How Paul Roland made 'Exemplum' for $10K

Renegade filmmaking should have no political loyalty. Increasingly, as cinema succeeds in conservative spaces, visionaries are proving this to be true.

A great example is Paul Roland, the director and lead actor of the award-winning “Exemplum,” a psychopolitical drama about Father Colin Jacobi, a 33-year-old priest whose quest to become the Millennial Fulton Sheen leads him to unthinkable outcomes.

Part technological thriller, part philosophical think piece, “Exemplum” reminds us that true cinema no longer belongs to Hollywood. Make sure to check out Vince Salerno’s review of the film for Align.

I sat down with Roland late last month to discuss Steven Spielberg, putting art before politics, and only writing what you can shoot.

Full Intereview:

Align: Let's start with the backstory.

Paul Roland: I can go all the way back to when I got into filmmaking way back in high school, and I’ve just been pursuing it ever since. And then I had written seven screenplays prior to making this film. And anybody who knows Hollywood knows it is is a very difficult place to get a project off the ground, regardless of who you know or your talents or anything.

So I knew when it came to this project, I knew I wanted to make something that I absolutely, without a doubt, would get made. So I said I was going to make a $9,000-$10,000 feature film. I had as my guiding light the wonderful independent directors of the 1990s, people like Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, Kevin Smith.

In many ways, Spike Lee was a precursor to them in the 1980s with "She's Gotta Have It." So I always revered these men, and I figured, “Why am I not actually doing what they did?” So I raised the money for the film, and that was in March of 2020, just before the pandemic hit. Like literally, I raised the money like two weeks before the pandemic hit. And if the pandemic had hit earlier, there's no way I would have gotten money.

So pandemic hits, I'm writing the script for like three months in the middle of this lockdown. I don't even know six months from now if I'm going to be able to shoot this thing. It's wild. And so I finished the script. Thank God.

Align: When you found out your wife was pregnant, right?

Roland: Yeah, yeah, we found out my wife's pregnant. So like, okay, now the pressure is really on. I’ve got to shoot this thing this year, no doubt about it. And then in July, an upstairs neighbor breaks a water main while he's renovating his unit. And it floods our bathroom, our kitchen. We have to move out of our condo for five months while it's getting repaired.

So we're bouncing around Airbnbs. My wife's pregnant. I have equipment stored at my friend's place that I got to go to every Friday to pick it up. I had that small window of time and it was extraordinarily stressful. I don't know if I could ever do something like that again, but I got it done and I edited the film throughout 2021 after the birth of my daughter, basically got no sleep while working a full-time job and had a good run on the festival circuit, won Best Director at the Pasadena International Film Festival secure distribution. Now it's out there.

I think someone's worldview is always going to show up in [their work]. But so long as it's the art, it's the sharing of what's going on inside me, what's going on inside my soul and sharing it with the world is what's important, not the political message.

Align: The thing that blows my mind is that you did it for under $10,000. How did you pull that off?

Roland: Well, with great difficulty, I mean, one thing's for sure is when you're doing a movie at this level, you have no artistic freedom. So I had to write the entire story around what I knew I could get for free or relatively cheap.

There are whole story points in this film that are decided by how much, whether or not I'm gonna be able to shoot this thing — like, “Can I shoot that? No.” And I'm like, “I can't let my imagination go away. So I have to figure out another way I can shoot this scene.” That's practical.

So the entire story is written around what I know we can get for free or relatively cheap. I had to limit the number of principal characters down to four. Beyond that, some of it just came down to a matter of luck.

I mean, the pandemic actually did help me a little bit because I was able to get some wonderful locations for free or because they were closed down. I got to shoot at St. Andrew's Catholic Church in Pasadena, which is a gorgeous historic church built in the late 1800s, and it was closed down, so they were like, “Yeah, you can shoot here, no problem, it's easy.”

And then I was — just through elbow grease and just through innovation — just able to get what I needed. I would say throughout those seven weeks, it was a 24/7 grind thinking about how I'm gonna solve a problem. And when you see me on screen, literally 10 seconds before I yell “action,” I'm thinking about “How am I gonna get tomorrow's set? How am I going to — what am I gonna feed people? How much money am I gonna have? How much, like, there's so much going on in my brain right before I even start acting in the film.”

