“Gasoline Rainbow”, interview with directors Bill and Turner Ross

September 9, 2023

Bill and Turner Ross, directors of "Gasoline Rainbow" on their whimsical, documentary-style fiction feature following the adventures of a group of teens travelling across the American West.

"Gasoline Rainbow", interview with directors Bill and Turner Ross Sarah Bradbury

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The roots of “Gasoline Rainbow” began during lockdown. As we all yearned for freedom, directing duo Bill and Turner Ross began to wonder who must be feeling that yearning more acutely than the younger generation, and their ideas for a film began to accumulate under “Episodes of Delinquency”.

After casting five first-time teenage actors from skate parks and other city spaces, they encouraged their personalities and characters to drive the story, with only a very loose outline of a script and various scenarios on a trip across the American West through deserts and industrial backwaters to the Pacific Coast, allowing them to tell their own story on their own terms. What they found was far less full of delinquency and cynicism than they had imagined, but rather a group full of curiosity and excitement about the world, a snapshot of a generation more open and inclusive than those who’ve gone before.

Despite the precariousness of many of the moments captured, with each day of the shoot like “threading a needle”, the Ross brothers shared how they became like a family, supporting each other in the face of many a wild escapade.

The gritty and punk rock-edged film populated with outsiders and misfits doesn’t shy away from the flaws of modern-day America, with stories of unstable homes, addiction and troubled live on the margins peppered throughout, but through the eyes of those coming-of-age, there’s a brimming sense of hope and optimism about the future and the American Dream, as Turner Ross put it: “If you told them the frontier was dead, the dream was no more, they would argue against that and still find their own. It’s what we’ve all done for generations.”

Plot

With high school in the rearview, five teenagers from small-town Oregon decide to embark on one last adventure. Piling into a van with a busted tail light, their mission is to make it to a place they’ve never been—the Pacific coast, five hundred miles away. Their plan, in full: “Fuck it.” By van, boat, train, and foot, their improvised odyssey takes them through desert wilderness, industrial backwaters, and city streets. Along the way, they encounter outsiders from the fringes of the American West and discover that the contours of their lives will be set by trails they blaze themselves. They are forgotten kids from a forgotten town, but they have their freedom and they have each other, hurtling toward an unknowable future—and The Party at the End of the World.

Written by: Sarah Bradbury

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