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Q&A: Kristen Bush’s New Short Film Is a ‘Love Letter’ to Rural Kansas [1]
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Date: 2024-12-13
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Kiki Bush, who goes by Kristen Bush professionally, is a rural Kansas actor whose credits include American Parent (2023), Paterno (2018), Liberal Arts (2012), and guest-starring roles on TV shows like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, The Good Wife, and Suits.
Bush’s upcoming short film “The Game Camera” was co-written by her husband and fellow Kansan, Rolf Potts and filmed with a mostly female cast and crew on the couple’s central Kansas ranch, aiming to capture the under-represented beauty of the prairie.
“The Game Camera” is the debut project from Rural Women Films, an initiative created by Bush and Kansas-born director Emily Railsback that seeks to highlight stories from and about women living in rural landscapes.
Enjoy our conversation about returning home, rural Kansas beauty, and the continuing problems surrounding representation in the nation’s film industry.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Lane Wendell Fischer, The Daily Yonder: Could you tell me a little bit about yourself?
Kiki Bush: I’m from Sterling Kansas, a one stoplight town, where I was born and raised in the same house, across the street from the Sterling College Theater. As a little girl, we would go across the street, watch the plays, and I would become absolutely enamored with the performers. I just wanted to levitate on the stage and be with them. Eventually my parents were like, “okay, you’re going to be well-rounded, so in addition to biddy basketball you’re going to go out for a play.” I wanted to desperately, but I was so nervous. But, of course, they needed a bunch of kids for “Oliver.” I was 11 and I fell in love and I didn’t look back. Kristen Bush’s upcoming film, “The Game Camera,” is the debut project for Rural Women Films. (Photo by Jasmin Shah.)
I knew when I went to The University of Kansas (KU), I was going to major in theater. I went and got a master’s equivalent right after that and went to drama school in London for three years. I would come home to my small town and my mother would be like, “what’s with the accent? The posture’s great, but the accent’s a little ridiculous.”
At the time, there was no professional acting in Kansas, and I was ready to get out. That has to be said: I was ready to get out of my one stoplight town. Everybody knew you. Everybody knew what you were doing. Your parents always found out what you thought they didn’t know. And that was charming, but I was so done with it at the time. So I moved to Los Angeles, then New York, then back to LA, then back to New York, and then I moved to Berlin. I was in Berlin during the pandemic and realized that I needed to come home. I didn’t want to spend the pandemic in a 400-square-foot apartment, so I moved home.
We were very fortunate with our pandemic. We didn’t get sick. We made cookies, we watched Bosch, we went on walks. It was really one of the more special times and we were really, really lucky. But I also met my husband, which made it even luckier. He lives in Saline County and I moved up here to be with him. He’s a professional travel writer, so this is a marriage of not only two people, but of two artists. It really worked out well because when an actor marries a writer, you kind of put him to work.
DY: Speaking of work, I was able to see a sneak preview of “The Game Camera,” which I thought was so splendid. How did this project come together?
KB: One of the things we like to do in our relationship is just talk about ideas and a lot of times they’re about ideas for books or movies. He told me early on about the time that he first moved to this property — he’s a Wichita guy, so he’s an urban guy — they moved and he was wondering what animals were up here. So, he bought a game camera, strapped it to the hedgerow, and started to check the memory card every day.
In the mornings he would check it and he would be absolutely amused with the raccoons who were doing funny little dances, and the deer, and there was a bobcat once, and a feral cat. And then one morning he checked the memory card from the night before and there was a man’s legs that had been just passing next to the camera. We were about 15 miles away from town, way out in the country, and it was like midnight. Up to that point, we hadn’t been locking our doors at night, so we started locking our doors. So that was the idea for the story.
