Writer, director and former Bruin Mike Cahill surprisingly enough has something in common with the loony protagonist of his new film “King of California”: They both like to dig for treasure. Literally.
In “King of California,” Charlie (Michael Douglas), who has recently been released from a mental institution, goes searching for gold hidden beneath the local Costco, with his skeptical teenage daughter, Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood).
When discussing his inspiration for the script, Cahill describes his deep interest in California history and admits to being a bit of a treasure hunter himself.
“I’m a native Californian and I’ve been watching the housing boom over the last several years and just watching how the terrain has changed so much,” Cahill said. “After the rain I go out and dig for Indian artifacts and they’re still there to be found. There are all kinds of things still in the ground.”
After majoring in English at UC Berkeley, Cahill studied film and television production at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, receiving his master’s degree in 1991.
“King of California,” which screens Thursday night at the James Bridges Theater with a Q&A with Cahill to follow, is a climax of the filmmaker’s lifelong passion for both writing and directing, which he views as interrelated.
“I started making films when I was 11 years old, and I’ve always written stories and scripts and so on,” Cahill said. “I think that, for me at least, the writing and the directing are very connected. They’re one in the same thing.”
Professor Barbara Marks, who taught Cahill’s editing class with her husband Professor Richard Marks, said, “The work (Cahill) did in the class was very indicative of his integrity and illustrious of his skill. He was a very visual filmmaker and very serious about his work”
Cahill’s former screen writing professor at UCLA, Lew Hunter, also recalls Cahill’s refreshing tendencies as a student in his class.
“I remember he would write a little more off-beat than most people,” Hunter said. “He wasn’t particularly interested in being, quote, commercial, unquote.”
Hunter described Cahill as an interested student, taking continuous graduate screen writing classes, coming out of the program with impressive expertise.
“Mike was the kind of a guy who was a scrapper,” he said. “We really felt that he was going to make it in some capacity, whether as a manager or as a writer or as a director, because he was typically tenacious.”
Prior to “King of California,” which is his first motion picture, Cahill worked in housing construction and also wrote a novel called “A Nixon Man,” which won the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Award for best new novel.
The change of scenery from construction site to film set was surprisingly smooth.
“Strangely, I was not surprised (by the process of making a motion picture). It seemed not that different from making student films at UCLA,” he said. “The thing for me to learn was the larger infrastructure. But the basic idea of making films was the same.”
Cahill credits UCLA for preparing him well for his debut as a movie maker and he hopes students will take lessons away from his film.
“I hope that (the audience) will try and look at things a little more closely, things that they might take for granted,” Cahill said. “There may be significant bits of history and significant people with interesting important ideas that they might be overlooking.”