‘Snatch’ meets Tarantino: A Q&A with ‘Best Pancakes in the County’ producer Raja Collins

If you haven’t heard, acting legend Nicolas Cage finished up a movie in Arkansas earlier this year. It’s called “Best Pancakes in the County,” and from what I can gather, the cheekily titled romp seems to sit on the violent and zany side of Cage’s eclectic body of work.

The trailer for “Best Pancakes” privileges one primary setting — a remote diner — and three main characters: a cook (Justin Long), a waitress (Shelley Hennig) and The Sonofabitch (Cage), a madcap con man with the strangest-looking nose I’ve ever seen. Cage’s character’s criminal dealings appear to be the reason why said diner devolves into a breezy bloodbath that might not be for the faint of heart. At one point, someone’s head gets shoved into a sizzling deep fryer.

Written and directed by Ken Sanzel and distributed by the Independent Film Company, “Best Pancakes” simultaneously heads to a limited number of theaters (including one in Little Rock that’s yet to be announced) and video-on-demand platforms on Nov. 20. While not explicitly set in The Natural State, the entirety of the movie was shot here in Central Arkansas, leaving us with some questions about how everything came to be. Luckily, Raja Collins, an Austin, Texas-based producer who worked on the film, was happy to oblige.

How did “Best Pancakes in the County” come together?

A producer that I work with all the time named Eric Breener, he had the project before and brought it to Eduard Osipov and me. Edward is like my brother — he’s an amazing producer. We tried a few times, but the timing didn’t work out. But then at the right time, we reached back out to Nic Cage and made another offer when we heard he had an open window after something got pushed back. 

He’d worked with Ken Senzel — the director and writer of the movie — before. He liked Ken and he liked the script, so he signed on and we cast Justin Long as the other lead with Shelley Hennig, who we’re a huge fan of. I think she’s such a movie star, and when people watch her, they’ll know why. She’s just phenomenal. She and Justin stole the show. And Nic Cage, he’s just Nic Cage. He’s amazing. I love everything he does. He’s one of my favorite actors of all time.

I’ve seen the trailer for “Best Pancakes,” but I’m curious how you would describe the movie in your own words.

This movie is the wild ride of a man named S.O.B. who owns a pancake house and has something very valuable that every single crooked fed — just every type of department of crookedness in the world — is fighting for. It’s a battle to the end to get it, and it’s about how everybody tries to outwit each other. 

It’s really fun and upbeat. If you were to compare it to something, it’d be “Snatch” meets Tarantino in a diner. 

Is it actually set in Arkansas?

We purposely made it nondescript and just Middle America. Because of the violence, we didn’t want to say, “It’s this little town here in Arkansas.”

Talk me through some of the locations you used. 

[Most of the film] is pretty much just a pancake house, right? And here’s the funny thing: We could not find a diner to save our lives that would work for the movie because we needed a building that was desolate around it, where there was not much. In Pinnacle Valley, there was a building that they were going to build a restaurant in, and during COVID it just stopped, so we had an empty canvas. We have a phenomenal designer named Nate Jones who with his team built an entire diner for us within three weeks. It was so impressive and it looked beautiful. 

You’ve produced six movies in Arkansas since 2022. What keeps you coming back?

Arkansas is just so user-friendly. The film commissioner, Christopher Crane, is the best I’ve ever seen in my life anywhere. He’s so hands-on. He helps with everything. He helps refer locations to you. He makes the calls that no one else wants to. 

The crews are also super friendly here. People are excited to work here. They work hard. When you have a problem, people are asking, “Hey, how can I help you?” and they don’t have their hand out. They just want to help. 

There’s so many different kinds of exteriors you can do here. You can do a lot of different locations in Arkansas and make them look like they’re anywhere in the world, or you can just shoot Arkansas for Arkansas.

The hospitality that you’re talking about doesn’t surprise me, but I have heard that the state of tax credits for films in Arkansas can make it hard to shoot here. Can you speak to that?

[The tax credit incentives in Arkansas] are actually not bad. It’s 25-30%, which is pretty good for most states. And it’s a very generous turnaround time — it doesn’t take like a year to get it back. It used to be a rebate here, and that was even better because you don’t have to have somebody finance it and then sell, so you’re getting hit twice on funding the tax credits. 

The few things I’ve actually asked a few people around town [to advocate for during the next legislative sessions] are: “Can you please up the tax credit to over a million dollar cap per individual, so if we’re paying an actor more than a million dollars we can get their whole fee on the tax credit? Can it be higher, like 35%? And can we go back to a rebate?”

That would probably almost double the work that we can bring to Arkansas, because then filmmakers wouldn’t have to look to Atlanta and other places that can cover that.