'Roach Trip' tells the tale of hitchhiking cockroach and a drive from LA to Tucson

A Tucson-based filmmaker and actor is out with her directorial debut, and it tells the true story of a road trip she took with an unusual hitchhiker.

Clare McNulty’s film is called "Roach Trip," and as you may have guessed from the title, is about a cockroach that found itself in her car on a drive from LA back to Tucson.

It’ll be showing at the Vero Beach Film Festival this week, as well as at film festivals in Milwaukee and Calgary later this month.

The Show spoke with McNulty about the inspiration for the movie.

Full conversation

CLARE MCNULTY: I drove to a gas station that seemed a little dirty, and I picked up a cockroach as a hitchhiker there. It crawled up my leg without me knowing it. And the movie is the story of what happens next. Essentially it's the story of me and this cockroach in the car together and in ... a remote part of the world on I-10 between Los Angeles and Tucson and all of the magical things that can happen there. [LAUGHS]

BRODIE: What was your first reaction when you — I assume you felt something on your leg. Maybe you didn't quite know what it was. Like, what went through your mind when you realized what it actually was?

MCNULTY: Absolute horror. ... Abject terror.

It was also nighttime, so I didn't know what to do. I think confusion, I think panic, anxiety, you know. And also there probably was somewhere deep inside me some brief idea that, wow, this feels cinematic.

BRODIE: [LAUGHS] So even in the midst of what must have been a terrifying experience, the light bulb was going off: This could be something.

MCNULTY: ... Honestly, yes. Because I was actually in the midst of writing a feature, my first feature, and so I was already in a creative storytelling mindset. So I wouldn't be surprised. It may not have happened right when I discovered that there was an enormous cockroach with me in the car. But it happened pretty shortly thereafter, I think.

BRODIE: And just to be clear, it sounds like you did not try to get rid of this cockroach. It almost, to the contrary. At a certain point you kind of decided like, OK, this guy's coming along for the ride.

MCNULTY: Yeah, in reality, I did try many times to extricate the cockroach from my car, you know, pulling off of the highway and searching for it. But it was really cunning, and it hid itself every time.

So not to give too much away, but I sort of came up with a plan basically that would keep it in one place. And you're right, ultimately I brought it along as a passenger.

BRODIE: Yeah, well, I'm kind of picturing you like kind of a "Castaway" situation, like where you're Tom Hanks and the cockroach is Wilson here. And you're just sort of talking to it as if it was a real person.

MCNULTY: It's a very apt comparison. People who know me well know that I have a lot of feelings about non-human animals and their cognitive abilities and their ability to communicate or our understanding of what communication means. I have the capacity to have richer relationships with creatures that cannot talk to me ... because of how I perceive them.

BRODIE: Yeah, well, so once you got kind of over the ick factor and realized that this cockroach was going to be part of your drive back to Arizona, how do you think that having it there with you in the car changed your trip, changed your drive?

MCNULTY: It got me out of my head. I was on the tail end of a breakup at the time. And so it's a — the movie is very emotional. Of course, you know, every movie ends up being very emotional and about an emotional experience. So I was in a very emotional place. And having this companion made the road trip — it turned it into a bit of a processing session, turned it into a bit of a therapy session, but also sort of an opportunity for performance.

There is something that happens when you vocalize, you know, your feelings, your thoughts, whether or not it's with another person or even if it's just with yourself that, you know, can change your emotional state, can change — can help you process, you know, difficult things.

And so it made the trip, for one thing, extremely memorable, but also really helpful. Illuminating. Illuminating both my own emotional state and helping to integrate some experiences that I'd had over the last couple of months.

BRODIE: It's interesting. I mean, so again, to sort of quote another scene from a movie like, when you got back to Tucson was this, like, "When Harry Met Sally" situation where, like, you each kind of said your goodbyes and went your separate ways? Like, what was the parting like? After what sounded like a fairly intense several hours in the car together?

MCNULTY: ... In the real-life story, the parting. Well, yeah, we said goodbye to each other. I took it. It had crawled into a bag of food, and I pulled it out, and I tossed them under a bush in my front yard. Tossed it under a bush in my front yard. Them. And that was it.

And I never saw them again.

BRODIE: Wow.

MCNULTY: I did actually make a promise to them. I made a promise to them in the car that if they stopped bothering me, if they promised not to crawl on my body, that I would set them free without incident.

BRODIE: That seems like a fair deal.

MCNULTY: I think so. And it worked, you know.

BRODIE: Yeah. So what was it like filming this story? Because I understand you had both live cockroaches and a puppet cockroach. And you know, for a lot of people, like, cockroaches are not insects that you would voluntarily choose to be around. And yet, you know, you kind of surrounded yourself with them.

MCNULTY: I did. Well, to be fair ... I did not surround myself with them. I directed one or two as, you know, as a performer.

... And that's a very, very different, you know, that — interacting with one cockroach is very different than interacting with a lot of cockroaches. But I will say that we had a cockroach wrangler on set named Jules. And we also had a representative from the Humane Society on set to make sure that we were appropriately treating them well.

And there was an environmental circumstance, which is that it was very, very cold. And it never occurred to me that cockroaches can't function in the cold. So the two — we worked with two different cockroaches — one of them which had a leash and the other, which did not.

Neither of them were as crawly as I wanted them to be because it was simply too cold and the wind was quite strong. So it turned into a circumstance where I was really in charge of the well-being of these animals in a circumstance in which they were incredibly vulnerable. And so my relationship to cockroaches has subsequently changed because I've had this experience where I was like in charge of the well being of one or two of them.