The Go-Getter (2007) on Netflix
After his mother dies, 19-year-old Mercer takes a Volvo station wagon without asking and hits the road. He is looking for Arlen, his estranged half-brother, to tell him she is gone.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.4/105,351 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes42%
Trailer
Plot summary
Mercer is 19 and has just lost his mother. He wants to tell Arlen, the half-brother he has not seen in years, and so he takes a Volvo station wagon without permission and drives out of Eugene, Oregon. Arlen does not know she has died. A phone in the car rings, and the woman calling is Kate, the car's owner. She agrees to let him keep it if he calls her regularly and describes the trip. His first stop is a commune at Shelter Cove, California, where Arlen once lived; the people there say Arlen has moved to Reno, Nevada. In Fallon, Nevada, Mercer looks up Joely, a girl he liked in middle school.
Cast
- Erv Immemanas Patient
- Michael Patterson-Crohnas Shaddup
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Go-Getter (2007)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- A crew member lost the project's filming permit on the last day of shooting in Mexico, police halted filming at rush hour, and the crew scattered, leaving star Lou Taylor Pucci alone further down the street, which Hynes calls his strangest experience in the film industry.
- Musician M. Ward and co-star Zooey Deschanel recorded a duet for the film's closing credits, bonded over their shared musical taste while making it, and went on to form the duo She & Him together afterward.
- Director Martin Hynes secured the rights to Elliott Smith's song "Coast to Coast" cheaply by writing a heartfelt letter to the late singer's mother and sister, who controlled his estate.
- Four months before filming, Hynes set aside US$20,000 to $25,000 of the budget for a test shoot: he, cinematographer Byron Shah, a camera assistant and a stand-in traveled over 2,000 miles and shot 8,000 feet of film, testing different filters, lenses, film stocks and shooting styles.
- Writer-director Martin Hynes learned his mother had been diagnosed with cancer while he was making his 1999 film The Big Split, and his marriage ended soon after she died; calling it a huge amount of loss, he took a road trip, writing for much of it.
- Producer Lucy Barzun Donnelly managed to raise the film's entire budget within six months of the script being finished, without a single actor yet attached to the project.
