The typical teenage experience of ‘finding yourself’ can often lead you to strange places.
In the case of Owen Kline’s directorial debut Funny Pages, his protagonist Robert’s (Daniel Zolghadri) quest for an authentic coming-of-age experience finds him moving out of his middle-class family home into a truly unsettling apartment.
Sharing half a room with two middle-aged men, the teenager has to contend with boiling heat, unusual clutter, and a warning from the landlord that he mustn’t tell anybody he lives here.
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Shot in grainy 16mm by regular Safdie Brothers cinematographer Sean Price Williams, it’s a deeply visceral space. And as Kline explained to Zavvi, it was also inspired by an unlikely celebrity:
“When they raided Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch, the pictures released left you not knowing where to look!
“It was pure cultural decay: a drawer of pills left open, a crooked hologram of the Hulk on the wall, Baby Gap mannequins, Bart Simpson toys, and a Malcolm In The Middle VHS tape lying on the floor. It partly inspired me to stuff this film’s apartment with absolute crap.
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“I wanted to make a more frightening version of that, although it was toned down in the edit. If you look closely, you can see a rack full of adult diapers hidden behind the boiler – that’s one of my more depraved Easter eggs.
“There’s something about that basement which feels like a time capsule they’re stuck in – like they’ve made it disgusting as a form of self-punishment, for whatever reason.”
Let’s rewind to how Robert found himself living here. Following the death of his art teacher, who may have only been feigning an interest for predatory reasons, the teenager realises that to become a great cartoonist he needs to embrace danger.
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This means moving out of the family home into the apartment and dropping out of school to start working for an attorney – here he meets Wallace (Matthew Maher), who previously had a low-level job at the prestigious Image Comics but is now disgraced after attacking a pharmacist. Wallace is clearly mentally unwell, but Robert sees him as a potential mentor despite the red flags.
Kline was briefly a child actor, most notably appearing in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid And The Whale, but eventually quit to focus on his dream of being a cartoonist. So, does the director see the film as autobiographical in any way?
“You want to write what you know. But with a debut film you’re at the mercy of a low budget, so the greatest production value you have is knowing when to employ details from your life, including people you know. I knew people who worked in comics, so I employed them as performers.
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“I didn’t know anybody who can jump off a building and live, but I knew someone who can draw a great penis. When you’re trying to make your cartoonist characters feel authentic, that’s the best thing you can have.
“But Robert isn’t based on me! I wanted to be a cartoonist at that age and was a bit of a jerk, but the similarities end there – the only thing we have in common now is an optimism about the world, even if that means he makes mistakes and brings terrible people into his life.
“I had two years of being self destructive due to hormonal confusion, and I think I have the same curiosity that leads Robert to meeting Wallace. He wants to understand people, even if they’re not going to be healthy for him – I think there is a genuine innocence to that, even if it inevitably goes wrong.”
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Funny Pages has been a labour of love for Kline for almost a decade, shooting on and off over several years before wrapping in 2019. This was a conscious decision from the director, aware that the usual trajectory for an indie movie is “rushing to make the thing and trying to shove it into the Sundance line-up before it’s even half cooked”.
He instead aimed to follow producers the Safdie Brothers’ blueprint for low budget filmmaking – best described as having the freedom to “rip it up and start again”.
“As the old expression goes, you can’t make something good, fast and cheap. If you make something good and cheap, it’s going to take time, and if you make something fast and cheap, it’s not going to be good.
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“At a certain point, I realised the extra time only made it stronger. Editing what we shot for four years before getting another dime to finish it meant more room to experiment.”
After spending ten years making his debut, Kline is now eager to take the same approach with his next feature: “The weaknesses of independent film often come from rushing to get into a festival – it’s a common problem and often means indie films are the most compromised. When people do something out of the box and take a risk, it usually results in something much more adventurous.”
So, prepare for a long wait before seeing Kline’s next project – but if it’s as good as Funny Pages, it’ll be worth it.
This feature originally appeared in the September 2022 edition of The Lowdown.
