New holiday movie puts spotlight on La Grande

If you’re not a fan of traditional holiday movies, “Breakup Season” might be for you. It follows a young couple that plans to spend Christmas together, only to break up on the first night of their vacation. A snowstorm makes travel impossible, meaning they’re stuck together for the holiday. The movie was entirely filmed in Eastern Oregon, featuring shots of downtown La Grande and the surrounding snow-capped hills and valleys.

Filmmaker H. Nelson Tracey developed “Breakup Season” through a residency with the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. He joins us to talk about his debut feature film and why it was important to set it in La Grande.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. In case its name is not a tip-off, the new holiday movie “Breakup Season” is not in the Hallmark movie mold. It does feature a character who goes back to his small town childhood home for Christmas, but it focuses not on the beginning of a relationship, but the end of one. It follows a young couple who break up on the first night of their vacation and then are stuck together after a snowstorm closes down roads – in this case, I-84.

Filmmaker H. Nelson Tracey developed “Breakup Season” through a residency at the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. His debut feature takes place and was shot entirely on location in La Grande. It’s available for rent right now on all the major streaming services. Nelson Tracey, welcome to Think Out Loud.

H. Nelson Tracey: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Miller: What was the initial spark for this movie?

Tracey: I had been rattling this idea around for well over a decade from just an offhanded comment. It was during the holidays around this time of year, and we were home. My sister said, “Oh my gosh. My friend is so mad at their brother right now. He brought his girlfriend home for Christmas. They broke up and now she’s stuck with us for the rest of the holiday.” The funny thing is my sister doesn’t even remember who the friend was, but that little nugget just stuck with me. And I said, “That, right there, is a movie.”

Years went by and I lived some of my own life, went through a breakup or two, and figured out how to make that into not just a fun concept, but a grounded take on what relationships are like, and their dynamic with holidays, families and all that mix of stuff that happens there.

Miller: One of your characters says that December 11 is the day that couples are most likely to break up on. I did some Googling, and there are a lot of sites that will tell you that the couple weeks preceding December 25 or January 1, that breakups are much more likely then. Why do you think this is?

Tracey: Yeah, that’s what’s so fun, is that I had been working on this movie for a while. I’ve been writing it for a while. It had an old title and then I stumbled across that exact fact that according to Meta and Facebook’s data, December 11 is the most common day to break up of the year. And it makes a lot of sense because it is two weeks to the day before Christmas. And you’re not gonna want to bring someone home for the holidays that … Imagine if you break up with someone after Christmas and everyone who just met your significant other at the Christmas party says, “Oh, whatever happened to so and so?” And you’re like, “Well, we actually just broke up.”

So it’s better to cut your losses ahead of the holiday season, and hence, the term “breakup season” came [into] play. And yeah, the data makes sense in our movie. We just sort of lumped that into our movie cause it already made sense and tracked with the story I had. And it tracked my own life too. I looked at some texts and I realized I was broken up with on December 13. So the person I was dating was always running late anyway. So that makes sense why they were two days behind the date.

Miller: Without giving away the ending, I can say, I already did say that this is not a Hallmark Christmas movie. But they have become so widely known, so loved and mocked, often by the same people. When folks heard about your movie, did they assume that that’s what you were working on?

Tracey: Yes, for a long time, everyone just assumed … even people just said, “oh, there’s a Hallmark movie being made in La Grande,” because Christmas and Hallmark are so synonymous.

Truth be told, I’m not a holiday movie guy. I didn’t set out to make a holiday movie per se. But Christmas is in fact the only high stakes holiday. I mean, if this was 4th of July, she’d be fine. There would be no drama here. It’d be like, “Oh just ride it out.” But not only with weather, obviously in Christmas is when you get bad weather and things like that, but it’s a stressful time of year and I think that … My reflection of Christmas, I do love Christmas clearly, but it’s a challenging time of year for me and for my family. I’m a kid of divorce, so I’m always having to juggle that. And I wanted to make a holiday movie that maybe feels a little more real to what people [inaudible] …

The best kind of compliment I can get is that people who love Christmas movies really enjoy this movie, and people who hate Christmas movies can also get a lot out of this movie.

Miller: I’ll just say there are a lot of high stakes holidays for families out there that celebrate various versions of holidays. But I do take your point.

Let’s listen to a scene from early on in the movie. This is when the two main characters that I mentioned, Ben and Cassie, are breaking up. And they’re whispering here because they’re right upstairs from his whole family.

[Clip from “Breakup Season” playing]

Cassie: This isn’t working. Not any more. I’ve known that for a while. And I realized that in order to have the independence that I need, it means sacrificing my relationship. Which feels awful. I feel guilty for wanting nights to myself. But we are always rushing into the next plan.

Ben: Yeah, because if I don’t make plans, then we don’t see each other.

Cassie: Yeah, I know. And maybe it’s because I don’t feel the way you do. And I’ve tried. I’ve been trying. Me being here is me trying.

[Clip ends]

Miller: That is a scene from the movie “Breakup Season,” the debut feature by filmmaker, H. Nelson Tracey.

Nelson, how did you think about the reasons for this breakup?

Tracey: It was really important to me that this was a kind of a two-handed situation. I knew that if the breakup was because Ben, who’s the male lead, was a really horrible person or he had done something that really crossed the line, the audience would lose their sympathy for him. And in order for the whole conceit to work, the reason for Cassie, the female lead, to break up with him had to be justified, but it couldn’t be something that there was no point of no return from. And honestly, that’s the experience I had with the relationships I’ve been in. It’s not usually this catalyst cataclysmic event. It’s usually just a realization, especially when you’re in your 20s, mind you – which is the age of the characters – that this isn’t what it’s gonna be and it’s gonna need to end here.