But we also live outside of Salina, which has one of three independent movie theaters in all of Kansas — it’s the most western one and the most rural one — and we’ve seen the Oscar shorts shown there. We also saw Kevin Willmott, Kansas’ best known filmmaker who won an Oscar for “BlacKkKlansman.” He screened a showing of “The 24th” in person. We were so inspired by him, and his story, and his love of Kansas. So that coupled with the Oscar shorts, plus the idea that we had for the film, we came home after one of those evenings and just wrote down the breakdown for “The Game Camera.” That was how the story came into being.
“I really wanted the visuals to be naturally beautiful with the grass and the sky and the clouds and the cottonwood trees and the sounds. That was of paramount importance,” Bush said of “The Game Camera.” (Photo by Shane Clark.)
DY: In my experience leaving my small Kansas hometown to attend college on the East Coast, I only started to fully appreciate all of the small parts of Kansas life after I was gone, like the wide-open horizon. I’m curious how your experience of leaving – and returning – to a rural space informed which parts of rural life you wanted to highlight in the film.
KB: I love that question and I also love the spirit in which it’s presented because we live in a lot of false binaries in this world. And I think one of them is the rural and the urban binary. I mean, I am such a product of both of them.
There is a sense of I’ve got to go out and see what the world is. There’s that real hunger. And I think that that is to be honored. Thinking about the “hero’s journey,” the hero isn’t still out on the road. The hero comes back and kind of synthesizes what she has learned from the big city as well as what she was born with in her small town.
I couldn’t have practiced my craft on a professional level in Sterling or even in Kansas. There are no regional theaters, they don’t have any Actors’ Equity houses here, so there’s no real professional theater, but there aren’t very many film and television productions that are Screen Actors Guild. So I chose to go to the coasts and I honed my craft there.
But I learned other things there, too. It’s funny that you mentioned the horizon. When I lived in New York, people wanted to get out of town for Labor Day weekends and holidays. I would be enthusiastic about it initially, so we’d be driving upstate and I kept waiting to get there, to get the feeling of the deep breath. And it never came because you’re constantly surrounded by trees. And don’t get me wrong, they’re beautiful, but there’s something about being able to see the sun go down on the horizon that just instantaneously lets me breathe more.
DY: Exactly – sunrises and sunsets were my bookends in Kansas. It was the start of the day and the end of the day. Like a mindful moment.
KB: Absolutely. And to be present, to let your mind filter out with all of the monkey brain stuff to really go, okay, here I am with the sunset. And in many ways “The Game Camera” is a bit of a love letter to rural Kansas. I really wanted the visuals to be naturally beautiful with the grass and the sky and the clouds and the cottonwood trees and the sounds. That was of paramount importance.
DY: I felt that, too, as a viewer. Were a lot of those shots filmed on your property?
KB: A lot of them, yes. We live on an old horse ranch and I have a mini horse, so we were thinking about how to incorporate all this into the film. We kind of worked backwards. In filmmaking, set locations or renting animals are expensive, so you have to work with what you’ve got. And being in a particularly pretty part of Kansas, working with what we had was easy. But I also have shout out to Emily Railsback and Michael N.J. Wright, our cinematographer, for the visuals. They’re the two geniuses in terms of visuals for this.
Many scenes in “The Game Camera” were filmed on Bush’s property, an old horse ranch. (Photo by Shane Clark.)
DY: Some of the other scenes in the short take place off the ranch. How did you find and select some of these other locations? I could imagine that some of these towns and folks aren’t used to someone coming up to them asking to shoot on their properties.
KB: Our director Emily is from Hillsboro, Kansas and her mother still lives there as well. Emily was able to talk to the hardware store owner and she visually loved the look of the hardware store. Her mother’s church was a place that hosted us for hair and makeup. The church ladies helped out by essentially providing craft services for the cast and crew. One of the police officers who helped block off the street for us to film often came up and chatted with us. It is such a different feel to film out here than it is to film in a big city where you feel inconvenienced and inconvenient. Out here people just find it exciting and cool and more often than not want to know how they can help. It’s a real joy.
DY: Broadening the scope to rural representation, why is it important to support filmmakers with small town backgrounds trying to tell rural stories?
