The Making of ‘Union County’

By Abe Beame

Adam Meeks’ first feature, the addiction drama Union County, is a kind of movie you’ve seen before. It’s “about” two foster brothers addicted to opiates, trapped in the American drug addiction rehabilitation industrial complex in Bellefontaine, Ohio, and their journey through the city’s Adult Recovery Court, a program notable for its uncommon success rate…of just over 50 percent. 

Meeks, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, first came into his subject matter when he went to visit family in Ohio in the late 2010s. There, he was connected to several members of the court, including Judge Kevin P. Braig and chemical dependency counselor Annette Deao. Meeks observed what was happening in the court and found the human drama riveting, so he made a 13-minute film centered around life in the institution, which played at Berlinale Shorts. The short attracted enough attention to allow Meeks to turn it into a feature that played to raves at Sundance and picked up distribution through Oscilloscope Laboratories. It’s since earned glowing reviews thanks in large part to transformative performances from Disney Channel alum Noah Centineo, near-unrecognizable here as feral, bearded extrovert Jack, and Will Poulter, who fully embodies the taciturn, introverted Cody.

If you’ve met or been friends with people like either of these men, what will stand out about Union County, showing on Friday at IFC before opening more widely on August 21, is how much you’re reminded of them because of how committed Meeks’ screenplay is in sticking to the reality of its characters. The device of fiction can barely be felt over the film’s 90 minutes. There are no Oscar-reel speeches. There’s no romanticizing of Jack or Cody’s nobility with moments that contain a hint of narrative convenience or editorializing, no trauma plots or trauma porn. These men are arrested by their histories, working through the same system and trying their best to eek out humble lives for themselves, but it’s a story that opens in media res and gives us little to explain away their situation or assign blame, which is the point. 

I thought the film’s approach to its subject matter, and Will Poulter’s performance, as well as his interest in the material were interesting, so I connected with Adam Meeks and Poulter over Zoom recently to discuss.

(This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Will, what was the research for this like? Cody has such a specific, muted energy. Is he based on anybody that you met in Ohio? 

Will Poulter: So much of it was created in collaboration and through a lot of conversation that Adam and I had a long time in advance of even going to Ohio on our research trip, which took place, like, six or seven months before we started shooting and then continued throughout the process.

Cody is a fictional character, but he’s certainly inspired by a number of different participants who have been in the program. And I think, more broadly, he’s inspired by the experiences of a lot of people who have made attempts to recover from a substance addiction. So my research was characterized by a lot of conversations with Adam and a lot of time listening to folks with lived experience in the recovery program.

That quiet, muted quality that he has is a sort of style of avoidance and a response to trauma. I was talking with Noah [Centineo] just a moment ago in another interview, and it’s the first time we both realized this idea that one character is incredibly gregarious and loud and is saying a lot, and the other is quiet and not saying much at all, but it’s really two different styles of avoidance, in a way. One is characterized by not talking about the thing, and the other is talking about everything else, all the time.

I think it speaks to something Adam does really well, which is respect individualism, and that is inherently humanizing, and it goes against how much we stereotype, and how reductive we are when it comes to addicts. It’s one of my favorite things about the film. You get to see these rich, complex, very detailed lives.

Did you and Noah bring those different energies to set, or was it in the script?

WP: Adam, as the writer/director, had already fleshed out very distinct characters.

Adam Meeks: The general energy of the characters—everything that Will just articulated so well about their different responses and ways of moving through the world—was two-dimensional on the page and part of what we wanted to do. But Will and Noah both embody that so beautifully, and they came into the film having already worked together and having an ability to settle into a brotherly thing. We spent a lot of time over the couple weeks before we started filming settling into that, and teasing a lot of those details out, and that sense of history. We were finding how they’ve arrived at who they are in this moment together and in [relation] to each other.

Outside of the actual people that you met in research, were there any performances in film that you looked at or thought about that you brought to Cody?

WP: Zachary Zamsky, who was in the short film, who played Cody originally, was definitely influential to me. He did a beautiful job. There are certain realities about having to transition from short film to a feature film in terms of financing or whatever, and I recognize I was the benefactor of that, but what he did was definitely influential on me.

Photo by Leia Jospe

What was the biggest challenge the role presented?

WP: I think it was about embracing that challenge of tempering [Cody’s] emotions. I think part of the reason he doesn’t talk so much and express himself is because he is living with the burden of suppressed trauma and pain. So the challenge was believing that and living with it, and then physically manifesting things born of those feelings and that genuine connection to it.

So, Adam, when films use non-actors, we’re often quick to praise them, but it’s a gambit that can easily go left. With this being your first feature, were there challenges presented by directing non-professionals?

AM: It’s an interesting question, and I agree about this kind of romanticization. It becomes this thing that folks want to claim as a part of a process, and sometimes I see films, and I’ll think I understand that this process felt exciting, but maybe there should have been trained actors there instead. So I was aware of the pitfalls of that. 

With this film, it was just thinking about over many years, which roles needed to be held by somebody who had real control over an emotional performance and could be at the core of something, and then who could help the film, who could we empower to bring their authentic selves to this, that is also the best way of telling that particular character’s story. Because we had made the short in a very similar process, albeit over the course of a couple days, I had had some experience with it.

