Greg Grano’s “American Bear”

Imagine going on a cross-country trip for two months relying on complete strangers for a place to sleep each night. With nothing but his family’s car, his passion for filmmaking and his curiosity about the state of American hospitality, Greg Grano did just that.

Illustration by Katrina Kopeloff

This summer, Grano, a 21-year-old film student at NYU, traveled across the country filming a documentary entitled “American Bear.” With his girlfriend, Sarah Sellman, Grano set out to investigate whether he could travel across America relying on nothing but the generosity of strangers. Grano said the experience impacted his filmmaking, his creative process and his outlook on life in ways that he never imagined.

From the beginning, Grano said the project seemed like a product of fate. While staying with his girlfriend’s family in Colorado last year, Grano started talking in his sleep. He insisted upon visiting Bear, Colo. “I said it something like five times,” Grano said. To his dismay, he discovered there is no Bear, Colo. But there are five other towns scattered throughout the U.S. named “Bear.” Inspired by their love of traveling and filmmaking, Grano and Sellman planned to visit every Bear in America with a camera in tow.

It was only after they began brainstorming ideas for the film that Grano and Sellman decided to focus the project on the kindness of strangers. “We wanted to make this film in order to explore and hopefully disprove our alleged culture of fear,” Grano said. So they ruled out hotels and spent each day on the road asking strangers to take them in for the night. Out of the 60 days they spent travelling, there were only four days when Grano and Sellman could not find a place to stay.

Grano, a self-proclaimed people-person, had no qualms about asking strangers to let him spend the night in their homes. “I really do love people’s stories and getting to know people,” Grano said. Grano even attributes his passion for filmmaking to his love of people’s stories.

In high school, Grano started using films to tell his own stories. While growing up in Morristown, N.J., Grano studied classical music and learned to play both the cello and the bassoon. In ninth and 10th grade, he began making films and completed a trilogy of feature-length films starring eight of his closest friends. When it was time to decide what college to attend, Grano was torn. “I debated for many hours whether I wanted to study music performance or music composition and film obviously won out,” Grano said.

Before “American Bear,” Grano had never made a documentary film. Many of the screenplays he writes are fictional and inspired by movies like “The Fountain” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Although Grano’s current film projects are fictional, he said “American Bear” has influenced his fiction and informed his creative process. “I’m just really interested in other people’s lives and other people’s stories in a more serious way than I ever was,” Grano said.

One of Grano’s current projects is inspired by experiences he had during his trip. In a film Grano is working on this semester, the main character shares a tragic story about her life with people she hardly knows. “Just recently I realized that this is directly inspired by the people that we met who opened up to us like that,” he said.

The first night of filming “American Bear,” a forty-five year old retired cop opened his doors for Grano and Sellman and told Grano that during their trip, they would meet the people they were supposed to meet. Grano said he believes many of the encounters they experienced were destined in a way. “It’s not just that we had good luck but that almost all of our experiences with people formed these really strong connections in such a short amount of time,” Grano said.

While Grano uses Facebook and e-mail to stay in touch with some of the people he met, he said he feels distant from the film. “American Bear” is currently being edited and although he and Sellman are supervising the process, Grano says nothing can compare to the excitement of filming.

Grano said that decisions are still being made about how to promote the film but he is confident that “American Bear” has real potential. “But that is just a hope. And hope is not a business plan,” Grano said.

Grano has a similar view about his future. “I’ve made all these student films to be screened at festivals so that someone will see them and fall in love with them and help me with my next film. But that’s always a distant hope,” he said.

Although Grano said he is unsure what is in store for him after college, he said he definitely wants to travel cross-country again. “It was such a one of a kind experience that I don’t want to let it be just one of a kind.” But Grano said if he and Sellman were to do it again, they would leave the camera at home. “I don’t think we would film it. We would do it for our own personal sake because it’s a fascinating way to meet so many different kinds of people.”

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