KB: I think there’s a sense of local pride when you’ve got somebody from a rural place who knows it so well and loves it so much that they want to put it into a visual story. I don’t care where you are from, urban or rural. Imagine some outsider coming in and telling you that they’re going to tell your story in the way that they want to and then they pack up and leave and talk about how great it is, but then they never come back. There is a feeling of like, “but wait, don’t we get to have a say in how we’re depicted, not only depicted, but also how we’re then seen and how people then start to think about us?” I think that rural stories told by the people in them can also help to staunch the creative brain drain happening right now.
Had I known that I was going to move back when I was 18, I would’ve probably been very upset. But it’s amazing what can happen between 18 and 45. A lot has changed. There is something so deep about the love of this place that really inspired me, not only to stay, but to make films about it.
I think also with the advent of phones and a group of friends in a backyard. Nowadays kids can make stuff right here. They don’t have to go away in order to be creative and to tell their own stories. But in order to not only have a creative pride that comes from rural places, but also to show the coastal or the urban gatekeepers that we have stories that need to be listened to, you’ve got to start telling those stories in the places and by the people who live there. We need to be part of this conversation.
DY: Which brings us to Rural Women Films. What are your goals with this new initiative?
KB: In its simplest terms, Rural Women Films is essentially an unofficial film production company. It’s in its nascent days, but I’m looking forward to it helping us focus on telling women’s stories in rural places. At times being rural and being a woman, you’ve got two counts against you, especially in film.
Although right now it exists as an online platform with a website to help connect people in disparate rural places, two weeks ago we were in person showing our film at the independent movie theater in Salina. We had half a dozen actual Kansas filmmakers in one place from Oscar-winning Kevin Willmott, who we were so incredibly grateful to have there, to women filmmakers who are just out of school making things by themselves on a shoestring budget, and everybody in between.
And they were able to talk about things in person. It was quite inspiring to see this grassroots sort of filmmaking being done and then having an actual space to commune. One of the loveliest moments for me was to look over and see two of the filmmakers talking to each other. That just doesn’t happen very often in places like this.
“At times being rural and being a woman, you’ve got two counts against you, especially in film.” (Photo by Shane Clark.)
Looking at women in film, I think on the surface people look at Barbie and think that women in film must be blowing up right now, that we’re fine now. Sadly, that isn’t the case. One way of looking at this is a study from the San Diego State University’s Celluloid Ceiling Report by Dr. Martha Lowen. It is the most extensive report on women’s involvement in film. What she’s found, sadly, is that there is no improvement. In fact, from 2022 to 2023, we’ve actually receded.
The next time you’re watching a film or a TV series, you might realize that one out of three actors are women, only one out of three. Most of them are under the age of 30 or 35. And after 50, 60, 70, it’s like all women die according to Hollywood, they disappear or they’re silent. That’s just in front of the camera. Behind the camera, it’s even worse. Only one out of four people on the crew — producers, directors, cinematographers, grips, gaffers — are women. And that was in 2024.
So the filmmakers who were at my screening a couple of weeks ago, most of them were men. But an initiative like Rural Women Films is also a way to help educate and remind male filmmakers that they can do more to include women in their filmmaking. I’ve worked with some amazing men. I’m not looking to never work with men again. I just want to be a bit more equitable and to educate people.
One of the big motivations for me is to show just how dynamic the nature of rural places are, not only with “The Game Camera,” but whatever we end up doing with Rural Women Films. We’re not just one thing. We’re not just of one political persuasion. We’re not a monolith. And I think we’ve got a lot to offer. We often have an inferiority complex about going to the big city, but I think that a slower pace of life and a willingness to inconvenience yourself for someone else’s good is just the name of the game out here, and that matters. And I think that sort of ethos is something that I would love to have seep in through my work.
“The Game Camera” is currently not available for public screening while it is being considered for film festivals. Bush and Rural Women Films hope to screen the film in communities across the state of Kansas.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. Join my email list By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time. Processing… Success! You're on the list. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.
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