“I fell at the party. / I’m still at the party.” – Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer, ‘Nice Hat. Thanks.’
Listening to Abe Epperson talk about movies reminds me of the way I talk about music. I don’t do a ton of music criticism, because so much of what I enjoy about music and what I talk about when I talk about music is based on nerdy, musician-type stuff, like weird chord progressions and surprising key changes and other stuff that most makes sense if you’ve played music before. So I get shy, thinking no one will understand what I’m saying, and rely on simple “the band rips” or “the guitar here is sick.”
Abe Epperson, though—one-half of the Small Beans podcast network/YouTube channel, former director at Cracked Studios, director of Those Aren’t Muskets if you wanna reach way back into the annals of internet sketch comedy—Abe Epperson has the courage of his convictions when he talks about film. Listen to an episode of Directorpiece Theatre, a Small Beans show he co-hosts with fellow director Adam Ganser, and you feel like you’re getting downloadable upgrades to your film-watching brain. Personally, I still have a shaky grasp of what sight lines mean for the language of a shot, but I think about sight lines more, thanks to Abe.
Now, Abe and his homie/writing partner/fellow Small Beans founder Michael Swaim—notable for his role of “Michael Swaim” in After Hours, the best sketch show in the history of the internet—are making a new film, Papa Bear. The film is a heartwarming coming-of-age sex comedy about Trey, a high school senior whose father, Hank, comes out as a gay furry. I urge you to go check out their Seed & Spark for a more in-depth description. The film sounds amazing and full of heart. Also laughs. Have I mentioned Abe and Swaim are hilarious? They made Cracked Studios. With a lot of other people, but still. Papa Bear is about 44% funded as of this writing. Go ahead and buy a $15 ticket ahead of time and fund some art being made outside of capitalism’s normal currents.
Note: this interview was conducted over e-mail
Chris Corlew: What is the most exciting aspect of making this film independently?
Abe Epperson: Absolutely the most exciting part of making a film yourself is that you fill the role of the studio. You are in control. And in my soul, I’m a power-hungry monster. While it means you need to secure funding and work harder, there’s something exhilarating about living in the bed you make. Being able to wake up every day and say “okay, that reality is no longer on the table, let’s create a new reality” and really have no oversight other than the budget and the braintrust of the people who have built the story from scratch. It’s terrifying and it’s freeing and I love it. The way Hollywood films are headed, at this point I feel like I could find a home in independent cinema forever.
CC: You’re a musician and an appreciator of a good film and/or T. Bone Burnett-curated soundtrack. What’s the most out-of-budget song—we’re talking “rights to Abbey Road” here—music do you wish you could get, and for what kind of movie?
AE: I’ve always thought it’d be great to have a horrifying murder sequence set to “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys. Think American Psycho: blood spraying everywhere, limbs lobbed off, the face of the killer splattered with blood as they smile in slow motion. It’s such a pretty song, but it’s also sad, as Brian Wilson is singing about the fear of losing his love. I think it’d be fun to portray a serial killer needing his prey. It’d probably be a memorable sequence at the least.
But we actually have a “reach” track in Papa Bear. We scripted a bit where “Father of Mine” by Everclear keeps kind of haunting Trey. It keeps coming on the radio until he basically shouts “why?!” which we find hilarious. It’d be great to have enough of a budget to secure that bit. Which you can help with by pledging at our Seed and Spark link this month while we crowdfund the movie! Sorry, I can’t help myself.
CC: Has there ever been a scene/score pairing you or Michael introduced that was a surprise to the other? Made you view a scene a different way?
AE: You know that’s the thing about Michael. We know each other so well our experiences working with each other have always felt effortless. We may disagree here and there about small things, but never the big things. And Michael is so deliberate and clear about what he’s after that it’s always been easy for me to see the point of a sequence and play with the possibilities. Is it a sad thing to say we don’t often surprise each other? We’re cinematic brothers at this point and it’s always been a war between “the right choice” and “not quite it yet.” I guess the one I came up with after thinking about it was a featured sequence in a previous draft of Papa Bear that featured “Nasty Habits” by Oingo Boingo. It wasn’t really a surprise, it’s a perfect song to play over a montage of the character Ahmed, a teen with a porn addiction, jerking off through the years. Basically, we show him find out that he can masturbate and then show how he fell into a situation where he can’t really be sexually present with girls because he’s in love with jerking off so much. It’s such a wacky song and speaks to Michael’s eclectic tastes in music I immediately was on board. Though, in a more recent draft, we re-wrote the sequence to be shorter and now it’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” which is frankly a lot more efficient in showing Ahmed’s profound love of pornography. Also, we plan to literally quote 2001: A Space Odyssey, but instead of the first men realizing the power of tools, it’s Ahmed realizing he can touch his own dick. It needs to be said however, we’re not showing dicks in this movie. It’s played on his face. We’re not monsters, just weirdos.
CC: We’re both huge Coen Bros fans—you and Michael have The Coen Brothers Brothers series over on Small Beans—and if I’m not mistaken, we share a favorite Coen Bros movie, The Big Lebowski. Which tertiary Big Lebowski character could you see fitting into Papa Bear: the Guy Who Bought A Red Corvette Last Week (aka “Find A Stranger In The Alps” guy), the Landlord With The Dance Quintet, The Jesus’s Bowling Partner, or the Sheriff of Malibu County?
