Crew & Credits
Film by Tyler Nilson & Michael Schwartz
Music by: Jake Sinclair
Final song: “The Stakes Were Raised” by Slow Runner
Run Time: 10:53
The Bitter Southerner is proud to bring you the first honest-to-God narrative short film we’ve run in our “Moving Stories” section: Tyler Nilson’s “The Moped Diaries.”
“The Moped Diaries” tells the story of a young man named Levi, the son of a fisherman on an island along North Carolina’s Outer Banks, who learns about love and loss and how both can, quite literally, make you feel like you’ve been whacked in the head with a shovel.
Nilson is a filmmaker from North Carolina who, after a few years of adventure in the South Pacific, headed to Los Angeles to tell stories on film. Like every aspiring filmmaker in L.A., he makes his living in a variety of ways — from bit parts in movies (he's in Judd Apatow’s “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”), making films for corporate clients, acting in commercials and even hand modeling. He has very attractive hands, evidently, good enough to double for those of Brad Pitt.
But when you watch this 11-minute film, you might come to the same conclusion we have: Tyler Nilson could wind up becoming a Southern version of Wes Anderson. “The Moped Diaries” is that good. Nilson is now in pre-production for his first feature film, “The Peanut Butter Falcon.” His aspiration for that movie, he says, is to make “a Southern, just like some films are Westerns.”
We’re not sure yet what that means, but we can’t wait to find out.
