Jude Rawlins can’t stop working, but as long as the ideas keep coming to him, he doesn’t mind at all.

The British-born musician-turned-filmmaker and Jean Seberg superfan who has called Marshalltown home for the last several years is excited to once again roll out the red carpet for the theatrical premiere of his latest film, “Dream Time,” on Saturday night at 7 p.m. While the first movie he shot in the area, 2022’s “Little Johnny Jewel,” also debuted in Marshalltown, “Dream Time,” shot in black and white and produced by Marshalltown-based Bella Luna Productions, will be extra special for the director because it’s premiering at the Orpheum — the first film to do so since native daughter Seberg’s acting debut, “Saint Joan,” in 1957.

Running about 90 minutes, “Dream Time” chronicles two main characters, Albie and Alice, who have both arrived at the High Trestle Trail Bridge near Des Moines for the same reason — to jump off of it and end their own lives. As they get to know each other, however, they begin to reconsider their decision and find hope amidst their shared misery.

Starring Grant Gale as Albie and Rawlins’ now wife Rebecca Haroldson as Alice, “Dream Time” also features return appearances from a few other actors who appeared in “Little Johnny Jewel” including Cheyenne Goode, Rob Merritt, Jorg Rochlitzer and Stacie Sorenson.

A still from the next Rawlins film, “Mania,” which was partially shot in New York City. shalltown on Saturday night at 7 p.m. The film was written and directed by Jude Rawlins.

Never one to sit back and relax for long, Rawlins got to work on his latest project, “Mania,” almost immediately after wrapping on “Dream Time,” and the newest film was shot in both New York City and Iowa.

When he was still living in the U.K., Rawlins had planned to film “Mania” in London, but his relocation to the U.S. forced him to recalibrate his plans and his cast — Dame Janet Suzman, an Oscar-nominated British actress, had been prepared to come out of retirement to play Nora, the domineering mother character.

Because the film takes place partly in a rural setting and partly in a large city, Iowa was once again used as a location, but instead of opting for a closer metropolitan area like the Twin Cities or Chicago, Rawlins set his sights on the Big Apple.

“New York became the obvious choice just because I know a lot of people there and I know the city. When it came to just the aesthetic side of it, filming in New York was a really interesting challenge because so many things are shot there,” he said. “It’s like ‘How do you do something new?'”

Accepting his own challenge and taking inspiration from the 1981 horror classic “Possession,” Rawlins set out to create an “operatic” moment showcasing his main character Dandy Fleming (Avery Knudson) freaking out at a subway station while running down 8th Avenue. Knudson previously played one of the thrift store girls in “Little Johnny Jewel.”

“Mania” tells the story of the relationship between Dandy and Nora, who the director described as an overt manipulator, and the burgeoning romance between Dandy and her psychiatrist Harris Bolger (Merritt), which isn’t quite the ticket to paradise the protagonist is hoping it will turn out to be. Goode returns as Ariel, Dandy’s deceased sister whose loss she mourns throughout the film, and Amy Van Holland, who played a key role in “Dream Time,” also makes another appearance.

“(Dandy) will take so much, but if she gets triggered, she will fight back at some point. And so she does fight back several times in the film with quite dramatic consequences,” Rawlins said.

Replacing Suzman was a tall task, but Rawlins found Patricia O’Neil to do it and praised her performance as “terrifying.” Another new face is Mike Provenzano, who plays Nora’s husband Norris.

“The performances are all completely outstanding, and it’s quite different from the previous two films in that sense because it’s much more naturalistic,” Rawlins said. “It needed to be because, in ‘Little Johnny Jewel,’ everything was a little bit larger than life. Everything was slightly eccentric… In ‘Dream Time,’ the character of Albie is this total misfit, ‘Paddington Bear’ kind of character that had to be played a bit angular to reality.”

The music in “Mania” is more subtle compared to the previous two outings, particularly “Little Johnny Jewel,” which took its name from a song by the American rock band Television. Most of the soundtrack is classical music played in the background as opposed to the rock n’ roll needle drops of the last two films.

Rawlins isn’t sure yet how he’ll distribute “Mania,” although he noted that Hollywood sales agents have suddenly taken an interest in his work in light of the ongoing writers and actors strike. Still a punk rocker at heart, the writer-director who cites the late American maverick John Cassavetes as one of his marquee cinematic influences harbors some inherent skepticism toward the establishment, but he hasn’t totally closed the book on making a big-budget blockbuster someday.

“If I had an idea that I really, really, really believed in that was gonna take several million dollars to make, I would cross that bridge when I came to it, so you never say never,” he said. “But there’s a certain dynamic, a certain thrust that you get into when you make films for (Hollywood). I can’t make films by committee. I had a brush with Hollywood several years ago on a documentary project that I was trying to do, and it was just a nightmare… They don’t understand anything about cinema in Hollywood. They know business, but art is something that is completely beyond them.”

The last Hollywood film to truly blow him away, he added, was Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning horror classic “The Silence of the Lambs,” released all the way back in 1991. After the recent death of William Friedkin, Rawlins said Steven Spielberg is about the only remaining big budget American director he still finds interesting.

The plan is to host the world premiere of “Mania” in Paris and the American premiere in New York before the end of the year, and Rawlins will then move on to his next project, the all-female spaghetti western “3 Witches,” based on the characters from “Little Johnny Jewel” (who, in turn, were inspired by the infamous witches from “MacBeth”) and placing them on a “Heart of Darkness” style covert mission.

Perhaps Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy, “MacBeth” returned to the headlines a few years ago when Joel Coen helmed a new adaptation starring Hollywood heavyweights Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, and Rawlins intends to add another new wrinkle by casting women as men and hiring Marshalltown local Rocio Villagomez to play the titular character.

“There’s a recent movie version of ‘The Tempest,’ which is terrible, actually, but Helen Mirren plays Prospero. Why not? So that’s not even really a new idea, and changing the setting of Shakespeare isn’t really a new idea either. Everybody’s done that, and changing the setting of ‘Heart of Darkness’ has been done as well,” Rawlins said. “But they haven’t all been done in the same project.”

Filming locations haven’t all been finalized, but a famous Iowa locale will be one of them — Rawlins, ever the cinema historian, wants to stage a “High Noon” style gunfight on one of the bridges of Madison County involving characters inspired by the Droogs from “A Clockwork Orange.”

“Every once in a while, going completely over the top is kind of fun and interesting,” he said. “Because the last two films are very much set in reality… To take something that’s a Shakespearean story that was set in medieval Scotland, it was like ‘Let’s just tip it completely upside down and see what happens.'”

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.