AMERICANO
Director’s Statement
By director Kevin Noland

AMERICANO is a cross-cultural love story about Chris McKinley (Joshua Jackson), a recent college graduate whose backpacking experience through Europe with friends Ryan Green (Timm Sharp) and Michelle Romaine (Ruthanna Hopper) culminates at the infamous San Fermin festival in Pamplona, Spain.  With only a few days left before he is to return home he meets the quintessential Spanish beauty (Leonor Varela) and an enigmatic ex-patriot club owner Riccardo Wapato (Dennis Hopper), all of whom challenge him to rethink his life. As the minutes and seconds until his departure tick away, Chris struggles with an age-old question: Should he follow the beaten path or risk it all on the road less traveled. 

What inspired the story? That enchanting feeling of waking up in a foreign country at dawn and looking out the window and realizing you are totally surrounded by adventure.  I wanted to capture the beauty of truly experiencing other cultures. I wanted to show why it’s important to step outside our system and look at it from a different perspective.  Life is a mysterious entity held together through a web of diversity. How boring the world would be if there was one terrain, one language, one way of doing things. Divided we stand.  

I knew in order to provoke people to travel I would have to put the audience inside a mysterious world most have never experienced. Therefore, the choice was made to take an enormous, albeit calculated risk.  In the process of bringing this story to the screen, the cast and crew literally risked their lives. They actually ran with the bulls to bring a level of reality to the picture that would allow the audience to experience the “awakening” of Chris McKinley. Joshua Jackson even slapped a charging bull as it was captured on camera. Furthermore, we enlisted a professional Spanish bullfighter to allow us to film him during an actual bullfight at the San Fermin festival. Shooting real time inside a packed arena had not been done until AMERICANO, which allowed me to provoke important discussions of cultural relativism. 

Inside the story of AMERICANO the characters ponder their passions and their beliefs as they absorb the experiences of the festival and the beauty of Spain.  This is the time of their lives when they are expected to shut the door of their youth and open a new door to the unknown of their adult lives. Their travels teach them to see rather than merely look. They have been programmed to think one way; yet travel opens their minds to consider the world. They realize what is important to them may be questionable to another culture.  In the end, a fresh perspective is gained thus allowing for a renewed balance in their lives.

The power of travel has become a movement of enlightenment. I hope AMERICANO inspires further exploration of one’s self through the world of other cultures.