about Oklahoma, where you still have a train coming right through town.
“ … And, being a foreigner, even though I’ve lived in the United States for about 20 years in New York, I thought it was a unique and different place, very American in a way.
“So that then became a topic of conversation: What if we set a movie in Oklahoma and make the protagonist European, like I am, because it was sort of through my eyes … What are the things that as a foreigner you either take for granted or you find interesting or funny or different,” she said. “And so that’s how the story kind of came about.”
“Bringing Up Bobby” was shot in less than 30 days in Oklahoma during the summer of 2010.
According to IMDB.com, the film first screened at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and has been shown at a variety of film festivals ever since.