David Drake is a first-time feature filmmaker whose debut film, “The Long Haul,” will premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. It stars Margo Martindale, Stephen Root, Cole Sprouse, and Yalitza Aparicio. Ahead, Drake explains why the road to his first feature was so long, and so very personal.
My debut movie is called “The Long Haul” and it stars Margo Martindale. In the film, she plays a truck driver running from her past and the prospect of retirement. It’s premiering at the Tribeca Festival this weekend.
My interest in trucking comes from the time I spent working with my father. He wasn’t a trucker in the same way the characters in my film are, but he drove a route out of the Hunts Point Cooperative Market in the South Bronx for thirty years. Upwards of 15,000 trucks access the site every day. In the early years, he had a fourteen-foot refrigerated box truck, and then he downscaled to a transit van. The market is the largest food distribution center in the world and a hub for trucking. Days started at 4 a.m., when he went there to pick up the produce. He’d spend the rest of the day dropping it off at restaurants, pizzerias, diners, pubs, and bowling alleys in Westchester County.
When I sat down to write this script, my father was in the process of winding down his career, so I started with a character heading into retirement. I really wanted to set the story around trucking, but I also wanted it to be a road movie, so I settled on long-haul trucking because it would allow me to pull on both threads. Deep research was the first step. I read many books and firsthand accounts, listened to podcasts, watched trucking YouTubers, and emailed with people working in the industry. I also spoke to several friends of mine who drove OTR or worked in dispatch.
When we finally started production, it was really important to me that we paid attention to all the details. We filmed at active truck stops and freight yards. We worked with a truck repair shop to help us construct a drivable rig for our interior driving shots. Members of our art department had parents who were truckers, so the cabs were designed to look lived-in and honest.
Probably the most important thing was the work Margo and the other cast did with our on-set advisors. We had a number of very experienced long-haul truck drivers present at all times to make sure things were done correctly. Margo worked very closely with an amazing trucker named Dolores Lozano, who has been driving big rigs for decades. I can’t say for certain that we got everything perfect, but we put a lot of time and effort into portraying long-haul trucking as accurately as possible.
It was also quite eye-opening spending so long immersed in that world. The trucking industry is undergoing major shifts at the moment. Technology and corporate consolidation are putting immense pressure on individual owner-operators. What was once a viable way for working-class people to make a living is becoming a struggle. The margins have been squeezed so tight that drivers often lose money when transporting goods. Hundreds of thousands of carriers have been forced to exit the business over the past few years, the majority of them being individual owner-operators.
The film industry is a different sort of work with different sorts of challenges, but the wider economic squeeze is felt here too, especially for practitioners who didn’t enter the industry through standard channels. I’m a self-taught filmmaker. I came to filmmaking after a considerable amount of zigzagging that took twenty years. I didn’t go to college or film school. I learned a trade in high school, moved out at eighteen, got married at twenty-one, and became a father at twenty-three. I spent years doing various jobs: window cleaner, punch press operator, leafleteer, watch salesman, bartender. I wheedled my way into photography eventually and started to make short films in my thirties.
I met my producers in 2019. Six years later, we were on set shooting the movie. I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to work with, and I still can’t quite believe I got to work with Margo Martindale on my debut effort. She’s that rare breed of person that makes you forget how incredibly talented they are because of how down-to-earth they are. A collaborator like her makes directing feel easy. I’m very proud of the movie we made together, and the world that it shines a light on.
I’m also excited to be premiering in New York so that my family and friends can attend. There’s also a nice little Easter egg being at this festival, as the Hunts Point Market where my dad worked opened in 1967 after its previous location in lower Manhattan was bulldozed for redevelopment.
That old freight yard is now called Tribeca.
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