This is Ozarks at Large. Filmland continues through Sunday in Little Rock. This annual event showcases Arkansas' current connections to the film industry. Movies that touch the state in some way are included and discussed.
The documentary Mississippi River Styx is about something that literally touches the state — the Big Muddy. It will screen tomorrow afternoon at 3:30 at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts. The film follows a man and his dog traversing the Mississippi in an ill-equipped houseboat.
To find out more, we reached out to Andy McMillan, co-director and co-producer of Mississippi River Styx, to find out how he discovered this story.
McMillan: I bummed a cigarette off of Kelly Phillips at a dive bar a couple blocks off the Mississippi River in Memphis, Tennessee, one night, and I smoke a cigarette maybe once every 17 years. It was just one of those things. I was there shooting a commercial project with a producer, and the producer wanted to keep going to different bars. Next thing you know, it's 2 a.m. and there we are.
Kelly's there talking to people, telling them about his journey. He had printed out photocopies of all the newspaper stories about his trip, and he was handing them out. Something stuck with me. Back then I was shooting a lot of magazine work. My background was as a photojournalist before I got into film, and I knew I could get a magazine to send me out for a couple of days if I wanted to do a feature story on him.
So I got his info. But then my close friend Tim Grant, who I co-directed this movie with, and I had been looking for something to collaborate on for a while. Instead of pitching it to magazines, I gave him a call, and a couple weeks later, Tim, our cinematographer Ben Joyner, and I were on Kelly's boat floating down the Mississippi River.
Kellams: What you heard after bumming that cigarette was that here was a fella with his dog, going down one of the wildest rivers on this side of the planet in kind of a houseboat. And he's doing it with a terminal illness diagnosis.
McMillan: Right. So the thing that really drew me to the story — of course, so much of it is catnip for anyone interested in American literature. Tim and I, the first thing we bonded over was the short stories of Flannery O'Connor. Specifically, there's a story called The River. She was sort of our North Star on this film.
Looking at Kelly's story, there's going out on your own terms, those romantic ideas people are drawn to. There's the mythic qualities of the Mississippi River, the adventure element of it. But the thing that really hooked me was this idea that he was handing out photocopies of his story at the bar.
It seemed remarkable to me that someone would have that sense of agency about their own story at the end of their life. We don't usually get to tell the story of how we die. That's what drew me to it beyond all of the romantic, kind of top-of-the-news-hour elements.
Kellams: You're getting into this pretty quickly. There wasn't a long time to think about what you're doing. What was that like?
McMillan: I think if we had had more time to think about it, we wouldn't have made the movie. I grew up in North Carolina, and I'd never spent any time on the Mississippi before this. I had no idea how dangerous it was. No idea.
Our first day shooting, we were going to float down the river with him and then figure out how to get back to our car in West Helena, Arkansas, and realized pretty quickly that's not happening. With my background as a photojournalist, I felt confident being able to get in and out, finding them, tracking down the boat.
Tim, my co-director, also runs sound. I said, "You guys float on the boat with them. I'm going to figure out how we're going to get to you at the end of the first day." I had to drive 12 miles down private dirt roads and talk myself through three hunt club gates to find them. We had no idea what we were in for.
On one hand, it was a fun challenge to take on. Our cinematographer Ben is incredibly talented and successful. I've known him since he was in diapers; I grew up with his family. Tim has been a close friend for probably 15 years. It was fun to have a big adventure with your friends. But as the movie progressed and as we became more aware of how dangerous it was, it became more complicated figuring out logistically how to make the thing.
Kellams: Even people who have grown up closer to the Mississippi than North Carolina — probably not many of us have actually been on it. We've crossed it, we've been on the banks. You say it's dangerous? Is that the traffic? The eddies? The depth?
McMillan: It's all of it. The rock dikes can be dangerous because sometimes you can't see them depending on how high the river is. The currents can be dangerous. And the traffic — absolutely. The lower Mississippi is the biggest port in the world by tonnage. Those gigantic ships showing up from all over the world steer based on propulsion. If you're in the way, it's not like they can just last-minute steer around you. There are a lot of elements to deal with on the river.
Kellams: This doesn't go the way you think it's going to go. What was that like?
McMillan: Our first night shooting, we realized there's something more going on here. To me, what the film is really about is grief. It has all of the other elements — the adventure, the romance of going out on your own terms — but the through line is grief for all of our characters.
Kelly winds up floating through what's popularly known as Cancer Alley, the section of the Mississippi from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. His story strikes a nerve there because everyone has lost someone to cancer, and a lot of people have had direct experiences with it themselves.
When Kelly got to New Orleans, he'd become a celebrity and was getting recognized on the street. Watching the way people responded to him, and how his story was an invitation for them to project their own experiences with cancer, grief, politics, ideas about how a sick person should act — it was fascinating to watch.
I'm drawn to characters you can't quite put your finger on. The movie is animated by this idea of, is this guy telling the truth or not? What I hope people walk away with is something that feels more important than that.
Kellams: Andy McMillan is co-director and co-producer of the documentary Mississippi River Styx, screening Thursday afternoon at 3:30 at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock as part of Filmland 2025. A complete schedule for Filmland is found at arkansascinemasociety.org. The movie can be seen right now on United Airlines flights and soon will have a premiere on the free streaming service Documentary+. You can watch for that premiere date on social media — just look for @missriverstyx.
Our conversation took place yesterday.
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