Filmmaker returns to Idaho roots, will hold open casting call Sunday

Bill Canepa is hoping for good weather in February.

On Feb. 10, Canepa will begin shooting his first feature film – tentatively titled “Home and How to Break It” – in Coeur d’Alene, Post Falls and Spokane, and he’s already facing enough problems. Not only will he be working with an equally inexperienced crew and cast, but he’ll also be trying to double as producer and director, and he’ll be overseeing a budget that, essentially, is the financial-aid money he was given for his last semester as a film student at San Francisco State University.

He doesn’t need the added headache of Arctic-Circle-like weather.

“The first thing that we’re shooting is a side-of-a-rock, edge-of-a-cliff-might-fall-into-the- river kind of fistfight,” Canepa says. “We’re going to learn a lot those first two days about working outdoors in Idaho.”

Learning is something that filmmakers endure on every shoot. The good ones find answers to the troubles that crop up.

Canepa’s learning curve began at North Idaho College. A 1995 graduate of Post Falls High School, he started out as an NIC communications major. Then he got interested in theater, which led to dreams of film school.

“It was one of those ideas that was kind of in the back of my mind, but I always thought it was unattainable,” Canepa says. “I guess that kind of happens when you grow up in a place like Post Falls. Like, your expectations are set really low, and it makes you think like all you want to do is get a job and have a family.”

Not that he sees anything wrong with that.

“It’s totally respectable,” he says, “but I started noticing that I was having some successes and that people were liking what I was doing.”

And that encouraged him to take a chance.

“Basically, I just moved to San Francisco on a bus,” Canepa says. “I had $700 to my name and just kind of went.”

He knew one person, but only barely.

“I met her at a wedding,” he says. “I’d known her like four hours. She let me crash on her couch for a couple of weeks until I could find a place on my own.”

Canepa’s first stop was San Francisco’s Academy of Art University. One semester, though, is all it took for him to realize that he’d made “an $8,000 mistake.” It was, he says, “like going to film school with a bunch of engineers. There weren’t a whole lot of people particularly interested in just telling a decent story.”

San Francisco State made a much better match. It was a school project, in fact, that became “Home and How to Break It,” which is good because – as Canepa still has one class to take – he plans to head back to campus to do the post-production on what he hopes will be a two-hour-long feature film.

Equipment isn’t the only thing that he’s borrowing. Consider the film’s plot.

“It’s essentially about a guy who comes back to his hometown in Idaho to make a movie about it,” Canepa says.

There are other similarities to Canepa’s life. For example, the main character’s name is Will.

“But I may change that,” he says. “It’s a little too post-modern for me.”

In the end, though, the film is about the America of 2005. It centers on a Michael Moore-type filmmaker who wants to make a documentary about the corporate takeover of America but who ends up, Canepa says, “getting seduced really early by more sensational stuff like small-town drug culture and racism and North Idaho’s reputation.”

The polarization of today’s America is something that Canepa knows intimately. Caught between conservative North Idaho and the ultra-liberal Bay Area, he’s been hit by both sides. And he’s tired of it.

“This whole us-against-them mentality keeps coming up,” Canepa says. “It’s like this whole red-state-vs.-blue-state thing … And I’m, like” – he heaves a deep sigh – “man, you’re all people first, you know?”

Canepa has cast several of the main roles, using friends that he made at NIC – among them Nathan Myers of Pullman and Dan Thompson of Oldtown, Idaho – but he’s looking for others, cast and crew, who are willing to work for free. To that end, he’ll hold a casting call Sunday at 6 p.m. at the Coeur d’Alene Tea House, 402 N. Second St. For further information, contact Canepa at homeandhow@ hotmail.com.

“The way I look at this project, it’s sort of me taking my one real stab at making a film in this way,” Canepa says. “I have no intention of doing this again. I mean, it’s insane. It’s just more than anyone should try to do.”

Canepa’s professors should be proud. At least he’s learned that much.