EXCLUSIVE: Frances Fisher (Titanic), Will Patton (Armageddon), Lauren Holly (Dumb And Dumber), and M.C. Gainey (Con Air) lead feature drama Ruby Road from Acoustic Pictures and Witchcraft Motion Picture Company.
Independent Spirit Award nominee and Guggenheim fellow Talia Lugacy directs the movie, which wrapped production this summer in rural Kentucky, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
The film follows Fisher as Ruby, a former coal-truck and school-bus driver, who when facing a terminal illness sets off in her yellow mini-bus through the Appalachian mountains on a final journey to reconcile with her past and her fractured family. The filmmakers are targeting a 2026 premiere.
Written and directed by Lugacy, the film was produced through a collaboration withAppalshop, an Appalachian media and advocacy organization, and supported by the Mellon, Ford, Schubert and MacArthur Foundations.
Appalshop and Lugacy developed the project alongside local performers, artists, and craftspeople, many of whom make cameos in the film, which hybridizes fiction and improvisational non-fiction.
The project is a continuation of the team’s cooperative filmmaking model, emulating Lugacy’s previous feature film, the Independent Spirit Award nominated This Is Not A War Story which was acquired by Warner OneFifty for HBO Max.
According to producers, everyone on the cast and crew received the same daily pay while traveling and living together throughout a 30 day shoot across three states.
Lugacy, Ryan De Franco, Emily Cooper, Julian West and Noah Lang produced with Rosario Dawson, Gill Holland, Fisher, Patton, Luke Lieberman, and Slade McPherson executive-producing. Satya Polisseti co-executive produced with Nick Shadix and Robyn Haddad serving as associate producers.
“Look at it this way – the backbone of America, the Appalachian region, is a microcosm of where we’re at as a collective, as a nation,” Lugacy said, “We have common threads in our anger about how things are, in our disillusion as well as in our fight for integrity and decency. This is a film that seizes on our common threads and asks us existentially how are we going to face the crises of our times – together, or not at all?”
Fisher said: “This is that one-in-a-million chance an actor yearns for: to grab hold of a character and to tell her story from the inside out – to do her justice. Then to collaborate with passionate and fiercely dedicated writer-director Talia Lugacy, was a dream come true. The scope of what we accomplished, across three states in Appalachia – from the depths of pathos to the heights of tenderness and humor with each one of my fellow actors, made this experience a poetic odyssey.”
“This is my third feature collaboration with Talia. We’ve continuously aimed to explore and celebrate the complexities of being human which has been both the guiding light of our independent filmmaking and our friendship,” said Dawson in a statement, “We’re obsessed by the worlds we’ve championed on this journey together. Producing stories that push us to dig deep and take creative risks is the driving focus that has compelled and moved us all of these years.”
Fisher is repped by Greene Talent; Patton by Grand View Management and IAG; Gainey by Monolith Entertainment Group and ATB Talent; and Holly by Mavrick Artists Agency, The Characters Talent Agency, and Gilbertson Entertainment.