The first thing Ari Selinger remembers noticing about Tom Ferreira was his butt crack.
In college, while scouting locations for a short film he was making in Montauk, Selinger saw Ferreira bent over, working on one of the cars in his front yard (his home doubled as a repair shop). He struck Selinger as a sort of Hank Hill type. But then, he started talking to him.
“This guy’s really smart,” Selinger remembered thinking. “He was one of those guys that you’re like – I would have never had any idea that you have so much going on in your head.”
That initial meeting blossomed into a friendship that led Selinger to want to tell Ferreira’s story. His new film “On the End,” which played at this year’s Rome International Film Festival, stars Tim Blake Nelson as Ferreira. In the film, Tom finds love online with a woman named Freckles (Mireille Enos), but their happiness is threatened when an ambitious real estate agent (Anna Chlumsky) trying to sell the property next door tries to turn the community against them.
The movie follows Tom’s eventual federal suit of the city of Montauk (he claimed town officials improperly used health and safety laws to forcibly clean up his yard, all in pursuit of increasing the neighboring property value), but the heart of the film is the relationship between Tom and Freckles. Selinger said he wanted to meld these two things – small town politics and a love story – to create a slice of storybook, Americana life.
“It’s time to make my first feature. I need something that I can sink my teeth into,” Selinger said. “When you make a feature … you need to want to work on it for at least three years or so. I was like, well, Tom’s a really good friend. That’ll keep the engine going.”
Selinger got in touch with Nelson through actor Will Janowitz, who had just starred with Nelson in the film “Bang Bang.” Nelson said part of what drew him to Selinger as a director was a sense of trust. Because of Selinger’s long and close relationship with Ferreira, Nelson trusted that he could tell the story well.
“It was a story that he really knew,” Nelson said. “That’s incredibly important.”
According to Selinger, Nelson said yes right before the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike began, which put a halt on the film’s progress.
“But, for that reason, we were able to become friends and for it to percolate for the two of us,” Selinger said. “I was able to let it seep in: it’s going to be Tim that plays Tom.”
Ferreira, who struggled with diabetes and other health problems throughout his life, passed away in 2024. But Nelson was able to spend a lot of time with Ferreira ahead of filming (and during – “On the End” was filmed just down the street from Ferreira’s actual home). He talked to Ferreira about very personal things, and even slept in his home.
“When you’re able to breathe a person in that way, by being with them, then hopefully when you exhale, it’s gonna infect you in a way that you start to become that person,” Nelson said.
Nelson said that as an actor, he used to find a character by working from the outside in. But, in the early 2010s, he started taking on larger roles, like Anse Bundren in “As I Lay Dying.” While some of the productions he was working in might have been bare bones, that only meant that there was a heavier focus on the acting. This, along with working with Daniel Day-Lewis in Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln,” started to change the way he approached the art form.
“It’s more about finding that person inside of you, and then trusting that that’s going to do the work of transformation,” Nelson said.
While Tom is the film’s main character, the best thing in the film is his chemistry with his other half, Freckles. Selinger said he was worried about being able to boil down some of the story’s more complicated court dealings, but he knew the romance would be the most important thing.
“As I was writing it, I was like, the love story is the ace of it,” he said.
When it came to casting Freckles, Selinger had memories of seeing actress Mireille Enos’ face on the sides of buses in New York City when she starred in the AMC series “The Killing.” Her face stayed with him.
“She was delightful,” Selinger said. “You know, you send your script to an actor, and it takes them maybe a month to read it. She read in, like, five days.”
Nelson said that his connection with Enos was instantaneous. The movie calls for Nelson to be as intimate with another person on screen as he has ever had to be, but he said he was very comfortable with Enos, both physically and spiritually.
“We’re both married and have kids, and so the boundaries were very clear,” Nelson said. “It’s that notion of good fences make good neighbors. We were able to go into the physical intimacy in a very responsible but fearless way that worked for the movie and that also allowed for comfortability in scenes that weren’t that way.”
