Growing up in a Southern American city, you never see much of a future for yourself on screen.

You watch BLADE RUNNER and its subsequent generations of aesthetic offspring, and what you get with no small degree of universality is Los Angeles, New York, all the usual suspects of cultural and economic development, revised to scale with Tomorrow. But as a young person who called the Buckle of the Bible Belt home, you couldn't help but watch a movie like that and wonder what your side of the Mason-Dixon looks like in that world. And if the dystopian megalopolis did reach Nashville, would it even touch my corner of it? What would change on Gallatin Pike, what might remain familiar, and how would the two compete?

It of course turns out I would see that future in my lifetime – BLADE RUNNER is set in 2019, which not only makes it a period film, but makes Deckard a Millennial – and the dystopian megalopolis would leave no city untouched. But the aesthetics of gentrification are less cinematic than anticipated. The neighborhood I grew up in was ground zero, now as unaffordable as it is unrecognizable from when it was home to a diverse enclave of poor and working class folks. So that question for tomorrow persists into today: Where does my world, where do my people, fit in here?

I made SERIOUS MATTERS partly in an attempt to find a place on the screen for those folks – my folks – in a future that doesn’t seem to reserve much space for us. It’s the Nashvillains who could give a fuck about a honky-tonk. It's the Sunday School kids I went to public school with, devout Christians who got through their teen years cribbing prescription bottles from medicine cabinets (as adults, they’d typically settle into one extreme or the other). It’s the atheist girlfriend I accompanied to court-ordered N.A. meetings, worrying quietly if she’d resist the help she needed because they ended each meeting in a prayer. It’s the long-gone, dingy bars and the still-kicking, old sedans. It’s the people we've known and the people we’ve lost. It's the anecdotes, the anxieties, the longings and laughs we’ve shared only with each other, in late night discussions on broken-down porches, draining bowls of mids and packs of cigarettes ‘til the sun came up and we were all finally sober enough to drive home.

SERIOUS MATTERS was a true DIY, no budget production, pieced together over a few years from available weekends and the scraps left over from my paychecks once rent was paid. It was created without permission, on affordable digital technology, borrowed lenses, and shoplifted Home Depot hardware. It is the product of collaboration with the invaluable and astounding creative talents of some remarkable actors and filmmakers. I wrote it and directed it out of a need, and I shot it, cut it, and designed it out of necessity, but the collective skills and passions of everyone involved in bringing it to life – not least of which includes my producing partners Taylor Napier, and the movie’s lead performer Brittany Carlton – is what makes me proudest of this short.

One of the more conscious influences on SERIOUS MATTERS was the short-story writing (as well as the Anaheim) of Philip K. Dick. As such, the title of the movie is cribbed from the best advice I've ever heeded, a line from one of his novellas: "Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night."

That the title is taken from PKD is not pure homage to the author, nor is it intended to be the moral of the story. Hell, I'm not sure this story has a moral, but it most certainly is no fable. Instead, this short is to me that good advice, ignored. Its compounded musings on faith, love, addiction, loss and class – in the right light, all things that give your life a meaning – all likely ill-advised. To large extent, this movie is The Serious Matters in question: here to bring up subjects one avoids in polite company, in spite of the fact that the hour is late and one should know better.

Written and Directed by Josh Copeland

Starring Brittany Carlton, Thashana McQuiston, Devin Walls, James Rudolph, Izzi Rojas, Brontë England-Nelson, Ben Copeland, Will Sinclair and Breck Wilhite

Produced by Josh Copeland, Brittany Carlton and Taylor Napier

Videography + Editing + Special Effects + Sound Design – Josh Copeland

Music by Glass Boy – Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 3.0 Int'l License – Buy the albums at glassboy.bandcamp.com

Line Producer – Taylor Napier // Stunts – Matt Taylor // Production Assistant – Thashana McQuiston // Sci-Fi-Drug-Plug Construction – Ben Crawford // Super16 Lenses Provided by Kip Kubin // Production Audio – Taylor Napier, Thashana McQuiston, Heath Haden, Max Pankow // Camera Assist – Matt Taylor // Grip + Set Construction – Nate Napier, Woodrow Drake // Gore Specialist – Thashana McQuiston // Visual Effects Assisant – Lillian Boyd // Twin Peaks Consultant – Taylor Napier

Dedicated In Loving Memory to Scot Copeland

BizarroLand Film Festival (formerly Sick N’ Wrong) – July 6-12, 2020

Mr. Holehead’s Warped Dimension – Sept. 26, 2020

Nashville Film Festival – Oct. 1-7, 2020

Other Worlds Film Festival – Dec. 1-6, 2020

Videodrunk Film Festival (Canada) – Dec. 2-6, 2020 – WINNER OF INTERTOTO AWARD

Another Hole In The Head Film Festival – Dec. 11-27, 2020

WildIndie SciFi Fantasy Film Fest (U.K.) – May 30 - Aug. 27, 2021

Threadbare Mitten Film Festival – Sept. 9-12, 2021

StudioFest 2021 VR Experience – FINALIST ENTRY – Sept. 17-19

NewFilmmakers Los Angeles – Jan. 14-15, 2022 – NOMINEE FOR BEST SHORT FILM DRAMA + BEST SCREENPLAY

Red Tower 2024 Spooktacular Film Festival – Oct. 27, 2024 – WINNER OF BEST ORIGINAL STORY AWARD + NOMINEE FOR BEST DIRECTION & BEST SPECIAL FX