At 52, David Reyes took a while to finally finish his first fiction film.
“I was part of that sad generation that saw Star Wars and decided [filmmaking] was what I wanted to do,” said the Austin filmmaker. “I was 14 years old, and I knew where I was going. I always had a camera.”
His long wait appears to have been worth it. His comedy Trippin’ to the Altar won a prize at the recent Fort Worth Indie Film Festival for Best Domestic Comedy. Reyes missed the award presentation because of a family event in South Dakota, but he watched the ceremony on Facebook Live and was able to attend the screening of his film here.
“It was a smaller festival, which was good for us,” he said of the fledgling film showcase. “Coming from Austin, I only knew South by Southwest, the monster. Here, it wasn’t intimidating. The director introduces himself to you. I was happy getting in front of people for the first time.”
As the son of a U.S. Marine, Reyes grew up in a number of different places, but his family had settled in San Antonio before he went to Austin to attend the University of Texas. At the time, the expenses involved with making films were considerably more than working in TV, so he learned television instead and after graduation earned a part-time job at the city’s ABC affiliate, KVUE-TV. After 12 years working his way up to production manager, he had learned the essences of his craft shooting both inside the studio and outside.
“The station was reorganizing [in 1999], so I got out,” he said, forming his own production company, X Horn Productions, with his wife Lisa Reyes. “From TV, I learned how to do more with less. You need a certain budget to make a promotional video or a music video. Ours were smaller.”
He directed two feature-length documentaries in the ’00s, one about Austin bands (Walking the Crooked Mile) and another one about his time as an extra in John Lee Hancock’s historical epic The Alamo (Half Cock, Fire Lock: Time Served in Santa Anna’s Army), but his main source of income in those days was producing wedding videos. This experience spurred him to create Trippin’ to the Altar, a found-footage comedy about a couple who hire a documentary film crew to chronicle their wedding.
“I saw all the shared stories and the joy of that day and the groom standing in the corner with a glazed look on his face,” he said. “I didn’t want big, crazy moments like you see in Bridal Wars. I wanted something that people could relate to more easily.”
The film was originally supposed to center on the filmmakers, but a bruising panel at SXSW led him to rework the script to be about the bride.
His own finances and a round of fundraising on Indiegogo brought the budget up to $8,600, and Fort Worth was his first stop on the festival circuit. “The communication was great,” he said. Fort Worth Indie Film Festival “is hungry, and they know how to treat filmmakers and listen to your feedback.”
The next stop for Trippin’ to the Altar is in Reyes’ backyard at the Austin Revolution Film Festival next month, and he’ll continue to shop the movie for the rest of the year before starting work on another comedy next spring.
“I learned that this is exactly what I want to be doing,” Reyes said. “When you write a script and then watch actors say the words you wrote, it’s an amazing feeling.”
