How Producers Got Bang for Buck in Oregon on ‘Night Always Comes’
The Netflix crime thriller “Night Always Comes” was always going to be set in Portland, Ore., like the Willy Vlautin novel from which it was adapted. But it wasn’t necessarily going to shoot there.
“A lot of the early discussions are like, ‘Where’s the biggest bang for the buck?’ And Canada came up a lot,” admits the film’s executive producer Chris Stinson (“The Holdovers,” “Sound of Metal”). “In the northwest … they’re constantly contending with ‘let’s just go to Vancouver,’ and a lot of times they do go to Vancouver,” where they can take advantage of experienced crews, a favorable exchange rate and a healthy production incentive.
But Stinson says he was able to point to the 2018 drama “Leave No Trace,” a good-looking movie he made in Oregon on a very low budget, and “convince the powers-that-be that Portland would not only be the best place, but also the cheapest for a number of reasons.”
Those reasons don’t necessarily jump out when you glance at Oregon’s decent-but-not-great film and TV incentive. It offers cash rebates — not the more common transferable tax credit, the bulk of which must be sold to third parties for 85 cents to 95 cents on the dollar — of 25% on local goods and services and 20% on in-state payroll for projects with a minimum spend of $1 million. The latter can be stacked with the Greenlight Oregon Labor Rebate for an additional cash rebate of up to 6.2% of Oregon payroll.
The Beaver State has a long history of attracting iconic projects ranging from Buster Keaton’s “The General” (1926) and the best picture Oscar-winner “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) to the coming-of-age drama “Stand by Me” (1986). This past June, the adventure-comedy “The Goonies” (1985) celebrated its 40th anniversary with a weekend-long festival in the town of Astoria, where the old jail, which was used as a location in the movie, has been turned into the Oregon Film Museum.
In the past decade, Oregon’s most high-profile productions have been TV series such as NBC’s “Grimm” (2011-2017), the satirically self-mythologizing “Portlandia” (2011-2018) and, most recently, the upcoming Amazon series “Criminal,” starring Charlie Hunnam. Besides “Night Always Comes,” starring Vanessa Kirby and Jennifer Jason Leigh, the state has also recently hosted the independent films “Horsegirls,” starring Gretchen Mol, and writer/director Logic’s “Paradise Records,” both of which premiered earlier this year.
But as “Dirty” Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) said in “Magnum Force” (1973), “a man’s got to know his limitations,” and so does a state like Oregon.
“We’re not big and we don’t have as much infrastructure, but we’re a really good alternative for medium-sized projects, mostly because we’re very production friendly, we’re very responsive, and it’s a cash rebate,” says Tim Williams, executive director of Oregon Film (aka the Oregon Governor’s Office of Film & Television), a former film producer whose credits include 2001’s “In the Bedroom,” an Oscar nominee for best picture. “And a lot of times you get paid quicker than most other places and you can utilize that to finish your movie, and that helps the medium-sized projects a great deal.”
To hear Stinson talk, the No. 1 reason to shoot in Oregon might actually be Williams.
“You can send him your budget, and he’ll go through it and tell you exactly how much tax credit you get, what qualifies and what doesn’t, and give you a total. That’s a lot of work for him,” says Stinson. “On top of it, he does the pictures of locations, and he’ll tell you what’s coming to town and make sure it’s not too busy. When there’s been a problem, he’s spoken to [people in] locations that were hard
for us to get. He’s a fighter, and he’s on your side.”
