Shoot a film or TV project in Mississippi and you won’t have to worry about the hassle that goes with filming in some of the bigger film hubs, says Mississippi Film Office Director Nina Parikh. The state, which boasts some of the best film incentives anywhere in the world, is wide open for business.
“Our communities are incredibly supportive. So you walk into a community and everyone’s ready to help,” she says. “No one’s trying to nickel and dime you or push you out. They really want to bring you in. If you need period furniture, they’ll say, ‘Come look at my grandmother’s house and pull stuff from there.”
Mississippi offers a 25 to 35% cash rebate, for everything from feature films to music videos to documentaries to video games. Productions get a 25% rebate that covers spending with local vendors and on non-resident payroll — which includes above-the-line. There’s a 30% rebate for hiring Mississippi residents, and an extra 5% for hiring veterans from the state.
The episodic credit, meanwhile, is 20% for non-residents and 35% for residents, with the extra 5% bump for veterans.
So if you’re able to hire, for example, Mississippian Morgan Freeman, an Air Force veteran, for a TV show, 40% of his salary is eligible for the rebate.
The minimum spend for projects is just $50,000. The program runs smoothly because it’s been in place in some form since 2004, though it has evolved with the industry — including the addition of the episodic credit.
The state has drawn a wide range of recent productions thanks to a rich mix of locations from Delta farmlands to rolling hills to peaceful lakes to picturesque town squares to Antebellum and Victorian homes to casinos to small cities to stately Oxford, known for Ole Miss and William Faulkner.
Visitors from Hollywood are almost aways surprised, Parikh says.
“They’re always like, ‘Wow, everything’s green.’ There’s so many trees, especially if you’re coming from somewhere like Los Angeles. And the diversity of locations here surprises people, because we have everything from casinos to a late 1800s-early 1900s small towns. We have college campuses that that look new and impressive, lots of agricultural land, and beautiful water properties in different rivers, ponds, reservoirs, and lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico.”
Mississippi and the Success of Sinners
Mississippi is ready to seize on an interesting cinematic moment: One of the biggest hit of the year, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, is set in the state, but wasn’t filmed there. Sinners was shot on a budget of roughly $90 million, and Mississippi’s film incentive program tops out at $20 million per year.
Parikh hopes the success of the film may make the state’s legislature see Mississippi’s potential to draw much bigger-budgeted projects by raising the cap of the program.
“They did consider Mississippi, but our incentive programs was just not quite big enough to accommodate a $90 million budget. So they obviously needed to go where they could get the money they needed,” Parikh says.
“We’re to the point where we’re maxing out our $20 million for the last five years. So with Sinners out there in the world, that’s probably going to be an eye opener for our legislators to go, ‘Oh, well we could’ve had that one. Maybe we can get the next one.’”
Though Sinners shot in Louisiana, Parikh says the film’s success is still very much a win for Mississippi. Sinners hired many blues musicians from Mississippi, and has widened interest in blues as an art form, which can only add to Mississippi’s reputation as a must-stop for music fans and scholars. In addition to visiting Clarksdale, the main setting in Sinners, they have long flocked to Tupelo, home of Elvis Presley, among other historic locations.
Projects Shot in Mississippi
The state’s potential as a film and TV hub may be best symbolized by the HGTV hit Hometown, in which Erin and Ben Napier refurbish historic, affordable homes in Laurel, Mississippi to bring out their full potential and beauty. They strongly favor reusing found materials, as well as older textiles, to emphasize local character and history.
The show has helped revive the town’s luster. Parikh remembers that when she worked as a camera assistant many years ago, she would sometimes shoot in Laurel, and that the downtown had many empty buildings. Now, she notes, “every one of those buildings downtown is occupied.”
“There are vibrant businesses,” she says. “There are license plates from all over the country. It’s a whole different place, and it’s because of Hometown and because of the leadership in that town taking advantage of the fact that here’s an opportunity. It’s just an amazing example of economic development through the creative arts.”
Other recent productions to shoot in Mississippi have included The Ritual, the recent exorcism horror movie starring Al Pacino and Dan Stevens, which shot in Natchez, as well as the drama Jesus Land, starring Juliette Lewis, which recently wrapped in Biloxi. The region’s casinos were on fascinating display in Paul Schrader’s quietly brilliant 2021 film The Card Counter, starring Oscar Isaac as a troubled but very disciplined card player.
The film office is also extremely friendly and attentive to detail: Parikh once helped convince the Coen brothers to shoot O Brother, Where Art Thou in Mississippi by taking them out for excellent local banana caramel pie and blueberry ice tea.
Which brings us to one drawback about shooting in Mississippi.
“The food is a draw always,” says Parikh. “So you have to be prepared. You are going to leave a little heavier.”
You can learn more about filming in Mississippi at the Film Mississippi website.
Main image: Biloxi Beach. Courtesy of Film Mississippi