You'll see a lot of Andre Hyland and Daniella Pineda in the coming weeks. You might even see them in town filming In Town.
Hyland, an Indian Hill High School graduate, and Pineda, whose credits include The Vampire Diaries, The Originals and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, finish filming their In Town independent feature film Tuesday. Then they head home to Los Angeles to start promoting their new streaming projects – Hyland's Guilty Party with Kate Beckinsale on Paramount+ Thursday, Oct. 14, and Pineda's much anticipated Cowboy Bebop on Nexflix Nov. 19.
They shot most of In Town last July, and returned late last week to wrap up the comedy that Hyland is directing from his own script. Both are producers. They've filmed in Clifton, Northside, Downtown and Owensville in Clermont County.
"With COVID, I was away from my family for a year and a half, so it was a nice excuse to come back for an extended period," Hyland says. "I've come here and shot short films, and some TV segments over the years, but this is the first feature film on my own that I've shot in Cincinnati."
He's seen a lot of his family during the shoot because they are in the film.
"My older brother Adam has a big part in it as a police officer. Both of my parents are in the film, and all my siblings are in it. My uncle's in it too, and a lot of friends I grew up with, including musician Yoni Wolf," he says.
In the film, Hyland plays an out-of-work musician who returns to Cincinnati. It's "an idiot's odyssey," he says, which describes most of Hyland's past comedy projects for MTV, Comedy Central, Funny or Die, TruTV, the old Fuel channel or his Funnel short film which Rolling Stone called "one of the 12 Must-See Sundance" Film Festival films in 2014.
Pineda says she plays the police detective "on the trail of his path of trouble."
Later this week, Hyland will be seen in the Paramount+ Guilty Party 10-part series as a low-level gun smuggler, a "coke-head numbskull with a 13-year-old's sense of humor" being investigated by a discredited journalist (Beckinsale) trying to salvage her career.
In November, Pineda plays Faye Valentine in Netflix's Cowboy Bebop, a live-action adaptation of the Japanese cult anime series. Pineda, John Cho and Mustafa Shakir star as three "cowboy" bounty hunters chasing dangerous criminals throughout the universe.
"Our show is a springboard off the anime," says Pineda, a Mexican-American actress, writer and comedian from Oakland, Calif. "Our show is really comical, and pulpy and slick, and our jazz score makes our show really original. You can't really compare it to anything else. It's in the zone of Kill Bill and Star Wars."
Once those series were completed, Hyland and Pineda came to Cincinnati to shoot In Town on a much smaller budget last summer. Doing independent "backyard-style, do-it-yourself" films gives director-writer-producer-actor Hyland total creative freedom.
"The nice thing about the backyard DIY approach is that you just go and do it, and it exists," he says.
In Town should be edited and locked by next summer. Then he'll submit it to Sundance, South by Southwest and other major film festivals.
"I've had a fair amount of success or luck, whatever you want to call it, at festivals, over the past few years, but it's nothing you can count on," he says. "I'm confident we're making a good movie that we're both proud of and happy with."
The next project for the duo is an "action-adventure romantic comedy" starring Pineda that Hyland wrote. He describes it as "sort of like True Romance and Curb Your Enthusiasm mixed together."
"There are a lot of different avenues for movies," he says. "That's a good thing about our ever-growing fractured entertainment system."
