At its core, The Bluesman is a story about finding your voice, your truth, your identity and that can be a hard fucking road. In 2010, I was so sure of the world, how things worked, who I was, who I was going to be. My reality was concrete. I set out to make my first feature film -- a real grassroots production that proved too ambitious to accomplish at the time for myriad reasons, but mostly due to not raising enough money for the scope of the project and being twenty-four years old. For those involved, it lives on as a fond memory of the summer we started to make a movie that didn’t quite net out - but for me, it was brutal and humbling. I spent the next four years determined to pay back the family and friends who had entrusted me with their money, working in post-production and learning everything I could from each filmmaker’s approach. From JJ Abrams’ Super 8 to Michael Bay’s Transformers 3. It was a tremendous education but working on other people’s vision was never my ambition. I was stuck.

Then change arrived in an obnoxiously dramatic form -- A friend was murdered. He was 34. Shot dead. That was it. Game over. This was my Blues Come Calling. I had no idea what it had to say but the volume had been turned up so loud, I knew I was supposed to be listening. So, I did. I pulled the plug on my personal life, left my producer post at Company 3, and hit the road.

Over the next 5 years, it took me around the world and eventually living out of my car, traversing the American south. I let go of the reigns and offered myself up to the real, raw experiences that life gifts you when you’re truly open. It was in this wilderness that I found myself with Gip, an aging bluesman who ran the juke Gip’s Place in Bessemer, Alabama. I stayed with him for a few days and our conversations on the strangeness of life created the foundation for what would become The Bluesman.

American blues music is a fascinating study on origin and imitation. As you trace any history backward, you age forward, accumulating all of these artistic expressions that speak to you. The rigid, suffocating desire to create something wholly original - to “not copy” -- slowly dissipates and somewhere along the line, you realize we’re all just conduits of the past, curators of our own experiences. You could play someone else’s song note for note but it becomes something original as it passes through your filter. That act of creating is preservation and in some ways, a more truthful documentation.

The Bluesman became my vehicle to explore the strange oscillation of the natural and the supernatural in life. The mission is to package these strange, sometimes uncomfortable, realities into the familiar genre of a detective story in the incredibly rich world of American blues music and to make it as entertaining as possible - so it not only has resonance, but reach.

And for those uninterested in all the artsy-fartsy symbolic underpinnings, maybe it’s just a story about a song hunter who uncovers the decades-old murder of his parents and in doing so, discovers himself.

It’s been a long ten years. A decade of experience. Moving from post-production to hands-on producing, I’ve shepherded seven feature films from script to delivery in the past three years. All of these collaborations and experiences have brought something to absorb. Working on studio screenplays to onset producing to endless hours in the edit. It’s been a lot of work and I’ve met some amazingly hardworking and talented craftspeople in the process.

I couldn’t be more proud of how The Bluesman has and continues to come together. Every stage is more exciting than the last. Having something to express is why I do this, having the team and skillsets to articulate that expression – that’s the road we are on now!

Thank you so much for taking the time to hear a bit about the origins of The Bluesman. I hope the story shakes something loose in you. 

Ryan Bennett