[Editor's Note: Touching Home has been held over at the Tampa Theatre, with screenings scheduled through Sun., June 20. Why don't you skip Jonah Hex and check it out? Just sayin' …]

When I first meet Noah and Logan Miller at the Tampa Theatre, the first-time writers/directors/stars of the new Ed Harris film Touching Home are fresh off a near-death experience in an elevator at the downtown Tampa Howard Johnson. Noah Miller explains: “We’re five floors up and the elevator is bouncing like a frickin’ bungee cord, and I’m going ‘what do we do?’ And I said ‘Bro, open the door!’” Logan did just that and the pair leapt to safety as shocked hotel staff looked on. “We timed it like some sick video game,” Logan adds.

Not that the identical twin brothers are gamers. The pair grew up poor in Marin County, California, their father the town drunk who slept in his truck when he wasn’t living out of a jail cell. The boys excelled at baseball, and Logan eventually ended up in the Toronto Blue Jays organization before both brother's athletic careers petered out. Old men at 23 and lacking formal education, the twins were at a loss. A friend invited them to Los Angeles to stay for a little while, not realizing that "a few days" would soon turn into months and years.

Upon arrival, the Millers (pictured above throwing out the first pitch at the June 8 Rays game) couldn’t get a job in LA to save their lives. Unprepared for any kind of professional life, the boys did have an incredible work ethic to carry them through. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know, and we were scared by it,” says Logan. The Miller brothers faced this fear by home-schooling themselves for over four years. From roughly 2001 through 2005, their schedule was as follows: Up at 5:30 a.m., head straight to the gym. Back by 7:30 a.m., grab a shower, and then read and write from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Everyday.

“We were crazy,” Logan tells me, and I believe him when he says he wouldn’t recommend this as a study plan for the nation’s youth. “We were driven by fear, fear of turning into our father … fear of failure.” In this period, the Millers read a library’s worth of books, developing an affinity for Jack London and Dickens, while also writing 14 different scripts covering a multitude of genres. But other than some modeling gigs, the twins were nowhere near breaking into the film industry.

After their father passed away while in jail in 2006, the boys vowed to make a film about his life in tribute. They wrote a script and started thinking about how they were going to make it — starting with the actor who would play their dad. Their first choice was Ed Harris, but with no industry contacts and with no credits to their names at all (Touching Home is truly the Miller’s first film; they never even made a short before tackling the feature), it seemed like a long shot. Still, within three months of their father’s death, the twins were at the famed Castro Theatre in San Francisco with a plan to ambush special guest Ed Harris and convince him to do their movie.

The Ed Harris ambush is fast becoming Hollywood legend. The twins planned to grab Harris as he made his way to the Castro stage for a Q&A and show him a laptop playing some footage they shot. (“We were so out of our minds,” Noah states emphatically.) After that plan fell apart, they instead tried to push their way backstage after the talk and were promptly tossed from the restricted area. But Harris was soon mingling with the crowd, and the Millers ended up face to face with the actor, overwhelming him with their passion and energy. "I think he was amused by the whole twin thing," says Noah. “It was kind of like a diversion,” adds Logan.

Talking to the twins, you get a feel for what Harris must have seen that night. These guys talk in ever-expanding thought bubbles that they themselves pop when a story becomes too ponderous. My recording of a short segment of the interview is littered with long tales punctuated by an “I’m rambling again!” or “This is way off your question, but …” And they complete each other's sentences — all the damn time.

For example, I asked about the compromises a filmmaker makes when adapting their own life to the screen. In particular, I knew they had been roofers in real life, but the occupation had been changed to quarry workers for the film. How did that happen? Their exact response:

Noah: The roofing to quarry, we were about three weeks out from shooting when we had to make that adjustment. And that, I wouldn’t— look, it worked out. We were very happy that we couldn’t get the insurance to shoot on a roof because the quarry to us, visually …

Logan: … Was more cinematic …

Noah: Once we showed up to the quarry … we wanted to find something that would at least depict, you know that …

Logan: … the hot, miserable and sort of dead-end kind of work of roofing.

Noah: And it’s not as hot and as miserable as roofing, and you make more, actually, at the quarry.

Me: Really?

Logan: Yeah yeah. Because you’re in machines most of the time and …

Noah: … and you get paid more if you can operate a machine. As a roofer you’re just a grunt. If you ask anyone who works outside for a living with their hands and they’ll tell you, yeah, roofing’s the worst. It’s a dead end …

Logan: But changes like that, the insurance skyrocketed when we wanted to shoot on the roof …

Noah: So you don’t sleep for that night, or a couple of nights and you go, how are we going to do this? ’cause you’ve envisioned …

Logan: We were like, “We were roofers! Our Dad was a roofer! We can’t work at a quarry! But then, you also say, hey, you’re making a movie, so you either make the documentary, right, or you make a narrative feature, and so then you have to figure out, what are you gonna do?

Noah: Yeah, and there were a lot of locations that we actually got to use the exact location. You know, where our dad parked his truck; that was where he parked his truck. Paintmill Creek Saloon, that’s the saloon, you know. When Logan finds him in front of the Fairfax Theater; that happened way more than one time …

The entire 90-minute interview went like this, with the twins telling me their story in tandem and in seemingly random order. (I suspect this is every conversation they ever have.) Fortunately, the Millers have put their whole story down on paper, and their book, Either You’re In or You’re In The Way, is a funny and moving account of what it took to get Touching Home made. Theirs is a crazy story — loaded with great details I’ve only briefly touched on here — and the book is a must for any aspiring filmmaker.

For the Miller twins, the journey to produce Touching Home is now coming to an end. The film is an amazingly assured directorial debut, one that will no doubt earn the pair the chance to make another film. Do they have any plans? “We’d like to make a family film, though we know that ‘family film’ is kind of a dirty word in Hollywood right now,” Logan says. “But we’re thinking more like early Spielberg, which people don’t think of as family films but really are.”

Something fun and exciting that everyone can enjoy? In today’s media landscape of niche marketing and micro-targeting, a “family film” that aims to appeal to everyone might just be the most radical thing the Millers could attempt. Whether they succeed or fail, these guys are guaranteed to give it their all.

(Note: All photos used with permission from Touching Home's press site. Click here for full credit information …)