by candice dyer photography by maryann bates

Camera with a

conscience
Filmmaker’s art
comes from the heart
While shooting a movie in Ethiopia, James Kicklighter
wandered alone at dawn into some high grass, hoping
to film the sort of molten, birth-of-creation sunrise that
symbolizes Africa.
While adjusting his camera, he was startled by a man
brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle. Realizing they shared
no common language, Kicklighter began pantomiming
his intentions, pointing frantically to the camera and then
the horizon. The man responded with a motion of his
weapon that indicated an ominous command: march. He
forced a panicked, sweating Kicklighter farther into the
undergrowth at gunpoint.
“I genuinely thought that field in Ethiopia was the last
thing I would ever see,” said Kicklighter, who was 21 at the
time. “No one would have found me.”
Finally, they reached a clearing. The guard pointed his
rifle toward the sky and left as abruptly as he had appeared.
He helpfully had led Kicklighter to a better vantage point,
where the knockout opening scene was filmed for “Land
of Higher Peace,” one of three projects the up-and-coming
filmmaker has entered in this month’s Macon Film Festival.
“At the end of the day, I got the shot we were waiting for,
and that is all that counts,” he said.
For Kicklighter, movie making is not just a route to the
red carpet; it is a risky calling gratified by intangible but
deeply felt rewards. “Land of Higher Peace” explores the
daily challenges of Ethiopia – the “pain and beauty” –
through the eyes of American Christians at an orphanage
in Gondar. His other festival entries also are intimate
dramas of human connection: “Winter,” filmed in a north
Georgia cabin, and “The Car Wash,” a “coming of old age”

30 l MACON MAGAZINE FEBRUARY/MARCH 2011

 (1) James Kicklighter instructs child actor Joshua Tweedy and zombie extras in 1
the opening scene of the short film "Followed,” which was shot here in Macon in
December. This scene took place in Washington Park. (2) Kicklighter gives direction
to lead actor Erryn Arkin and actress Sylvia Boykin in a scene shot at the So Chi
Gallery. (3) Kickligher reviews with director of photography Jason Winn on a scene
shot at Mercer University. (4) From left, Kicklighter, Kasey Ray-Stokes, child actress
Abigail de los Reyes, Abigail's dad Bruce Reyes-Chow, Mark Ezra Stokes and Rachel
Williams view on a monitor a scene previously shot at the Terminal Station.

story starring grande dame Edith Ivey, who appeared in “The

Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” (During filming, Ivey’s
affecting monologues about mortality and loneliness left even
the well-rehearsed crew in tears.)
“There’s nothing wrong with making a popcorn flick for pure
entertainment,” Kicklighter said, “but film is such a powerful
medium that I think there’s a responsibility there to go a step
2
further and interact with the audience, to ask questions that
make viewers evaluate
their own lives and what
is really important. I Macon Film Festival
don’t have the answers, • Feb. 17 - 20
but I like to use strong • Downtown at various venues
storytelling to pose • www.maconfilmfestival.com
questions, with the hope Three of James Kicklighter’s
that viewers will seek works will be featured.
out their own answers. I
received an e-mail from PAGE 73
a lady in Pennsylvania Read more about the festival.
telling me that she had
just watched ‘The Car
Wash’ and for the first time felt she wasn’t alone. Just that one
message made that entire project worthwhile.” 3
Kicklighter, a 22-year-old from Bellville, is inevitably tagged
as a prodigy, wunderkind and lovable “old soul,” with eight
movies to his credit, more in the works and a shelf of awards
from indie film festivals and arts organizations around the
world. He established JamesWorks Entertainment at 16 with
the mission “to create socially conscious films that engage
our audiences through new media to action in their personal
lives, communities and around the globe.” So, in a Tinseltown
yearbook, he might be voted “least likely to appear in the credits
of a Michael Bay schlockbuster.” Kicklighter’s visions of “pain
and beauty” do not involve the shoot-’em-up car chases, breast-
implant buffets and other cheap effects that define big-budget
American cinema. Granted, his most recent film, “Followed,”
which was shot in Macon, features zombies, but it may be his
most ambitious “message movie” to date, redefining horror in 4
terms of everyday guilt. These undead do not eat brains; they go
deeper, tugging balefully at your conscience, haunting you for
lapses in social responsibility, for sins of omission.
“The zombies represent all of the invisible people in our lives
we should care about – the homeless person under the bridge,
kids in a sweatshop – but don’t,” he said. “At best, we throw
money at the problem, but we don’t stop to touch these people,
to feel them, to bring them back into the community. One of
the zombies in ‘Followed’ is wearing shoes made of plastic water
bottles because we’d seen a child in Ethiopia wearing those,
scrounged from the trash. So we weren’t trying to be campy or
cheesy; we’re using zombies to illustrate real social divisions.”
Kicklighter does not have stars in his eyes, but he clearly has seen
Continued on page 56

