How Matthew Osubor Turned a Chance Meeting With an Indie Film Veteran Into No-Budget Debut ‘Big Daddy’s Flowers’

The Providence, Rhode Island-based filmmaker was in a grocery store when a stranger dropped an orange. Osubor picked it up. The stranger turned out to be Alexandre Rockwell, the American indie director of In the Soup, the Steve Buscemi-Seymour Cassel comedy that took the Sundance grand jury prize in 1992 and helped define that decade’s U.S. independent scene. Within a few minutes, Osubor had a conversation. Within a few weeks, a job on Rockwell’s The Projectionist. Eventually, he had a mentor, a producer and a place to live.

“Long story short, at a grocery store, he dropped an orange. I just picked it up, and he hired me on a film that he was working on,” Osubor says. “One thing led to another.”

Where it has finally led is Oldenburg, the scrappy northern German festival long branded Germany’s answer to Sundance, where Osubor’s debut feature Big Daddy’s Flowers world premieres. The film is a crime comedy with a large dollop of satire. Osubor wrote, directed and plays the lead role as a flower delivery driver, who is struggling to pay his rent and work off mounting debts, who realizes he is actually working for a powerful local crime boss named Big Daddy and his deliveries are not what they seem.

Big Daddy’s Flowers is also pure indie cinema: It was shot without permits, without money (the official budget was $2,000), and without a paid cast — a set of conditions that makes a European premiere feel to its director like a clerical error in his favor.

“Didn’t think we were gonna make a feature,” he says. “Didn’t think we were then gonna get a feature that got into a festival like this.”

The path there was not straight. Osubor had made a short that played well with friends and family and nowhere else, collecting festival rejections. Rockwell told him not to read those as a verdict — a film can be good and still not fit a festival programer’s taste. He offered Osubor the conventional advice: apply to film school. NYU, Columbia, somewhere he can built contacts and join the system. Rockwell has taught at NYU, and knew exactly what those rooms are worth.

Osubor did the math.

“I still have student loans for my undergraduate studies,” he says, highlighting an economic anxiety that migrated directly into his script for Big Daddy’s Flowers. “With this whole economy and everything, that’s a big part of this film — to use satire to talk about the illusion of economic security.” Even if he got a full scholarship, he reasoned, there was no way he could afford rent in New York City. And filmmaking, unlike law or medicine, issues no license at the end of the program and has no job guarantees.

“With film or art, even if you make a piece that resonates, a piece that’s a masterpiece, there’s no guarantee at all,” he notes.

So Osubor made a counter offer: what if the feature was the film school?

“I said, Alex, what about if I make a feature film? Would you support me making the film? Make that my film school,” Osubor recalls. “He said, ‘fine, all right. If you want to make a film, let’s make a film. Let’s go the whole way.'”

Rockwell and his wife, actress Karyn Parsons — known to 90s TV fans as Hilary Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air — did not confine their support to encouragement. They gave Osubor a room, rent free, for the duration of the shoot, the sort of stability a no-budget production almost never has. “I lived with them as I made the film. He was very charitable,” Osubor says. “The whole thing was almost like a residency. Everything was included.” Rockwell also had a key piece of hardware Osubor lacked: a camera.

“Yeah, I didn’t have a camera. Actually, I still don’t,” he laughs.

What followed was extreme independent filmmaking. “100 percent sweat equity” says Osubor of how he financed Big Daddy’s Flowers. With no money and no permits, every piece of the production came about through negotiations and trade. “I asked someone, ‘can I shoot this part outside your house?’ And they were like: ‘Can you vacuum my basement?’ So to get the location, I’d vacuum their basement.”

Shops and businesses opened their doors on the condition that nobody stopped working. “Businesses were really accommodating to us, but they weren’t going to close their business. So we shot around that.”

As the lead, Osubor did all his stunts himself. Including a scene where he walks, unawares, across an active freeway into oncoming traffic.

“The cars are going 45-50mph,” he recalls, “the goal was to time it in such a way that the cars wouldn’t be able to react and stop or slow down and spoil the shot [and] to calmly walk across the four lanes of freeway.”

Rockwell compared Osubor’s approach to his start, shooting in New York in the ’80s, when rent was survivable and permits were optional. “He’d say all the time: don’t ask for permission, just do it. Get your film made. You’re too small to fail.”

Though he’s not eager to repeat the experience of making a no-budget film — “I’d like the next one to have a budget, even a small one” — he says his on-the-job film school was worth the effort. “I did this film out of fear, the fear that I would never make a movie,” he says. “Now that I’ve done it. Nothing scares me.”

Whatever comes out of Oldenburg for Big Daddy’s Flowers — the film does not yet have a distributor, or a sales agent — Osubor hopes his example, of making the movie, whatever it takes, can serve as an inspiration for others outside the system.

“[Maybe] a filmmaker somewhere, the artist somewhere, who feels like they’re at a dead end, can see this movie and it inspires them to take a chance, to take a risk, to try something,” he says, adding: “And I hope that Alexandre and Karyn’s example will inspire people to support them.”