“My mother was raised in a dirt shack in Kentucky,” indie filmmaker Timothy Hines reminisces, “Literally slept in a lean-to in a rut with a piece of canvas underneath her.” This touch of history is clear in his period comedy The Wilde Girls, a rip-roaring Prohibition-era showdown between two young women who are kicked out of high society and find their callings in a world of criminals.

Hines, writer/director of the period comedy The Wilde Girls sat down with TVBrittanyF. He was joined by the film’s producer and his partner, Susan Goforth, and actor Teddy Smith (Silas Coulter) to discuss the production of the riches-to-rags story and finding the right voice for this fish-out-of-water crime comedy.

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The Wilde Girls follows two young heiresses, Mattie (Cali Scolari) and Tinsley (Lydia Pearl Pentz), after they’ve been dispossessed of their inheritance by their conniving aunts. Exiled from their New York estate to the deep woods of rural Oregon, the girls have to survive wild animals, hired killers, and each other with the help of a strange woodsman named Silas.

When asked about how this script got rolling, Hines tells us, “I’ve always had this idea of these entitled girls lost in the forest. First draft, they were very cartoonish, the kind of thing you see in ten-second memes. As I started to write the script, they started to talk to me. Mattie transformed into this entirely different person, who took care of her younger sister. A younger sister so unaware of the world that she puts a cigarette out on somebody’s back and thinks that’s perfectly rude, but complains Silas is rude to her after she blows up his truck.”

Speaking on the place and period, Hines tells us about his parents and how they impacted his approach to the story. “I grew up hearing about the bee’s knees, the 1920s, and what the Great Depression was like. My parents and most of the people of their generation lived through the Great Depression. I grew up hearing stories of the amazing, incredible tales of survival, of living in the forest without electricity, facing down bears.”

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From an early age, Hines found value in those stories. He tells us, “When I was a kid, I had a tape recorder, and I recorded their stories. I wound up with about 15 years of stories from survival in the forest, during the Great Depression.” Susan corroborates, “His mother was the sure shot. At ten years old, she could shoot a quail in the eye and feed the family.” Regarding one of the early pivotal scenes, where Silas fights off a bear with a knife, Hines explained that, “My father, actually, is the one who faced the bear. It actually happened.”

Speaking of his performance in Wilde Girls, Smith explained that “I was surprised that I could pull off being a mountain man.” A New York City resident, Smith tells us, “I’m a city guy, I’m not really an outdoorsman. Tim brought it out of me, choking snakes and bears.” Tim was quick to agree, noting that at one point during production, “There was a snake that went over to Teddy and he screamed like a little girl!” Most of the production was shot on location, during a record 105-degree heatwave. Every scene was plagued by a proliferation of ground-hornets, which brought some natural energy to the time-period comedy.

“It truly mirrored what was going on on screen, behind the camera,” Hines explained. “We had challenge after challenge after challenge for survival. And somewhere, about three days into the shoot, we found the humor in it… Truhfully, I’d say 90% of the outtakes were just because we were cracking up, not just at the script but what was going on behind the scenes. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is going to be a disaster. Then, somehow, we all found each other as a family.”

The Wilde Girls premiered on June 6th at the Cinema Village in Manhattan.