AE: What a great movie. What a great, fun question. I immediately thought of the Sheriff. There’s something about his alien-like calm that makes that scene. It’s like he’s on a different plane than the rest of us and we get this feeling that it’s entirely governed by a joy for bureaucracy and putting things in a nice little box. I had a chemistry teacher in high school who was also the football coach. He was a stout little man that was product of a kind of “git ‘r done” attitude. It didn’t matter if you made the game winning tackle or you raised your hand in class and told him Avogadro’s Number, if you did well, he’d give a little fist pump and say “Co-rrect! You’re dialed in, baby.” He definitely meant well and it’s charming as hell but it definitely spoke to his attitude that knowledge was something to be conquered; an item on a checklist that he took pleasure crossing out.
I think in Papa Bear, for Trey, our protagonist, who is ultimately trying to navigate the complex and messy enterprise of figuring out his thoughts on identity and sexuality, the world itself is a series of confusing confidences. He is well-aware of what is “normal” and is reluctant to part with that confidence. So we tried to populate the world with characters who subscribe to an is/ought worldview in a way that ultimately Trey sees as surreal. I think the Sheriff from Big Lebowski would work perfectly as one of Trey’s teachers. I think any teenager relates to seeing the adult world as something that screams “this is how it’s done” at them.
CC: Which old Cracked sketch series—Welcome Back Potter, Monster Management, or Starship Icarus—would Trey feel most at home in? What about Hank?
AE: An easy answer for Trey is Monster Management. That series was about a marketing team that specializes in rebranding classic monsters like Frankenstein or Dracula. Not only does Trey have a healthy love for pop culture, but he also is looking for a silver bullet for all problems. If he had his way, there’d be a video game walkthrough for life (at the beginning of the script). Soren Bowie and Nöel Wells both brilliantly play the marketing executives in that series, and every episode ends with a speech that gives the monster a sense of ease. Everything will be okay if you just listen to us. So for Trey, that’s obviously what he wants. But as we find in the movie, it’s not what he needs.
For Hank, initially I thought Starship Icarus because Michael and I conceived of Hank as a huge Star Wars / Star Trek nerd. And that’s completely based on Michael’s dad, who is a huge nerd. It’s one of his best qualities. But after thinking about it, I honestly am going to go with Welcome Back Potter, which was Cracked.com’s unhinged reimagining of the Harry Potter story as an acid trip. And in our story, Hank is in a new phase in his life. He’s finally becoming himself and there’s something to Michael’s performance of Harry as a drug-addled Hunter S. Thompson that makes him feel free and lighter. He’s not fulfilling a destiny, he’s just being him. I think Hank’s a lot like that. His kid’s going off to college, he’s divorced, and he can finally say to the world, “hey, I’m a gay furry and I feel ownership of my life for the first time ever.”
CC: I’m going to borrow from my own podcast here—if you had to make a “Starting Five” of influences, like a basketball lineup but for directors/writers/cinematographers/actors/artists/whomever, who is your Top 5 All-Influence team? You can try to make them play basketball—I bet Roger Deakins is a great passer—but you don’t have to.
AE: Oh boy, oh boy. This old chestnut. You totally got me, Roger Deakins is absolutely on that list. He’s just one of the finest DPs in the business. His images are complex and refined, but they seem effortless. He obeys that Rembrandt school of naturalist light, so it seems like everything is a painting. In this scene, the light just happened to fall this way. It always implies a larger world. He’s definitely the center on the team. Reliable, great in the post.
John Carpenter will always be precious to me. His journeyman attitude towards all things really feels like how I came up. When I first met Michael, I didn’t really know how to use a camera, but I sure as hell figured it out. Carpenter proved throughout his career that he was fearless and tried things others said wouldn’t work. He just didn’t give a fuck. And he trusts the team he works with. He basically worked with the same stable of people his whole career, so in a way, he’s not there to take credit, he’s there to lift everyone else up. He’s our point guard, dishing out dimes every day. Plus, we know he’s a gamer, so he’s probably really good at NBA 2k.
Alex Garland is probably the rookie on the team. Probably the young shooting guard who is having a banner year. While Garland’s stepping away from directing, he is in my opinion the finest working director today. His work in the last decade or so is incredible. He is so attuned to the overwhelming mix of stimuli the current generation has to deal with. And he makes these poetic images that make postcards out of his themes. Look at Annihilation and the lighthouse scene. It’s the most interesting portrayal of duality and corruption I’ve seen in a movie.
And for the front court, I’m going to put Robert Altman and John Ford. They’re workhorses but they’re also poets in their souls. Like everyone on this list, they are craftsmen who never try to take the stage themselves. They’re not loud filmmakers like Tarantino or Kubrick. They’re sneaky. When you look at their films, you can tell they are impeccable at their craft. But at the heart of their movies is an appeal to be a better human. I don’t know how that relates to basketball forwards. I feel like I lost the thread, but here we are.
Oh god, I can’t believe I’m benching Spielberg. What a mess.
Benching Spielberg unlocked a series of obstacles—rolling boulders, rooms full of snakes and centipedes, and an abandoned mine only navigable via squeaky cart on rickety tracks. Save Abe from having his heart torn out and skin melted off by vengeful dieties by contributing to Papa Bear. $15 buys a ticket (a link to watch the film sent to your email), other tiers buy increasingly sexy things. Follow Abe Epperson and Michael Swaim on Twitter and check out Small Beans.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris