Baylor University’s legacy of filmmakers, screenwriters, playwrights, and actors is uncommonly rich and varied – John Lee Hancock, Kevin Reynolds, Derek Haas, Michael Brandt, Robert Askins, Mark Olsen, Carole “Cookie” Cook, Geoff Moore, Jordan Hearne, Maree Cheatham, Angela Kinsley, Clu Gulager, and so many others – but few have had a more intriguing path than Will Canon.
Despite only a single year at Baylor, Canon said Baylor’s influence has remained with him … to the Cannes Film Festival and beyond.
It helps, of course, that William Aubrey Canon III comes from a family of Bears. His biological father Judge Canon played basketball at Baylor (BA political science, ‘74), his mother Aubin received her BA in religion in 1974, and stepdad Mark Petersen received his MBA in 1984 and has been a Baylor Regent. The Petersens have long been deeply embedded in the life of the University and the alumni association.
Growing up in Arlington as a child, Canon discovered a desire to tell stories. “I was really drawn to the idea of being able to express myself,” he said, “but I didn’t know that until I got the opportunity.”
While at Arlington High School, Canon took the family camcorder and made short films for his friends and family before transferring his budding expertise into class projects and even church camps.
His early influences included Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Lee’s Nike commercials featuring Michael Jordan. “I remember watching that movie with my buddies and realizing, ‘OK, this is not the action movie I usually see on Saturdays. This is something different. This is film as art.’ I saw the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski at the end of my freshman year and then saw it three more times. I thought, ‘I didn’t know you could make movies like that.’”
Inexorably, he said, his future seemed to be tied to making movies. “You don’t fully understand the odds against you going down that path,” Canon said. “I had this naivete that said, ‘This will work out somehow – and it’ll be fine.’
“Now I have two kids, Hayes (7) and Elizabeth (3). If they came to me and said, ‘I want to go to film school,’ we’d have to have a series of very long talks about what that means.”
Originally an athlete in high school, Canon played basketball for a year at the University of Dallas but during the summer after his freshman year realized that basketball wasn’t in his future.
Fortunately for Canon, Baylor had a late admission process. He had grown up with the school, attending football games and Homecomings and felt comfortable in Waco. Once here, he landed in several classes that would shape his future. In English, Dr. Sarah Ford told her students to exchange telephone numbers – in case they were sick and missed an assignment or test. The young lady Canon exchanged numbers with – Nell Baden (BS education/special education, ’01) – eventually became his wife.
Canon said other influential classes included Advanced Writing for the Popular Market in professional writing (where he worked on his first screenplay), a philosophy class with Dr. Robert Baird, a radio class with Frank Fallon, and Dr. Michael Korpi’s Production Methods I and II.
Korpi’s class, Canon said, stressed the physical side of the film business and gave him a working knowledge of editing, sound, and lighting, as well as an understanding of the basics of the film business.
“Baylor was very good to me,” Canon said. “Baylor had great speakers on campus, and I soaked all that up. I went to any lecture to hear anybody who was speaking.”
Canon also immersed himself in film, going to Blockbuster and checking out the maximum number of titles in a day – and watching them all.
Eventually, he realized he needed to attend film school. He applied to New York University which, with admission, also guaranteed acceptance into their well-regarded film school.
His parents were excited and supportive, if shocked. “My father (Judge Canon) said, ‘This will be really good for you.’ Mom was initially really concerned, but once it happened and I got up there, she fell in love with New York.”
Canon arrived at NYU in fall 1999. “In terms of the country boy going to the big city, I was definitely that,” he said. “Culturally, the difference between Waco and West Village, particularly since I didn’t know anyone, was huge. I was thrown in and figured it out as I went along.”
From the first day, he said, his instructors worked with film – 16-millimeter film – cutting, splicing, and editing. And, from the beginning, they sent students sent out into the streets of New York to shoot film. Other typical four-hour classes included watching movies and discussing them in depth.
“That was great,” Canon said, “because you could get out there and get all of your bad movies out of the way – people walking around Washington Square Park and talking. There’s a whole genre of ‘people walking’ movies.”
