Film 'Low and Behold' headed for mountains: Louisiana filmmaker's work picked for this year's Sundance Film Festival

Fact-based fiction and the crushing reality of the worst natural disaster in United States history collide in a Louisiana film that’s been selected for this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The annual event in Park City, Utah, is among the world’s most prestigious film festivals.

Low and Behold is the work of Lafayette filmmaker Zack Godshall and his New Orleans friend and collaborator, Barlow Jacobs. The two were looking for a project to do when a family friend suggested that Jacobs, then displaced by Hurricane Katrina, work in south Florida as an insurance claims adjuster.

The suggestion gave the actor-writer a great idea. Experience as a claims adjuster in hurricane-damaged Florida, he thought, would help him tell a story about hurricane-devastated southeastern Louisiana.

“I wanted to know exactly what a claim adjuster’s life was like on a day-to-day basis,” Jacobs said from New Orleans. “Zack and I also knew we wanted to improvise scenes with a lot of real people and their homes. I needed a very good knowledge of what a claims adjuster did, so I could hit all those beats in an unscripted scene.”

Beginning Sunday, Low and Behold will be shown at Sundance four times. Getting Low and Behold to Sundance was Godshall and Jacobs’ goal from the start.

“It’s the premier place to show independent films,” Godshall said from Lafayette. “There are other good festivals — Toronto, Tribeca — but Sundance is the spot to be.”

A month after Katrina, Godshall and Jacobs met in New Orleans. Jacobs was broke and homeless.

“Like everyone,” Jacobs said, “we were overwhelmed by everything we were seeing.”

Yet both of the young filmmakers knew they were in the right place at the right time to tell a compelling story.

Jacobs subsequently went to Florida and worked as a claims adjuster for three months. Upon returning to New Orleans, he and Godshall wrote their Low and Behold script and immediately moved into pre-production. He used his insurance adjuster earnings to finance much of the film.

Low and Behold was shot in May and June in New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish. Both filmmakers were keen about having real people in their film and local talent in front of and behind the camera.

“The people down there in St. Bernard were so responsive to what we were doing,” Godshall said. “We met several people who were really the hardest hit of anyone.”

Jacobs plays the film’s lead character, Turner Stull, a directionless young man hired by his opportunistic uncle to do insurance claims adjusting in the New Orleans area.

“Our main character,” Godshall said, “travels all over the place to measure damage on people’s homes. He hears a lot of stories. We use that structure to allow the voices of these people to be part of the movie.”

Scenes in Low and Behold are scripted, unscripted and nearly pure documentary. The post-Katrina setting isn’t just a backdrop, it’s a character.

“We believed that by combining fiction and documentary and shooting unscripted scenes and a lot of scenery, we could make a document of the time and place,” Godshall explained.

During the first days of shooting their low-budget project, the Low and Behold crew worked in the vicinity of Déjà Vu, a big-budget, special effects-filled Jerry Bruckheimer production also shot in the New Orleans area last spring.

“It was kind of funny,” Godshall mused. “We have a 10-person cast and crew and we’re driving around in a Nissan Altima. Then, across the river, we see Déjà Vu’s explosions and helicopters.”

The 27-year-old Godshall has an English degree from LSU and master’s degree in film production from UCLA. A screenwriting class at LSU with Rick Blackwood inspired him to get serious about filmmaking.

Jacobs, a 28-year-old native of Lookout Mountain, Tenn., moved to New Orleans after graduation from the University of Mississippi. The works of John Kennedy Toole and Tennessee Williams shaped his romantic vision of the city.

“I was writing and acting, but I didn’t have a big desire to move to L.A. or New York,” he said. “I really wanted to move to a place I wanted to live. New Orleans was that place.”

Jacobs is in a second film showing at Sundance this year, a project from North Carolina called Great World of Sound.
“It’s exciting and overwhelming at the same time,” he said.

As for Low and Behold, the actor-writer added, “Zack and I had a vision for the film we wanted to make. The exciting thing is that we surpassed our vision.”