“Why I Film in Mississippi”

In 2016, film producer and director Daniel Lewis was looking for a new place to make movies. After almost a decade of overseeing Louisiana-based productions for Ken Badish’s Active Entertainment, he was prompted to find a new filming site when budget cuts were made to Louisiana’s film incentives. “But I wanted to work with the same crew base we’d established and trained and enjoyed, and they were all [based in Louisiana],” he said. And that’s how he ended up in Gulfport.

A Louisiana boy, Lewis said he’d grown up passing through Gulfport and surrounding towns on his way to family vacations on the Alabama or Florida coast. “I never thought twice about it,” he said. But while filming his first Mississippi-based project, the Lifetime movie Christmas in Mississippi, which was set in the town of Gulfport—“we didn’t change the name of the city or the restaurants or the Island View Casino, or even the big harbor light show that happens at Jones Park”—he started to fall in love with the Mississippi coast. “I think if you go down there and spend any level of time, and you meet the people, and you walk the streets and go to the restaurants and get into the culture, you realize that it is such a beautiful place and certainly doesn’t get the level of attention it should. I would certainly call it a hidden gem.”

His growing fondness for the region—combined with his experience working with Gulfport’s mayor Billy Hughes, Island View’s Rick Carter, and Nina Parikh at the Mississippi Film Office—inspired him to make more movies in Mississippi. “They played such a big part in making sure our productions were run smoothly, that our questions were answered,” he said. “They opened up a lot of doors for us and created an environment where every crew member and actor who would visit the Coast would fall in love with it and want to come back, and that would happen on every single film.”

Both of those movies are ultimately love letters to those towns. I realized how much telling those stories in their own cities does to bring a very authentic feeling and vibe to the film. Daniel Lewis

In 2019, when he started his own production company, Evergreen Films, he arranged for his first project, another Christmas movie, to be shot in Natchez—where he “realized that the charm and hospitality so iconic on the Mississippi Coast is not reserved to just that part of Mississippi.” As he had for that first film in Gulfport, he set Every Time a Bell Rings in Natchez, keeping the names of the local businesses and showcasing the town’s inherent charm within the story.

“Both of those movies are ultimately love letters to those towns,” he said. “I realized how much telling those stories in their own cities does to bring a very authentic feeling and vibe to the film, and also allows the actors and creatives on set to feel like they’re part of the community. We’re not pretending to be somewhere else. We’re actually in this space. And tourists can come and explore the town,but also live in the fantasy of being in that movie. It’s been so cool to see the impact that can have on tourism in these smaller communities, these hidden gems.”

Lewis has now made seven films in Mississippi, and said he is always advocating for the state to other filmmakers. “I’m talking to folks all the time, kind of pushing them in that direction,” he said. “I look forward to being back in Mississippi soon enough.”