His fifth short film was chosen for the end-of-semester showcase of student films. “I went from ‘Do I belong here?’ to getting the real confidence-booster at the showcase,” he said.
With each succeeding semester, Canon said he was more deeply immersed in film (and video) production, from documentaries to short narrative film. NYU also featured a host of notable speakers, including some of his heroes: Michael Mann (The Insider), Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia), and others. He also haunted Manhattan’s cinemas, sometimes seeing as many as three films in a day.
Canon said his final student film, Roslyn, about a fraternity prank gone horribly wrong, was well-received by his professors and featured in his final NYU showcase, but when no studio exec burst into one of his classes to hire him, Canon followed his then-fiancée Nell to Denver. Canon and Nell had continued to date long distance for the entirety of his stay in New York.
Unfortunately for the young couple, 9/11 happened and the country came to a sudden stop. To make ends meet, Canon passed out PowerBars on the University of Colorado campus or walked around with a cask of Oregon Chai tea on his back a la Ghostbusters, promoting and dispensing tea to students.
Eventually, the couple moved back to Texas and Canon worked his way into making industrial films and fundraising videos in the Dallas area.
“That was great because at least I’m working a camera and editing,” he said. “I feel like I’m always learning, but at that time you’re really, really learning because you’re not ready. Even if I had had an opportunity to be a director, in my case, I wasn’t ready at age 22, 23 – although I thought I was.”
Meanwhile, because of the NYU showcase, Roslyn was entered into several film festivals, including the annual Chrysler Million Dollar Festival in Cannes in 2002. Canon’s film was one of the ten finalists and he was flown to France for the festival.
At the same time, Canon was accepted into Fox Searchlight Pictures’ director’s program, Fox Searchlab. In addition to $2,500 for another short film, Fox Searchlab created a mentoring program and sponsored well-known filmmakers to speak to participants, including Alexander Payne, Frank Darabont, and David Fincher. Canon repeatedly drove from Dallas to Los Angeles for the mentoring sessions and presentations, receiving just enough validation to keep going.
He continued to tweak the script for Roslyn – even as it continued to do well in various festivals and showings. Canon created a promotional DVD with his various short films on it and a query letter, bought a book with the addresses of agents and production companies, and mailed out 300 copies.
Canon’s Roslyn screenplay eventually had several close calls where production companies showed interest, offering to finance a full-length version, only to see them fall apart at the last minute.
Eventually, with the help of friends, including co-writer David Simon, he filmed it on a shoestring budget, inspired by independent filmmakers Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, and others who were having success with small indie films. Canon and his small team raised the money, sold shares in their project, and forged ahead with filming, even though there was not yet enough money to complete the film.
“We just kept raising money,” he said. “I felt like there’s never the perfect time and if we waited for the perfect time and waited until we had everything we thought we needed, we would be waiting indefinitely. It was like, ‘OK, we have enough money to shoot it and we have enough money to edit it. Now we can show it to people and get the rest of the money to finish it.’ And that’s what happened.”
In 2010, eight years after Fox Searchlab and after hundreds of query letters, industrial films, and commercials, Canon’s film, now named Brotherhood, premiered at South by Southwest in Austin (SXSW), where it won the Audience Award and earned a glowing review in the film industry’s bible, Variety. More positive reviews soon appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications.
What followed, he said, was a “whirlwind” – all because of a small film shot in his hometown of Arlington, with origins a decade earlier in a Waco coffeeshop.
After SXSW, film distributors called, followed by the agents and producers. He began to have, as they say, “meetings” with agents, actors, and directors. “It was a ‘pinch me’ moment in time,” Canon said. “You’re thinking, ‘No way. That person, that actor, really watched my film?’”
Canon signed with the famed CCA for representation and received a wide range of screenplays, sometimes with an offer to direct. “But because I only knew my own stories,” Canon said, “and I was so used to knowing what I wanted to do, I didn’t really know which projects would be good for me and which ones I should say yes to. It was a crash course in navigating the business of filmmaking.
