If you live in Georgia, you’ve probably heard of the Festival of Trees, the annual holiday tradition that features a forest of beautiful Christmas trees and plenty of holiday cheer. Now, a movie from local filmmakers Drew Waters and Erin Bethea is making that holiday tradition part of the plot.
“Festival of Trees,” directed by Waters and co-written by and co-starring Bethea, stars actress Kate Miner as Jacquie, an Atlanta-based designer whose big break rests on winning the Festival of Trees competition. Along with her assistant and friend Heather (Sara Heyter), Jacquie races to win the competition while learning a little bit about the true spirit of Christmas along the way.
Waters is originally from Texas, and Bethea was born in Marietta but spent most of her early years in Albany, Ga. The two moved to L.A. and then met on a set out in Santa Fe, NM. Friendship blossomed into a relationship, and they also started a business together – Argentum Entertainment. They decided to move to Georgia in 2020, quickly jumping into the film and television world here.
“Festival of Trees” is now available to watch at home, and a few theatrical, cast-attended screenings are coming up this week. From Dec. 12-14, Studio Movie Grills in Duluth, Alpharetta and Marietta will be showing the film. Tickets are on sale here, and proceeds from the special screenings will benefit Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
Ahead of the screenings, Rough Draft Atlanta spoke to Waters and Bethea about the making of the film, what types of holiday movies they gravitate towards, and what’s special about making a film set in Atlanta. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where did the idea for “Festival of Trees” come from?
Erin Bethea: The idea for the story of “Festival of Trees” actually came from another producer friend of ours, Deborah Moore. She brought us the story. She grew up loving the Georgia Festival of Trees and loving the events, just thinking it was such a magical, cool, family-oriented event that also really celebrated art and design, and people’s stories and people’s point of view on the world. She just thought that’s such a cool Christmas movie, and would also be visually beautiful. She came to us with this idea, and we fell in love with it immediately and said, “Can we take it and run with it?” And she said, “Yes, you can.”
Then we got really lucky along the way to be able to partner with the actual Georgia Festival of Trees to help make the movie happen, and then to also partner with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta in order to be able to give back to the community through it. It’s been a really fun story to tell, because … when you go to the Festival of Trees, even here in Atlanta, you get to really see what a diverse and interesting and fascinating community we have here. The trees are all so different, and seeing what people love to celebrate about the holidays, or want to display about themselves and their community and their culture and things like that – you really get to see that Atlanta is a real, thriving, diverse artistic community, which is lovely.
Speaking of those two partnerships, obviously the movie is called “Festival of Trees,” and CHOA plays a large part in it as well. But could you talk a little bit more specifically about how those two organizations came on board, and what they helped contribute to the film?
Drew Waters: We always try to find locations instead of living in a soundstage. We love working with local community businesses and enhancing the ability for people to know who they are. Hospitals are the hardest ones to find that allow you to shoot in, for multiple reasons. But Children’s Healthcare [of Atlanta], when we approached them … one of the characters in the movie is going through some health stuff – you know, it’s all positive and stuff, but going through some health stuff – so we thought, let’s take a chance. Let’s just see. We reached out to them, and they were building a brand new facility, so they had all these mock up rooms for donors and everybody to come through and look at, which is the exact room that the kids are in. We pitched the idea, can we use them? We always partner with a charity internally. When we do anything internal, from A to Z, we pick a charity that we give back to. Children’s was a great partner for this movie and for us.
Festival of Trees … we just asked the question, hey – a big cost for us is going to be these designer trees. Would it be possible to let you guys auction them off? Whoever wins, we pick out the ones that we want, and then you ask them, “Before you receive your tree, would you mind being in a movie?” [laughs]
Bethea: Can this movie borrow it before we deliver it to your house, basically. It was fun, because we ended up being able to partner with the actual festival, which helped us then celebrate more people in Atlanta who had contributed trees to the festival by demonstrating those actual trees in the movie. Then our film crew became a tree delivery service for the weekend. We drove all over Atlanta dropping trees off of people’s homes.
Waters: And our two Hero Trees are being auctioned off this year.
Bethea: Actually just were.
Waters: Yeah, just were auctioned off.
Nice. I can’t imagine anyone would say no to that, like – can my tree be in a movie before it gets to my house?
Bethea: Yeah – can my beautiful Christmas tree be in a Christmas movie?
Waters: Independents, you always gotta be creative. How do we benefit each other?
Speaking of Christmas movies, this movie kind of gives me fuzzy, Hallmark-y Christmas movie vibes in the best way possible. What has your relationship been to those types of movies in the past?
Bethea: I think we’re both big fans of more of the types of Christmas movies that we grew up watching. I think Christmas movies have kind of taken a rebrand over the last decade – in a way that I think is great. You know, there’s sort of the typical Hallmark formula that we even make fun of, right? There’s TikTok videos making fun of it all over the place, and I think those are great! But I think Drew and I both grew up loving movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and “Home Alone,” and “Christmas Vacation,” and “The Holiday” – you know, things like that.
