Coldwater (2013) on Netflix
Brad Lunders is sent to Coldwater, a wilderness rehabilitation camp for teenage boys in California run by Colonel Frank Reichert. Staff there punish the residents rather than reform them.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.3/104,555 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes64%
Trailer
Plot summary
Coldwater is a wilderness rehabilitation facility in California for teenage boys. It is run by Colonel Frank Reichert, a former Marine. His staff are former military men or former residents of the camp, and they set out to break the boys rather than rehabilitate them. Brad Lunders arrives as a teenager, sent there for low level drug dealing, after a strained time at home with his mother and her new boyfriend. He clashes with Josh, a staff member.
Cast
- Mackenzie Sidwell Graffas Casey
- Clayton LaDueas Trevor
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Coldwater (2013)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- P.J. Boudousqué had no prior acting credits when he was cast, at 24, as 17-year-old Brad Lunders. After years of auditions in vain in Hollywood, he had almost given up on acting when he got the call for Coldwater, a movie casting a block from his Venice home.
- James C. Burns arrived at his Coldwater audition exhausted from Call of Duty and unable to memorize his sides, so he improvised with director Vincent Grashaw instead. He felt he had blown his chance, but the improv was enough to win him the role.
- Vincent Grashaw wrote the first draft right out of high school in 1999, drawing on a friend who was taken from his home in the middle of the night to a reform facility and who, in Grashaw's words, had "lost it" by the time Grashaw saw him again.
- The film's brutal reform facility was largely shot at Camp Bloomfield, a Malibu canyon camp for the blind and disabled, where the cast and crew lived together in vacant dormitories for three weeks with no cellphone or internet service.
- Coldwater was written and shot as a linear narrative, with Brad's pre-camp life of self-destruction filling the first act. Before the SXSW premiere that act was removed so the film begins blind with his abduction to the Coldwater facility.
- The rewritten script nearly became a film in 2004 starring Ron Perlman and Lucas Black; when it fell apart, director Vincent Grashaw said "it was devastating."