Miller: Ben’s attempts to convince Cassie to take him back are essentially just one cringy, clinging, desperate move after another. What informed that?

Tracey: I think that it’s funny because people – I’ve seen this with a lot of audiences – and everyone feels that, “Oh, don’t do it, man.” And I’ve had people shout at the screen at him not to keep doing what he’s doing, but that’s true to life. I honestly can say, with a little bit of embarrassment, that I’ve made those mistakes before and I’m not the only guy in the world, or girl in the world, who’s done that. And so it wasn’t me attempting to make him the worst person in the world, but certainly, I think just that is often the emergency panic mode that sets in post-breakup.

Miller: I started with these two because they are at the beginning of the movie and they are part of the core of it. It’s their breakup that is a central drama, but as I mentioned at the beginning, they’re stuck in Ben’s childhood home with Ben’s whole family. Who is in his family?

Tracey: We’ve got his mom and dad, Mia and Kirby, who are quirky. And Kirby, in particular, loves trains and is a little bit of an oddball. And Mia is a little bit stern but has a heart of gold on the inside. Then his brother and sister, he has an older brother, Gordon, who’s a bit of a deadbeat, kind of a know-it-all, and still lives in his parents’ house and he’s almost 30, that kind of thing. Then Liz is his younger sister. She is a sophomore in college, believes in true love and flogging every step of the way, and just kind of excited, still wide-eyed and bushy-tailed about love and relationships.

Miller: You mentioned that the dad, Kirby, loves trains of all kinds – model trains, antique trains, freight trains. I want to play another scene from the movie. This is where this dad has taken Ben … He’s been directed by his wife to provide some comfort to [his] son. And so he takes him out to this field. When he knows a freight train is going to be passing, this is part of the shouted conversation that ensues.

[Clip from “Breakup Season” playing]

Kirby: Tell me what happened.

Ben: She got mad about dinner. I tried to apologize, but I made it worse. Then we thought about the future. She feels stressed. I keep trying to do nice things, but I keep making it worse. She was the most stable thing I’ve ever had. It’s taking me so long. I can’t find a job. My degree is useless!

Kirby: Let it all out!

Ben: Argh!

Kirby: Feel better?

Ben: No.

Kirby: Now what?

Ben: I don’t want to lose her.

Kirby: You’re trying to hold on to that girl. It’s like you trying to stop that train. The only possible outcome is to get your hand chopped off.

Ben: That’s a terrible analogy.

[Clip ends]

Miller: Can you tell us what it was like to shoot that scene?

Tracey: Yeah, that’s one that was really pulled straight from La Grande. I mentioned I had this concept for a long time, but having spent a lot of time in La Grande, it feels like a model train village and it’s a train depot. So passing-by trains and my time there really informed me. I wanted to do a scene where you were as close to the trains as possible because that is something I’ve done when I’ve been in Le Grande. When you’re talking next to a train, you have to shout. So the conversation, even if it’s a serious matter, feels completely different.

Shooting the scene, a whole different story. Trains are remarkably unreliable, but we were told the most reliable train we could possibly count on would be there at noon that day. So we got there at 10 a.m. and we set up a scout, a mile in each direction, to kind of give us a heads up if a train was coming. 10:15 comes, so we hadn’t even fully unpacked. And we got news, train’s coming. And so we said, “OK, let’s roll this one as a test to make sure we get all the kinks out before the noon train.” The train you see in the movie is that 10:15 train, and that noon train never arrived.

That scene is a one-take wonder. One take, two cameras – miracles happen if you want to make indie movies.

Miller: What prompted you to make a film in La Grande in the first place?

Tracey: A lot of people assume I’m from there, which is a nice compliment, but I am not. I started going there for the Eastern Oregon Film Festival, which is run by Christopher Jennings and is one of the coolest film festivals in the world. It’s been ranked that by MovieMaker Magazine, and it punches far above its weight. It’s not a major film festival, but you wouldn’t know it because it has so much heart and aspirations.

So I went there five years ago in 2019. And Chris and I really put our heads together cause he was like, “we’re really looking to bring film production to this region.” And the state of Oregon has a lot of support for indie movies that other states don’t have. So I kind of put on both my creative thinking cap and also my producer’s thinking cap, in terms of what would it be like to bring a film production to this region. I got to work and I spent the better part of the next few years figuring out how to make that dream into a reality.

Miller: What was the premiere in La Grande like in October?

Tracey: Oh man, so obviously we shot the movie about a year-and-a-half ago, February of 2023. And for that amount of time, the town has known about the movie. So many of them worked on it, or were background actors, or just heard the buzz. We packed the biggest auditorium in La Grande – 420 people. And it was just electric from start to finish. There were moments of just cascading laughter. It was like the audience was getting an inside joke, finally told. All kinds of just specific in-humor around La Grande. And then certain landmarks would show up and people would clap, or a local would make a cameo and people would cheer. Then, once the movie was done, we brought out all the cast on stage and everyone got up on their feet. We got our first standing ovation and it was just pure movie magic.

Miller: Do you think you’ll ever do another movie set in La Grande or in Eastern Oregon?

Tracey: This is my first feature and so it’s really important to me that my second film is not in La Grande because I don’t want to become “the La Grande guy,” if that makes sense. I don’t feel like I shot out the location. What I mean by that is there were so many other locations I did not touch at all that I think another filmmaker could fully use for filmmaking purposes. And I, myself, have other stories to tell there. But I think in the immediate future, my sites need to be elsewhere so that I’m not known as “the La Grande guy.”

Miller: Nelson Tracey, congratulations and thanks so much.

Tracey: Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

Miller: Nelson Tracey’s debut feature film is called “Breakup Season.” It’s a dramedy about a couple who break up during their Christmas vacation that takes place in La Grande.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.