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2011 MACON MAGAZINE I 31

Continued from page 31
the light of an African sunrise. His agonized
sincerity is authentic, in part because he
has learned some hard lessons about the
importance of a clear conscience himself.
Early on, when he was just a kid, traumatic
grief merged with his flair for magical
thinking, and, like so many great illusionists,
he started his career with a forgivable lie.
“I grew up in a town that was exactly one
square mile in size with a population of 150
people,” he said, referring to Bellville, in
southeast Georgia.
His father and mother were teachers
who assiduously “exposed him to in-
utero classical music,” noted his mother,
Barbara, who came from a British family
of vaudeville performers and learned
bohemians.
James was literally reading in the crib. “He
could read at age 2 1/2,” she said proudly. The
following year, he began chattering about
an alternate “universe called ‘Toonsvilva,’”
peopled with a sprawling cast of characters
who experienced an array of ups and downs,
including death and resurrection.
“I thought he might become a preacher,”
Barbara Kicklighter said. “We were a close
and highly verbal family, always snuggling
together to read beautiful books and tell
stories instead of watching much TV. James’
father, who taught chemistry and physics,
was this charismatic person who could
walk into a room and instantly become best
friends with everyone. I see his warmth in
James.”
When the dreamy, friendly boy was 13,
his father, Jerry Asbury Kicklighter, died
mysteriously. “He was perfectly healthy one
week and dead the next,” he said. “We’ve
speculated that it may have been SARS, but
56 l MACON MAGAZINE
that hasn’t been confirmed.”
Kicklighter retreated deep into his
imagination. “It’s very traumatic for anyone
to lose a parent, but at that age, after the
quiet set in, with all of the loneliness,
I went back into that childhood mode,
using movies to escape.” He studied show
business with an overachiever’s zeal, crafted
scripts and, along the way, appropriated the
accomplishments of a real screenwriter,
Michael Goldenberg, known for his work
in the Harry Potter series.
“I made up this crazy story that I was a
writer and producer for Universal Pictures
with these screen credits, and I began
planting stuff on the Internet, which led
to newspapers and radios interviewing me
and reporting this information as true –
nobody checked facts too closely,” he said.
“It spiraled out of control.”
Brewton-Parker College drama professor
Mark Ezra Stokes heard about the budding
genius and invited him to collaborate on
a documentary about a character actor
who grew up in Augusta. “That Guy: the
Legacy of Dub Taylor,” featuring interviews
with Dixie Carter and John Mellencamp,
became Kicklighter’s first legitimate film
project. He was still a teenager.
“During the process of making that
film, I sensed something was off about the
credentials James was claiming, and we
code-talked around it until after filming
when I finally asked him what was up,”
Stokes said. “More importantly, during the
project, my wife and I had fallen in love
with the real James – who is so much cooler
than the not-real James – and decided that
whatever he was hiding, we were going to
stand with him through thick and thin.”
Kicklighter issued an apologetic
confession in 2008 to the media and
Facebook friends, who were mostly
supportive and understanding in their
comments. “I absolutely regret misleading
people,” he said, “but it was almost a way of
putting myself through film school because
I ended up learning so much. At some
point, the lie became truth. It was sort of a
sad ‘Catch Me If You Can’ story that seems
like an eternity ago.”
Kicklighter earned a bachelor’s degree in
public relations from Georgia Southern,
working on films during weekends. When
he’s not on location, he lodges outside
Savannah with Stokes and his wife, Kasey,
who form the core of his production team.
He recently was profiled in Examiner.com’s
“CEOs Under 25” series.
“The Car Wash” notably has won several
awards, including “best drama” at the
Melbourne Independent Filmmakers
Festival. Kicklighter began writing the
script, about the meeting of two isolated
souls, on his flight back from Ethiopia.
“I was reflecting on something that an
elderly woman said to me at a car wash,”
he recalls. “The only words she said were,
‘My husband died.’ I started thinking about
modern communication, how young
people are so busy texting that they haven’t
learned how to converse with someone like
that. That turned into this movie, which is
about her acceptance of aging and death,
that things are not going to be what they
were, but primarily it is about this young
man’s realization at the end that he needs to
learn to connect in real ways.”
In Kicklighter’s richly imagined
universe of pain of beauty, characters find
redemption and resurrection through
community. M
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