By: Valerie Milano
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 10/14/2024 – These days, you can’t expect to make an October family film that doesn’t happen to feature an unhappy teenager forced to live in a new town, a new friend or two who are outcasts drawn to the unhappy character, and a local curse that just happens to draw increased interest every Halloween.
It’s a formula that has worked in such hit films from the past such as The Goonies and the Escape to Witch Mountain. Sibling filmmakers Drew and Nate Garcia (“Hero,” “The Lighthouse”) have assembled the perfect storm of family film magic for their latest feature, Treasure Trackers.
Treasure Trackers follows the adventures of three middle school kids who band together to find their small town’s mythic treasure – and destroy it in the process. After Leah Weavers’ (Charity Rose) father drops her off with her goofy aunt and uncle in the nowheresville Southern town of Carterville, this teenage surfer finds herself a fish out of water and has trouble fitting in at her new school.
That is, until she meets fellow misfits Tessa (Amelia Salazar) and Marshy (Sean Jay) and learns the folklore surrounding the small town’s founders from the amiable librarian, Mr. Bigsby. The trio embark on a hunt for hidden gold, which by coincidence, was cursed by the town’s local sorceress, the “Raven Witch”. This elusive treasure also possesses the trapped soul of the evil town founder, Silas Carter, and whomever finds the gold risks releasing Silas’ wicked spirit on the world.
What unfolds is a delightful romp the whole family can enjoy as Leah, Tessa and Marshy search for the hidden treasure while a band of high school bullies make it a race with a search of their own. The film boasts a solid cast of young actors, a magnificent Tennessee location and quality cinematography to tell this tale. The brothers Garcia joined The Hollywood Times recently to talk about their film, and they said casting was rigorous and in-depth as they searched for the right mix of actors to create the three juvenile leads.
Click below to see our exclusive interview:
“Drew and I came on board in like January of 2022 and then it was like straight into casting pretty much after that and we did not finish casting till like a few weeks before the movie,” Nate Garcia said. “It was quite the search to find the right kids and it was all over the country from L.A. all the way down to Atlanta.”
Chemistry was a critical component, and they did chemistry “reads” with the young actors to see how they played against and with each other.
“We might like a certain actor for one of the roles, but we really needed to see them reading against each other,” said Drew Garcia. “So, we would have Zoom calls because a lot of times they were in different parts of the country, and we would have them act scenes on screen. We went through that process with quite a few actors until we landed on the cast that we have.”
Harris Kaufman wrote the screenplay and produced the film along with Jason Potash, Paul Finke and Rickey Blumenstein. Kim Sandwich, Zephaniah Terry and Sam Coffelt lead the supporting cast on the film’s location, and it makes for a comfortable viewing experience from its outset.
“We ended up shooting the movie in Knoxville, TN and when we were first talking to the producers about how we might go about making this movie and where, there were quite a few options that were thrown out there,” Drew Garcia said. “But when Nate and I heard that Knoxville was on the table, we pushed pretty hard on that front because we just had this feeling that shooting at a place like that would give us just so much built-in production value.”
They were right. The fictional Carterville drips homey warmth and down-home friendliness that makes Treasure Trackers a fun, family friendly film.
“The city of Knoxville was extremely gracious to us and gave us a lot,” Garcia said. “They hooked us up with all kinds of locations, referrals and crew members and things like this. So, it was a really wonderful place to shoot.”
