Why I'm Making ODIE

ODIE started with a simple question: what does it actually take to get off the street?

Not in theory. Not in policy. In a single day. In this city.

I've been thinking about that question for a long time. The answer turns out to be: everything. Luck. Persistence. The kindness of strangers at the exact right moment. And the cruelty of systems that weren't designed for people like Odie Harper.

This is a film about grief as much as it's about homelessness. Odie lost his wife and son in a car accident he survived. That's where his story really starts. What we see over the course of one day is one man's attempt to climb back to something — not for anyone else, just for himself.

I want to make a film about the people most citizens simply do not choose to see. ODIE is rooted in Austin, but it's really about dignity, grief, survival, and the thin line between stability and disappearance.

I'm not interested in making a lecture. I'm making a film that lets an audience spend one day inside a man's life desperate to turn it around.

The script is locked. The cast is assembled — Dean Allen Stanfield leads a company of Austin performers who understand exactly what this story is asking of them. We have an editor whose credits include Oppenheimer, Dune: Part Two, and Licorice Pizza. We have locations across the city that will make Austin feel like the specific, complicated, beautiful, indifferent place it actually is.

We shoot May 18. I can't wait.

— Nick Barr, Writer/Director

Support ODIE through Fractured Atlas — contributions are tax-deductible: fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/odie