“And there are certain projects I passed on that I look back on and think, ‘What were you thinking?! Why would you ever say no to that?!”
To pay the bills in the interim, Canon directed high profile television commercials and accepted various screenwriting and directing assignments.
Eventually, he said, he came to an agreement with producer James Wan (co-creator of the Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring franchises), Dimension Films, and the now-infamous Weinstein Company. The film, titled Demonic, originally had another director attached to it. Eventually, actors Frank Grillo and Maria Bello were chosen as the leads and filming began.
“That one was a rollercoaster,” Canon said. “It was a tough movie to make. Once we got into prep, there was a lot of pressure to make the script, but the script we went into prep with was too expensive for the money they wanted to spend.”
Canon rewrote the script, even as he and his team were deep into pre-production for the film. “I kept telling myself, ‘This is not fun right now, but this is good for you,’” he said. “It was like going through bootcamp.”
Unfortunately, Demonic was caught in film distribution hell when its original release date conflicted with new films from famed directors Ridley Scott and Paul Anderson, and the studio repeatedly pushed back the release. When Demonic finally opened in 2015, it received uncommonly strong reviews, especially for a horror film. The Guardian’s reviewer wrote, “Demonic may just be one of the best horror films released this year. The final twist is sick fun.”
Meanwhile, Canon continued to forge ahead with a variety of projects. One commission, a film titled Livestream for Legendary Pictures, was axed when Legendary abruptly shuttered its low-budget division. He rewrote a project titled The Children of the Roses, based on the book by Warren Adler (a sequel to his hit The War of the Roses), but that project soon stalled. Another project was Target Churchill, about Winston Churchill’s trip to the United States in 1946 to deliver his “Iron Curtain” speech. Canon and his Three Folks Pictures team also worked with various producers in hopes of developing Majoring in Crime, a fact-based heist thriller for Gold Circle Films based on a Vanity Fair article by the same name.
Still in development is Canon’s thriller Down South, which takes place in East Texas and had, at one time, Katie Holmes attached. “It’s one of my favorite scripts,” Canon said. “I love the setting and the characters and it’s probably one of my most personal stories. I would love for Down South to be my next project.”
All – or none – of these films could someday be realized.
Canon’s latest film, The Confession, debuted to a sold-out house and strong reviews at the Dallas Film Festival in April 2025. The Confession stars Italia Ricci and is a thriller about a jazz musician who returns to her East Texas home, only to discover something sinister is happening to the town’s children. Canon wrote and directed the independently financed film, in part as an ode to his memories of a childhood in the spooky pine forests around Lufkin.
In September, Canon struck a deal with Quiver to release The Confession in the U.S. and Canada on January 16, 2025 on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Fandango at Home, and Google Play. The movie’s poster and trailer were released last week, and it’ll be available for pre-order on iTunes in early January.
But even as he works to promote The Confession, Canon is working on the next film. And the one after that.
“I’d like to make a wide release movie someday,” he said. “I’d love the experience of a film that’s opening in one weekend over 3,000 screens. But aside from that, I want to make movies that I’m proud of; movies where when I get to the end of the process, I’m glad I did it. And, so far, I’ve been fortunate enough to do that on smaller films.”
“I’m always drawn to movies that are really fun and entertain you,” he said, “then have some kind of depth and layers underneath. With Brotherhood and The Confession both, that was my aim, and I was able to do it with original stories.”
Another goal? “To connect with audiences and filmmakers the way I connected with my favorite filmmakers, whether it is Spike Lee or the Coen Brothers or Michael Mann or Kathryn Bigelow.”
And despite only attending Baylor for a single year, Canon said that his life – and work – has always been influenced by Baylor.
“One of my first memories is when we lived on Austin Avenue when I was a kid was walking to Floyd Casey Stadium, sitting on my stepdad Mark’s shoulders,” Canon recalled. “My family was always involved with Baylor; Baylor is part of my identity.
“During my time at Baylor, I felt so supported. I was able to safely explore a bunch of ideas. It was one of the favorite years of my life because I had teachers who took an interest in me.
“In the end, for any young student, you’ll never know how much that means.”