When Spielberg made “Duel,” he often reflects upon the intensity of that shoot. That was one of his first films that got him noticed, and he's just like, “I couldn't make a movie like 'Duel' today. There's just no way. ... The level of passion and energy that was in me at the time that propelled me through that shoot just does not exist in me now.” He personally could not do it.

I think I am at a point in life now — I'm 35 years old — there is no way I could do something like that again. It's just, it was so taxing on the soul, on the spirit, on the psyche, on the body, that there's only one of those things you can pull out of you.

Align: There are rumors about how the set of “The Exorcist” was demon-haunted. It sounds like the opposite for you, like you were lavished with blessings.

Roland: Yeah, that's true. I mean shoots can be like that. You just get lucky and you get the shot that you need or just things don't show up. That's the thing as a director, you gotta be ready for anything. You’ve got to be ready for blessings. You’ve got to be ready for disaster. And you cannot let either one dictate. You can't let the blessings make you think, “Well, this is going to be this way tomorrow.” And you can't let disaster derail you from getting your movie made.

The conservative position on this is to create movies and create art that is universal, that reflects the deep values that we love and hold as Americans and as Westerners, and creating characters that reflect that, and finding artists who really care about doing that and putting politics secondary.

Align: One of the things I really enjoyed the most was that there's a political element, but the politics are not left versus right. Rather, "Exemplum" is a human drama that could be called political.

Roland: Yes, well, I am an artist first, and my Catholicism and my worldviews and my philosophies inform that. It doesn't matter what kind of movie I'm writing, it's always going to be in there. Even if there's no specific political [element], I'm not getting you to vote a certain way, but it's just the morality, the story, and what you know, what it's about, it's always going to be in there.

I just wrote a film that I'm working on now. It's very heavily inspired by John Hughes, and even if you look at John Hughes — he was kind of a closeted conservative at the time. He had Ben Stein in his films, and Ben Stein has talked about it a lot, and people were like, “Well, I wonder what was the political underlying of this,” and it was during the Reagan era, and a lot of Hughes films were about how suburbia is a real place. It's not this trap, it's not this horrible place, you know, where people, like their souls go to die. It's a place where people have interesting thoughts and people are real and people have real problems, and it's a place where you can find joy and peace.

So I think someone's worldview is always going to show up in [their work]. But so long as it's the art, it's the sharing of what's going on inside me, what's going on inside my soul and sharing it with the world is what's important, not the political message.

Align: It has happened to Hollywood that a lot of times movies won't even make sense because they're so concerned with the political messaging.

Roland: Yeah, and you know, it's a real tragedy. I mean, Hollywood, we've always known, has been left-leaning, but at least craft came first. A good number of our beloved films have been created [by] people who are of left-wing bent, but the craft came first. And so that's why they're reaching for universal truths. And that's why all of us can read them and watch them. I mean, I would say 90% of them are conservative just because of the fact that it's about craft and it's about morals that we care about. But I would say in the last two decades — it started under Bush and really accelerated under Obama. Now it's out of control, where the political impetus took place over craft.

It's not working out for them. Nobody likes the movies. The right needs to not take it the other way and be like, "Well, we're gonna create political movies from the right perspective." No, the conservative position on this is to create movies and create art that is universal, that reflects the deep values that we love and hold as Americans and as Westerners, and creating characters that reflect that, and finding artists who really care about doing that and putting politics secondary. I say that once you make your art political, it's the death of your art.

Align: Did you write a lot of drafts? How did the process flow?

Roland: It flowed very well. I don't like to write lots of drafts of the script, mainly because I think when you write a script, you want to be 10 feet away from your target, you don't want to be 100 feet away.

Align: What would you do differently?

Roland: Well, I mean, my next project is certainly going to have a bigger budget than this, which is good. And it's going to have a bigger crew than this. One of the biggest, I would say, not so much regrets, because there's not really much I could do about it, but I genuinely wish I had a little bit more time before each shoot to survey and plan some shots.

Align: What’s next?

Roland: I'm working on a whole new project right now. A script is written, building a pitch deck for it, gonna be taking it out to investors very soon. I'm gonna keep the project under wraps, but I'll just say that it's something you don't expect. You're gonna be 100% surprised that this is my next project.