Movie Spotlight: Only Feet

The first day of filming Only Feet was the soup scene. Director Walter Wright and lead actor Chance Johnson had been internet friends for fifteen years. Met on YouTube at age 15. Kept loosely in touch. Wright eventually found out Johnson had become a stand-up comedian, approached him about starring in a movie where a guy sells pictures of his feet for money, and the two of them met in person for the first time on set.

The soup scene.

Fun way to say hello.

The premise sounds like a joke and the movie knows it. Jace Dawson and his girlfriend Bella are broke, behind on rent, scraping by. Then someone offers Jace cash for photos of his feet. Real cash. The kind that solves problems. He keeps taking the money. He keeps it secret. The title is doing exactly what you think it's doing. But the film goes somewhere darker than the setup promises, and by the final act you're watching a different movie than the one you sat down for.

Wright shot the whole thing in black and white. Most of it on an iPhone.

The iPhone, the Canon, and Midnight

The iPhone wasn't a gimmick. It was the budget. Only Feet cost $60,000 and was filmed over two years, mostly on weekends. Johnson lived in a different state. Four hours each way, every shoot. That's commitment to a bit about feet.

The final scene breaks from the iPhone entirely. Wright borrowed a Canon R6, but the camera had to go back by midnight. They had fifteen minutes. One take. The actors improvised the dialogue.

That actor in the final scene, Nullen Boyde, wasn't even in the original script. Wright went to a local play near the end of production, watched Boyde perform, and rewrote the ending to add his character. Sometimes the best casting decisions happen by accident in a theater you weren't planning to visit.

Finn's Bar and the Halloween That Wouldn't End

The opening bar scene was a reshoot. They'd originally filmed it at a smaller location, scrapped the footage, started over at a bigger bar called Finn's. The script needed a Halloween look. Problem was, it was already mid-November.

The bar owners kept their Halloween decorations up for the shoot.

That's the kind of thing that happens on a micro-budget film. You don't have a production designer dressing a set. You have a bar owner who likes your energy enough to leave fake cobwebs on the walls for two extra weeks.

Fifteen Years of YouTube to One Movie

Wright and Johnson's story is its own thing. Two teenagers find each other on YouTube in 2010 or so. Stay in loose contact for over a decade. One becomes a filmmaker. The other becomes a comedian. Then the filmmaker calls up and says hey, I need someone to act deeply uncomfortable about feet for two years of weekends.

Johnson said yes. He did not, by all accounts, enjoy the feet scenes.

The film sits in a lineage of iPhone movies that keeps getting more legitimate. Sean Baker shot Tangerine on three iPhone 5s units and premiered at Sundance. Soderbergh made Unsane on an iPhone 7 Plus. Danny Boyle shot 28 Years Later on iPhone 15 Pro Max with a $75 million budget. Only Feet is closer to the Baker end of that spectrum. Scrappy. Resourceful. A borrowed camera with a midnight deadline.

Robin Covington anchors the whole thing as Bella. The Nerdly review called her "natural, grounded, believable" and she carries scenes that could easily tip into absurdity. The black-and-white grain gives everything a gritty texture. Wright clearly has an eye for composition even when the camera fits in his pocket.

Is it rough? Sure. The sound mix fights the score in places. Some scenes run long. But there's something real about a movie made this way. Two guys who met online as kids, a comedian who drove eight hours round trip on weekends, a camera that had to be returned by midnight, a bar that kept its Halloween decorations up because someone asked nicely. That's filmmaking.

Thriller

---

Streaming now on Relay.