Filmmaker Tyler Riggs re-imagines ‘God’s Waiting Room’

Tyler Riggs

Tyler Riggs grew up in the punk rock and skateboarding subculture of early ‘2000s Tampa, a life of blunts and booze and big dreams, of quick hookups and languid dreams of getting out and going on to something bigger.

He channeled it all into God’s Waiting Room, his first feature film as writer and director, shot on location all over the city, from downtown to Seminole Heights to rural northern Hillsborough County.

For all its gritty realism, God’s Waiting Room – screening Wednesday at Greenlight Cinema in St. Petersburg – is curiously dreamlike, due in large part to the nuanced performances of its lead actors, the hazy musical score by Chris Dudley and cinematographer Mack Fisher’s use of intimate and unexpected close-ups.

It’s Tyler Riggs’ movie, though, and his fingerprints are in every scene. He even plays one of the three protagonists.

“So much of the movie is me,” says the filmmaker, who was raised in Town ‘n’ Country and Lutz. “All these textures are real things. And the three characters are kind of different parts of my psyche, in a way.”

God’s Waiting Room revolves around Rosie (Nisalda Gonzalez), a bored teenager from a good family, who falls in with a fast-talking hustler named Jules (Matthew Leone, recipient of the Tribeca Film Festival’s Best Actor award for his performance). The film’s title is an ironic twist on the now-antique phrase about Florida being the primary domain of elderly folks.

The parallel narrative involves a fidgety ex-con named Brandon (played by Riggs himself). The earliest drafts of the screenplay were exclusively about him. “I was basing him off of a news article about a guy who was sort of a killer,” Riggs remembers, “but he seemed interesting to me. And I could never make that story work.”

It was after he delved deeper into the true tale that he found the thread for the fictional plot of God’s Waiting Room.

“When I shifted the POV of the film through the eyes of two young lovers, it started to become very interesting to me,” Riggs explains. “And I wrote it very fast afterwards.

“My character is like all the bad things in Florida personified. And then you have this young love, which sort of reminds me of my last few years in Florida before I moved to New York – 18, 19, 20 years old – and that world that I was in.”

Riggs first made his name as a male model, appearing in multinational print ads and walking the runways of the world’s fashion capitals. He’s been married to Scandinavian supermodel Suvi Koponen since 2012.

The modeling career happened almost by accident, as he was at the time studiously taking acting classes in New York City.

“The whole typecast thing,” Riggs says, “is very real. I was going out and auditioning for one kind of thing and one kind of character. And it wasn’t really the sort of characters that drew me into the business. I was always auditioning for a romantic boyfriend-type character.

“But growing up as a kid, I had a crazy imagination. I had always fantasized about being a cowboy, or a bank robber or a soldier. I loved war movies and Westerns, heist films and sci-fi films. And those opportunities weren’t being put in front of me. I didn’t think I was on a path that was going to lead me to getting those opportunities. So I started writing.”

Theater school, he adds, “oddly enough, in terms of writing dialogue, turns out to be the best school you can go to. Because so much of the school that I went to was improvisation, so you’re constantly listening to real cadence and watching real mannerisms. And that stuff kinda becomes subconscious when you watch it year after year after year.”

Spending so much time in photography studios, he watched how professionals worked with light. And he filed it all away.

He had a lead role in 2017’s Boomtown, opposite Rachael Brosnahan and Dwight Yoakam, followed by the country music romantic comedy Forever My Girl.

Then Riggs received the greenlight for what was to be his writing/directing debut, the drama Peace in the Valley.

But Covid held up production, and in the interim he came up with God’s Waiting Room.

Riggs knew what he had to do. “I didn’t even know if Peace in the Valley was going to get made. I was living in Los Angeles at the time and thinking about going to grad school. I had some money saved up. I was really wanting to transition from acting into writing and directing. It’s just where my heart was taking me.

“I was looking for a film to make in Florida. I kept throwing around this idea with my cinematographer. We had just met, and we really hit it off. We really liked the same things, were interested in the same movies and in using light in a similar way and keeping everything really natural. He had worked for Vice News on HBO – he was used to going into live environments in all these war-torn countries.

“I told him I wanted to go to Florida and make a film that has almost a documentary feel to it.”

Fast-forward to 2021. God’s Waiting Room, created first, premiered at Tribeca. Peace in the Valley made its Tribeca debut at the 2022 festival, last month.

For an essentially self-taught filmmaker, this is all a sort of validation.

“When I decided to not go to film school,” Riggs explains, “I sort of declared that these first two feature films that I was writing and directing were going to be my unofficial film school. I financed one of them and I didn’t take a salary for the second one: ‘We have so little money, let’s just put it on the screen.’

“I formed a bond with my crew, which I will try to stay committed to. So I feel like I’ve gone to, basically, the best film school one could go to. So instead of coming out of school with insurmountable student loan debt, I have two feature films and both went to Tribeca, and one won an award and is now getting distribution.”

Tyler Riggs will be at Wednesday’s 7 p.m. screening at Greenlight Cinema, and participate in a Q&A after the film.