— by Matt Golec

7/25/24

Hanover High graduate Julia Coulter made her first movie when she was about 21. By her own admission, it wasn’t very good.

The script was too long and she’d planned too many locations with not enough money. But Coulter also learned valuable lessons from the failure, such as what kind of people stuck by her during the process, and that she shouldn’t give up after a first try.

“It's okay to fail in a way like that,” Coulter said from her home in Los Angeles, “because you end up taking away so much more from it.”

Coulter has put those lessons to good use. She’s released two well-regarded shorts — Brothers in 2020, and Habit in 2022 — and this summer, she’s directing her first feature film here in the Upper Valley.

Road To L’Etape Du Tour is about a young woman with heart problems who, after her father’s sudden death, throws herself into training for a stage of the Tour de France that her father had planned to ride.

Coulter grew up biking around the Upper Valley with her family, and when planning the movie, this was always the location she pictured in her head.

“I think the Upper Valley has such a beautiful backdrop to bike through,” Coulter said.

Julia Coulter plays a woman with a heart defect who trains for a leg of the Tour de France in Coulter’s movie "Road To L’Etape Du Tour,” which films in the Upper Valley this August. Courtesy photo.

Knowing the lay of the land will give Coulter a leg up when shooting here. She’s scouted some local locations, such as Cedar Circle’s Hello Café and a friend’s Airbnb, and she’s ridden a lot of the scenic biking routes.

Upper Valley filming begins August 19, with actors such as Kyle Secor from Homicide: Life on the Street, Brian Muller from Bridge & Tunnel, and Gordon Clapp from NYPD Blue (as well as various Northern Stage productions) attached to the project.

Coulter plays the main character, and besides biking, they share another characteristic: a congenital heart defect. Coulter underwent three open-heart surgeries when she was very young, and although she’s generally lived a normal life, “weird health stuff” related to her heart pops up from time to time.

Although Coulter isn’t sure she could train for a marathon, biking is manageable because coasting down hills gives her a chance to rest. Once she put together the conflict of somebody with a heart defect wanting to train for a bike race with her cinematic appreciation for sports, Coulter said it was easy to get the first draft out.

Julia Coulter talks to her father, Stuart, at Drummond Custom Cycles in Enfield, N.H., a location for the film. Courtesy photo.

Coulter got interested in acting while attending Hanover High School, participating in multiple plays each year.

“I was totally a theater kid,” she said. “That was my thing.”

After graduating in 2010, she attended the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Wales, where she studied acting. When Coulter returned to the U.S., she moved to Los Angeles, in part because she’d fallen in love with movies. Her college years were the height of ‘mumblecore’ independent cinema — Coulter describes it as “improv-y movies, basically” — which she could see herself making.

In Los Angeles, Coulter went on auditions and worked at a coffee shop. She made her first, not-very-good film. Then, in 2019, her cousin died, which inspired her to write and direct “Brothers,” a short film about a family’s grief that played at a number of film festivals, including the New Hampshire Film Festival. Coulter found she enjoyed directing.

“I love overseeing all of this and making all these decisions and organizing it all,” she said.