The day is Saturday, December 14, 2024. A nervous and stressed-out Owen Wilson is backstage at Travis Scott’s headline set at Rolling Loud Miami. He and his two sons, who are both Rolling Loud and Scott enthusiasts, Scott’s best friend and thriller “OG” and film director Jeremy Garelick. A full film crew, both backstage and in the crowd, anxiously hopes to capture the climactic moment of “Rolling Loud: The Movie,” which is loosely based on Garelick’s experience of sneakily bringing his 13-year-old son, Zion, to the festival and losing him. The only problem is, no one is quite sure if the moment they’ve all been waiting for (Scott unveiling Wilson in front of 50,000 fans) will actually happen because of all the moving parts. They wait for confirmation while Garelick checks their messages over and over.
In the audience, stars Matt Rife and Christine Ko, along with other actors and crew, challenge festivalgoers and try to get perfect multi-angle shots of the entrance. At one point, Rife and Ko, who play a crazy, chaotic comedy duo who assist Wilson throughout the film, are told that the moment will not happen and that they can hit the road. Hopeful and enthusiastic about the show, they quickly reply, “No, we’re staying here.” They’re too synchronized with the vibration to be bailable.
Backstage, where tequilas are distributed and handed out among the adults, Wilson is constantly checking the entry plan. “I’m not supposed to dance, am I? Where exactly do I stand?” he asks. OG answered her first and she said, “Yes, you can dance, you can dance when you go out!” Then by Garelick, who reminded him that to get the crowd going for a rendition of Scott’s hit song “Fein,” he had to come out, grab the microphone, and roar the command, “I ‘fien’ for more.” Wilson’s statement was Scott’s own idea and they had discussed it in an earlier meeting.
Rife, Ko and others in the audience begin to lose their minds. They see Wilson holding the microphone, looking out at the adrenaline-filled crowd, shouting the agreed-upon phrase, and throwing his arms in the air in enthusiasm. Like magic upon declaration, arm raises and kick drops rain down rainstorms on the audience.
Not only did the team capture Garelick from different angles with deep joy and relief, but so did the audience, making the event endlessly viral. Generation Z fans were both ecstatic and hilariously confused when they saw Lightning McQueen on stage with one of his musical heroes. “You can see how hard musicians have to calm down after gigs because I had an adrenaline rush for days because of the energy I felt,” Wilson recalled of the exciting scene. “I didn’t actually dance, but I did a lot of jumping. I’ve worked on a million movies and had so many different funny, memorable experiences. This is definitely in the top five of everything I’ve ever done.” The scene naturally became the film’s final climax, and stylistically it has a fundamental purpose: to make you feel like you’re at a real festival.
The partnership between Garelick’s founders and promoters American High Studios, Live Nation Studios, and Rolling Loud was crucial to making this goal achievable. Executive Ryan Kroft said of the particular push for authenticity: “We’re Live Nation; we can’t make a movie where the festival looks fake.” “There are other movies that I won’t name; they’re set at a festival, but they’re obviously in a parking lot and there’s 150 people. It would be a very expensive movie to try to build a fake festival to scale and have the headliner perform to 50,000 fans. But if you can partner with a company like Live Nation, you get access.”
This access resulted in Garelick bringing his crew first to Los Angeles, then to Miami with Wilson and others to the festival, not only to shoot big scenes like the Scott moment, but also to experience the energy and be able to replicate it for later shoots. “It’s a lot easier to create things when you know the environment,” Garelick explained of the world-building process. “To capture this, we needed to build an array camera. It consists of three cameras facing different directions, where no one can be within a 20-metre radius. [roguely] enters the frame and blocks it. If you’ve been to Rolling Loud, you know it’s not an easy thing to do.
In one scene in Atlanta, where the rest of the film was shot, they used elusive footage as reference to build a fake world that matched the real world exactly. Garelick chose this type of stage because of his experience seeing U2 at the Sphere in Vegas (also on a voluminous stage), as he believed it would naturally parallel the necessary resonance and boom of a festival venue. “It was so loud I couldn’t hear what I was thinking,” Garelick recalled of the feeling he knew he had to replicate. “Communication was so difficult that I had to wear gunshot headphones to focus.”
Matt Rife (left) and Owen Wilson from “Rolling Loud.”
(Ian Spanier / For the Times)
As you watch the film, the festival sets shot live blend seamlessly with shots of the crowd, both live and later simulated in Atlanta. One minute you could be watching a steamy set by Playboi Carti or Sexyy Red, and the next you might feel like you’re wading through a crowd of scantily clad festivalgoers with Rife, Ko, and Wilson zipping past them in drug-fuelled passion. “We had to get into a lot of holes,” Rife recalled of filming at the festival. “One time we were so far in the crowd that we were swaying without the strength to walk in the direction we wanted. I imagined how a parent in Owen felt. [when] They take their children to a haunted house. “I was scared too, but I couldn’t show him that I was scared.”
Ko had many moments in his scenes that exuded similar chaos, and it served him well after he relocated. “It was great because we knew exactly what it felt like when we went to Georgia and shot everything else,” he explained. “We remembered the heat, the wind, the rain, and it was really easy to get into character.”
Maintaining the angry mayhem was crucial to supporting the stakes of the main story: a terrified, out-of-water father who has lost his son and desperately needs to find him. “Seeing the energy and the order of the place, it became easy to imagine that it would be crazy if you broke up over this,” Owen instinctively recalled.
The father-son story at the center is what motivated Garelick to take on such a daunting project. “It was logistically stressful and I could have walked away many times,” she said. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to show my son this story as a gift to celebrate that important moment in our lives.”
Much of what happened in Garelick’s real life was featured in the movie, including him and Zion being separated over food trucks and portable toilets (though he was found in real life after only 20 minutes). But the most interesting thing they reenacted was how Garelick sneaked Zion in. He was 13 at the time, and Rolling Loud’s age requirement was 16. “We get there and the first security guard says, ‘Oh, you can’t get in.'” Garelick recalled the actual moment dramatized in almost identical fashion.
“We were leaving, and I said, ‘You know what, Zion? This isn’t great parenting, but we’re going to go a different way in. When they ask for your ID, just tell them you’re 16 and you left your ID at home.’ We are going there. He’s lying. He’s much better at this than I am. I was so nervous that I constantly thought my wife was going to kill me. Then we go in. We weren’t celebrating because we didn’t want to get caught. “We walked away and did that silent punch together, which was reflected in the movie.”
Matt Rife (left) and Owen Wilson from “Rolling Loud.”
(Ian Spanier / For the Times)
Rolling Loud co-founder Matt Zingler was amused when he described Garelick’s slippery moment while promoting the film. “I laughed at that because I thought, ‘At least you were there as a parent, sneaking your kid in,’ which is a really sweet thing,” she said. Zingler and his team received numerous offers for films related to the festival, but something about what Garelick wanted to portray stood out. “I think Rolling Loud is for families in a weird way,” he said. “It was a way to connect parents with their children. It was also a timeless movie and felt like something my dad and I could watch together.”
Filled with improvised lunacy like self-pepper spraying, comedic nudity, and swirling mosh pits, the R-rated comedy still maintains an emotional through line. So the film’s suggested familial wholesomeness is oddly valid. But for Wilson, as a father who brought his sons to see them perform at their beloved Rolling Loud, intergenerational connection didn’t necessarily lead to complete understanding. “I still don’t know exactly what ‘fiening’ is. I guess it’s a version of fiening. I guess that’s how I played it,” he said with a chuckle.