No Matter What

About

No Matter What is a moving polaroid of Northern Florida, a romantic place superficially frozen in time but increasingly threatened by the modern perils of economic fallout and cheap, dangerous rural drugs. Nick and Joey are 14 and 15. They skip school, skateboard, are growing up and old — but not out. They’re almost entirely parent-less, except for Joey’s mom.  But she’s been slipping away for years.

And then, on an unexceptional school-day morning, she’s just gone.

The boys have subsisted in the charming bleakness through each other’s company alone, but their friendship will be defined by the ensuing excursion to find her. One way or another, they’re getting the hell out of Florida.

If this were a nostalgic movie, you’d call their trip an adventure. But it’s not really, nor do they ‘come of age.’ Age comes to them, and this is how they deal.

Director’s Statement

My formative years were spent in a small town in the South. It was the kind of place where everybody knew everybody and only a few ever left. When I was sixteen I decided that, above all else, I wanted to learn to skateboard.

The skater population of the whole town might have been a dozen and, not one of them a girl, it was fairly easy for me to secure lessons. The boys I started spending my time with were the ones that grown-ups would shake their heads at and my other friends were wary of.

I was intrigued.

The summer of my sixteenth year I learned very little in the ways of skateboarding. What I did gain: The first inkling of a story that I knew I had to tell with an aching empathy for its characters. To know what made this one pilfer useless knickknacks from a yard sale, or why that one was failing all of his classes despite being more intelligent than the majority of his peers.

Nick and Joey are none of those boys that I knew at sixteen, but they are also all of them. They are the products of absentee parents, substance abuse and small towns. They are wounded, but far more resilient than children should have to be.

No Matter What will endear characters to an audience that would generally not relate to them. As much as I love these characters, they are not exactly lovable. Not at first. They are rambunctious, defensive and anti-social. They steal things and they have an underdeveloped sense of remorse. But we’ll show how they arrived at that point. How it is the sum of things out of their control that made them who they are and how, in the end, they would like to overcome.

-Cherie Saulter