St. Louis-based filmmaker Daniel Blake Smith has spent years honing his craft, making documentaries that have appeared on PBS as well as establishing himself as an author. His book, “Mr. Wonderful,” published in 2018, tells the story of a college professor navigating a strained relationship with his son and dealing with his father, who is struggling with dementia.
Smith, who was born in Kansas City and raised in Texas, took inspiration from his own upbringing to shape the novel. Last year, he worked with his frequent collaborator, director Mark David, to take that novel and bring it to the screen. Cast and crew filmed the dramedy in eight days across Los Angeles. The film stars Michael Madsen, best known for roles in Quentin Tarantino films such as “Reservoir Dogs,” the Kill Bill series and “The Hateful Eight.” The movie would also be one of Madsen’s final films as lead actor before dying of heart failure in July.
The film is nominated for best feature film at the Rehoboth Beach International Film Festival and will make its St. Louis premiere on Nov. 11 at the Hi-Pointe Theatre during the St. Louis International Film Festival. Audiences can also catch it on Nov. 16 at the Lincoln Theatre in Belleville. Smith is already working on adapting the sequel novel, “Crazy Love,” into a movie that he hopes to film in St. Louis.
Smith sat down with St. Louis Public Radio’s Chad Davis to talk about the film, the novel and Madsen’s legacy.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Chad Davis: Could you describe what the film is about and also who the main characters are?
Daniel Blake Smith: "Mr. Wonderful" is a family drama. It focuses on three broken men in a family. Michael Madsen is the star, and he plays my character. I call it that because the film is like the book, somewhat autobiographical, not completely. They're made-up people, and there's exaggerations. He plays this jaded professor about to be kicked out at his university, surrounded by a bunch of entitled, unruly students and so forth, and he's got a drinking problem. None of this really happened to me.
I decided that this guy being kind of a stand-in for me with a lot of added-on problems would make for an interesting story, especially when he's not only facing his own near-forced retirement by the university, but is struggling with a wayward son who is being chased by drug dealers. Can't get his act together at all. That's loosely based on my own son — he's actually a great guy now, and it was not nearly the kind of trouble that the character Danny is in in the film.
Professor Brian Fenton's own father, Robert, is very much drawn from life. My own father had the same issues with aging and dementia toward the end that afflicted Brian quite a bit. So here's three of the men who were struggling to sort of find purpose and meaning in life and frequently get help from wise and strong advice from the women in their lives. But sometimes they just have to face the harsh reality of what the world outside forces upon you, and you can't seem to get it together. And it makes for, I think, a sprawling but really interesting look into what family life can be.
Davis: Was it challenging to write it in the first place and to dig deep into some of your own personal experiences to write that story?
Smith: The story came out pretty easily except that it was really hard to talk about some sections involving my father's own struggles with dementia because that is a hopeless, currently still hopeless, condition, and it's really about how do caregivers deal with it?
Davis: Were there things that you had to change from the book to the screenplay, or things that didn't translate from the book that you had to alter when it came to the movie?
Smith: I've certainly altered my character, Michael Madsen's character, because I did not have those experiences, but I knew other people who did. My son is very vaguely connected to the character of Danny in the film, but most of the things that go on in the film are composite stories that I observed with him and other people or other people entirely but who kind of fit the picture of a millennial struggling for stability and a good path to go on. My son had none of these drug-dealing problems and all that at all, but he did have a stretch of time in his youth where it was tough for him to find a path to be on that led to good relationships and a career that mattered to him.
Davis: Specifically with Michael Madsen, he's well known for roles in Quentin Tarantino films. When you wrote the screenplay or even the book, was he a person that was in the back of your mind even to play Brian Fenton?
Smith: I can't say that he was. He was not doing Tarantino films anymore, and he had kind of left the main stage of American cinema, despite still having the chops to do it.
[Mark David] had never directed him, but he had been a director of photography on a couple of projects with him. He said, this guy's aching to try something different, and I'm aching to direct him because I think you can say the camera loves him.
Davis: I feel like you see a depth of his that you may not have seen in other films.
Smith: One of his sons, who was about 26 at the time, about a year or so before we shot this, killed himself. So you can well imagine when he watched what was happening to Danny, or even transposing it to the story of his own father in the film where he really becomes kind of unglued. That idea of loss resonated powerfully with him.
Davis: Some of this film deals with trauma. Did this film take on any new meaning for you after Madsen’s death?
Smith: The movie’s about legacies and look at the legacy that I'm hoping the film has for him a little bit. He took some real risks and chances here, and they really paid off.
Davis: The film is also funny. There's a lot of humor in it, especially with the son and his girlfriend. What do you want the main takeaway of the film to be?
Smith: I hope, among other things, it shows you how we are all works in progress. That there's hope for everybody. I want people to walk out thinking that a lot of life — good, bad and indifferent that goes on in every family — it's serious. You have to be attentive because we're all trying to find purpose and meaning, and these guys figured it out in ways they hadn't imagined.