With the non-professional actors in this film, it was not me directing the performances; it was setting up a camera in a documentary capacity and filming real spaces. So it was more to do with these people existing in their real spaces, doing the work they do. I thought, going in, that might demand a different kind of process of working with them than it ultimately did.

Part of that may be because they truly just happen to be very natural actors. The other part is it’s not so different from the way I work with professional actors. I recognize that everybody has their own process, and it’s my job to create a space for them to do their best work and feel the most comfortable and be ready to be vulnerable and unafraid to fail.

Were there moments where you felt any sort of a strain creating that space?

AM: I think the main thing was moving away from a staged film production and tapping into the work that they do in their lived experience. So with the non-professionals, much of the process would entail talking about a particular scene before we rolled, and going through how the scenario might work in their real jobs, in court or in counseling, and trying to tap into specific experiences and memories. Will and Noah so embodied their characters, they made it easy to tap into that. They felt so connected, and true to people they meet in their work, they were able to easily accept the reality of the scenario and really see them as these people.

Did Noah and Will go method on set?

AM: I wouldn’t call it method. They both have different processes. 

I’ll say in terms of accent, it’s easier to stay in it for periods of time, to stay in the voice rather than going in and out of it. The way that we shot the film required periods of 90 minutes-plus where we were in a real recovery court meeting, filming in a kind of documentary capacity, and we needed them to be able to sort of stay in character and respond to the judge when the judge called them up. So they were very committed and embodied performances.

The last thing somebody in the difficult early phase of recovery needs is a camera crew following them around, looking for dramatic moments. —Adam Meeks

Why did you want to tell the story in this blended neorealist way rather than as a documentary?

AM: The film started from me being in this court, and the first feeling I had was that I really want to share what it feels like in this room in a film. So then the first question is: Is this a documentary? And I think that my first response to that more intuitively was I want to tell a very human, character-driven, emotionally dynamic story.

What I don’t want to do, what I certainly was not interested in, is following someone around with a camera who is in the early stages of this program and has enough going on in their day-to-day life. The last thing somebody in the difficult early phase of recovery needs is a camera crew following them around, looking for dramatic moments.

And so I thought in the tradition of this neorealism that you mentioned, and a lot of films that blur the lines that I’ve loved so much for a long time, maybe I’ll write a couple of fictional characters who can be our eyes and ears through this real program and this real experience.

The courtroom, not just this one, but courtrooms in general, are very performative spaces. It’s kind of a stage, and everybody’s performing. And I think the participants who are stepping up to the podium are speaking in front of a treatment team, and their peers, and a judge, and performing a version of themselves. So I thought that making that space a centerpiece of the film could also allow for a blended approach that could also be about performance, that could invite collaboration with the participants, anybody who wanted and was willing to participate, to step up to the podium, and tell their own story, and represent themselves, which felt like the most authentic and true way of depicting a real community, and to convey that kind of community feeling.

What were the neorealist or other films that influenced you in the writing and production process?

AM: Bicycle Thieves is always an influence, one that I saw really early on—even before I decided that I was gonna try to make movies—that made a big impact. Just in terms of the ethos of it and the humanity of it.

There was a period where I fell in love with [Abbas] Kiarostami, and was thinking a lot about Close-Up, and about performance, and about a film that could be in conversation with its own medium, and with its own process, while also being so human and so layered.

Sound of Metal was an inspiration and an affirmation in terms of narrative and the dramatic trajectory of the film, but also the way that film so artfully surrounds Riz with folks with real life experience, at a sort of treatment house.

My cinematographer and I looked at a lot of [Frederick] Wiseman films and observational docs to try to think about how we could be present in some of these institutional spaces in a way that felt honest without compromising the best place to put the camera to tell the most emotionally resonant story.

A blended fictional and realist text that I was thinking about was The Wire, which looks at many elements of society, including addiction, and makes the point that individuals get lost in these large structural frameworks and unwittingly fall into roles that the system sets up for them. It’s pretty pessimistic about the large, faceless institutions that we’ve erected and their inability to adjust and react and make positive change. Your film seems to take a more hopeful view of the possibility of redemption within these structures. Have you put any thought into the tension between these two perspectives?

AM: Absolutely. For me, there is simultaneously a desire to celebrate the people and the day-to-day individual- and community-based work happening in the court, while simultaneously, what’s implicit in the story is that this process is embedded within a judicial system presented as an alternative to jail time, but ultimately with the threat of jail, if things don’t work out, looming over it. For me, the film is not setting out, necessarily, to make a binary argument about that, but more to observe folks moving through these spaces.

That’s the reason why this became a film about foster brothers who have different experiences through this program who ultimately see different outcomes. Because you can’t honestly and unflinchingly look at recovery and leaving your main character better off than when you found them without also acknowledging an alternative.

This program in particular is celebrated for having an over-50-percent success rate. But that is still just over half, right? There’s a line at the end of the film where a character says, “It’s never really anyone’s fault.” And I think that sentiment is what I hope would convey. That the onus doesn’t necessarily fall on any one person, but more these larger institutional and systemic failures that have left people in very unfair circumstances doing their best to deal with the cards that they’re dealt.