Eye Candy of the Week: Martin Hynes

Martin Hynes likes to steals things.  Well, he likes to writes screenplays about people who steal things.  A few years ago Hynes wrote a little screenplay called “Stealing Stanford,” in which a mom and dad duo take up a life of crime in order to pay for their daughter’s ivy league education.  Sound familiar?  In 2002 it was re-written into that memorable pic Stealing Harvard, featuring the effervescent Tom Green.

But now Hynes has returned to the topic of theft with his latest feature, The Go-Getter, starring Lou Taylor Pucci (Thumbsucker), Zooey Deschanel and Jena Malone.  The indie pic premiered at Sundance in 2007, then made its way to Cannes and is finally opening to limited release this weekend.  In Hynes’ admittedly semi-autobiographical tale (he once spent a year on the road), 19-year-old Mercer (Pucci) steals a station wagon from a car wash and leaves his hometown of Eugene, Oregon, on a mission to find his half-brother and inform him of their mother’s death.  But to make things a little more interesting, the car’s owner  (Deschanel) has left her cell phone in the Volvo and promptly calls Mercer at the beginning of his adventures.  Rather than being angry, she is simply curious and their running dialogue throughout Mercer’s trip evolves into a flirtatious friendship that is only escalated when she shows up in the flesh.  Mercer encounters a number of characters as he makes his way from Oregon to Reno, through the Mojave Desert, into L.A., and then finally to his half-brother in Ensenada, Mexico.

Hynes isn’t one to give in to the conventional, Hollywood ways of filming.  The cast and crew went on a pseudo road trip themselves during the making of the pic, as it was shot in sequence, on scene, over five weeks.

The helmer made his start while attending USC, where his student film Al As In Al played at HBO’s Comedy Arts Festival.  Hynes went on to direct the low-budget, indie pic The Big Split, in which the director also starred in opposite Judy Greer (who makes an appearance in The Go-Getter).  His only purely acting gig, Hynes starred in the comedic short George Lucas in Love, which became somewhat of a hit via the Internet.  The next project for the writer/director/actor will be a romantic thriller entitled 4AM Automatic, which is still in development.

So here’s the man himself, talking about The Go-Getter, sunglasses and Judy Greer, all from the same car that was used in the upcoming feature.  Check out his YouTube post below.