It was important to us with “Festival of Trees” to serve both audiences, right? To create a story that would deliver to the audience that loves a good, sweet, Hallmark-style Christmas movie – this movie absolutely delivers that – and to an audience that wants something a little bit less formulaic, a little bit more comedic, a little bit more colorful and interesting. This movie kind of rides the line that serves that as well. It’s not a typical, you know, “big city girl goes back to her small town” kind of thing. I think our heroine in this movie, she isn’t seeking anything or missing anything or looking for anything. She isn’t selfish or silly. She’s smart and she’s driven and she’s whole. She just has this moment where it takes community and people to help her remember a few of the things that she’s forgotten in her pursuits.
Waters: I think you [Erin] say it best when you say it’s “The Devil Wears Prada” meets Christmas.
Bethea: “The Devil Wears Prada” at Christmastime, yes [laughs].
Waters: Christmas isn’t rom-coms for me. Christmas is family, excitement, kids, joy. And the thing I love about this Christmas movie is it takes a child to remind the grown-ups what Christmas is all about, and find the joy in it again. Life isn’t perfect, and we shouldn’t try to over layer it as perfect, you know? The imperfection is what makes things perfect, and that’s what this movie does so well. I think it has all these little imperfections that everybody can relate to. And at the end of it, it turns out with a perfect ending to a Christmas movie.
Speaking to the humor of it, I thought the actress who played Heather, Sara Hayter, was very funny. It was her film debut, am I right about that?
Bethea: Feature film debut.
Which is super impressive. I wondered if you could talk about the casting process and bringing everyone together for this.
Bethea: We took on the casting process ourselves, rather than hiring a casting director, largely because I wrote the movie, and I’m also an acting coach here in Atlanta. So there are a lot of Atlanta actors that I’ve seen and known and know really well. I understand the talent that’s in our backyard, I think, in a different way than a typical Atlanta casting director, or even L.A. casting director, certainly. We took that on ourselves, and we were very lucky to get Kate Miner on board, who plays Jacquie. She does a wonderful job, and I think people who only know her as Tami from “Shameless” will be really delighted by how funny she is, and how sweet she is in this movie.
Waters: Yeah, she’s nothing like that here. [Laughs]
Bethea: Sara, she’s a born-and-raised Atlanta actress, and she just came in and won the role. She’s so funny, so dry and so wonderful. Then we’ve got loads of other Atlanta talent – there’s Alpha Trivette, who’s the new Grandpa Walton, and Aaron Goldenberg, who’s not only a great actor, but a massive social media influencer and does a great job. We really were looking for people who understood the comedic voice. The comedy was really important to me, that it not get lost and that the movie not be too sweet, you know? The character of Heather, she’s my favorite character I’ve ever written. She kind of picks up the tone that I wanted for the comedy, which is, it’s a little irreverent. She’s got one line in the movie where she says, “Christmas Day can be about the kids, today is about winning.” [Laughs] You know, a little of that comedic irreverence. And we needed a crew of actors across the board who could bring to it a little of that tone to keep it from being so saccharine sweet.
You’ve touched on this a little bit, just talking about filming in location and filming in Atlanta specifically. Atlanta is a hub for film production, but while it might be common to find a film that was shot here, I think it’s way less common to have a film that’s actually set here. Could you both talk about tying this film to the Atlanta and greater Georgia community specifically?
Bethea: Yeah, that’s one of our favorite things about it.
Waters: I think we just wanted to give a nod. You know, we live here now, and all the local businesses [in the film] are here – I think maybe three of them have some kind of national footprint, but the rest of them are local. We wanted to give it a nod. It’s funny, because I agree – when you think of Christmas movies, you don’t really think Atlanta.
Bethea: It’s all New York City or Vermont, you know?
Waters: I think the tone of our Christmas movie, since it’s not a rom-com – it’s not a young girl leaving the big city, going back home and finding her long-lost boyfriend from high school and rekindling that thing – we just kept it in the big city. We kept it around an event that is very important to both Children’s Healthcare and Atlanta, and they have their own charity. A lot of people donated time to locations, and when you have that, you want to be respectful of it, and you want to say thank you.
We just didn’t see a need this time – we love traveling. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Georgia’s great to shoot in and everything else, but I’m a traveler. We got into this business because we love traveling, and we love shooting abroad. We have a movie set in England that we’re gonna shoot in Ireland. We have another one in Arizona, another one in Michigan. But they’re written in those worlds, you know? And since we necessarily don’t shoot on soundstages, we shoot on location, it’s important for us to be able to kind of show that, because all the locations are characters as well, and you want to make sure that they enhance your product.
Bethea: I think it’s also a little bit of a love letter to our town that we live in now. You know, it’s one of the things that, for me, I think is important about the Georgia film industry in particular – supporting the local filmmakers, right? Because we live here and invest in this place every single day. Two days ago, I had coffee at the coffee shop where we filmed, you know? So our day-to-day lives are about investing in these businesses, in these locations. While it’s wonderful that we have these massive Hollywood movies that come in here and hire our crew and can turn a soundstage into another planet … I think that’s one of the things that I love about being not a filmmaker who lives in Georgia, but a Georgia filmmaker – being able to tell stories and celebrate the lives that we live on a daily basis, and to say these are interesting, beautiful, colorful lives that we live in Atlanta. Interesting enough that we should make a movie about that, and not just use the state of Georgia as a tax incentive.
