This Friday, August 31, Self-Medicated, written and directed by Las Vegas native Monty Lapica, will open in 14 cities across the U.S., including Las Vegas, where it will play at Regal Cinemas’ Village Square and Green Valley Ranch theaters. Released by prominent indie distributor ThinkFilm, Self-Medicated is the highest-profile local independent film in a long time—perhaps ever.
It’s based on events in Lapica’s own life, and stars the filmmaker as Andrew Eriksen, a fictionalized version of himself as a teen. At 17, he was on a self-destructive path that ultimately led him to a draconian rehab facility in the desert outside of Las Vegas. All of these events are depicted in the film, with Lapica (who was 24 at the start of filming in 2003) reenacting parts of his own life. “My dad really did pass away when I was 14 years old, and his death sent me into a downward spiral,” he says by phone from LA, where he now spends about half his time. “I started getting arrested, I started hanging out with the wrong crowd, so to speak, and my life just took a turn for the worse. My grades went from being really good to being really terrible. I nearly didn’t graduate high school. That is all very much true.”
Reliving those painful experiences was a strange ordeal for the filmmaker. “Certain memories of what actually occurred when I was 17 and what occurred when I was making the film have sort of blended together, and it’s hard to distinguish the two,” he says. Of course, not everything was based entirely in fact. “I needed the character to be somewhat sympathetic, or I needed to give the audience a reason to root for him, not just have him be some punk kid, like I was at the time,” Lapica says about some of the fictionalized embellishments that he added.
But it was the film’s verisimilitude that made it a hit at a number of festivals, including CineVegas, where it premiered in 2005. “Initially there was zero interest from film distributors,” Lapica says, “because what we learned very early on was the first question they ask and their main interest is, who’s in it? And if you don’t have names, you don’t have much.” After garnering 39 awards at festivals around the world, though, the film finally had enough momentum to attract mainstream attention.
It was a long road to that point, starting at the treatment facility. “Initially I wanted to make a movie about this when I was actually locked up in the program,” Lapica says. After graduating from film school (at LA’s Loyola Marymount University) and drifting through low-level jobs in Hollywood, he decided to come back to Vegas and make a film on his own terms, and his teenage troubles seemed like the perfect subject matter. “I knew this character very well, and I knew this story very well, so I thought it would be beneficial to me as a first-timer to make this my first movie,” he says.
Along with friend and producer Tommy Bell, Lapica raised a small budget, enough to recruit experienced actors like Diane Venora and Greg Germann, and shot mostly in Las Vegas, including at his childhood home and Bonanza High, his alma mater.
“Basically we shot as much film as we could with the money we had at the time,” he explains. “And then we had to stop production, because the movie was a little bit more ambitious than what the money allowed.” Production eventually encompassed locations in California, Hawaii and Arizona as well.
Lapica has lived with this movie for a long time—over six months in the editing room, nearly two years at various festivals—and is ready to move on to something a little less personal, and less demanding. He and Bell are set to independently finance a thriller called Methodical, for which Lapica has written the script. He plans to direct but won’t be casting himself in the lead role again. “I would like to do all those things [again],” he laughs, “but not concurrently.”