Director Owen Kline Calls Funny Pages His ‘Self-Critical’ Debut

On a recent weekday afternoon in Manhattan, the director Owen Kline, 30, sat on a glass-doored conference-room couch. He wore a blue velour fleece adorned with a shiny brooch of a dancer-type figure. His reading glasses hung around his neck on a Croakies-like device. He looked gawky and, counterintuitively, very cool, which in turn made him feel very, specifically New York.

His parents are the actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates. His sister is the indie music star Frankie Cosmos. When he was a teenager he played the little brother in The Squid and the Whale. His first full-length film, Funny Pages, produced by the Safdie Brothers and A24, is out August 26.

Shot on 16 millimeter film, it’s an aggressively prickly coming-of-age comedy about Robert, an aspiring cartoonist who abandons the suburbs to follow his dreams—and also to live in a basement boiler room with strange old men. (One of my favorite movie moments of the year is one of said men saying, “Dennis the evil menace with his slingshot.”) It’s one of those movies you only need to watch once to never forget. “How unpleasant this all is, from beginning to end, without being actually funny,” reads Deadline’s representative review. And then, a few sentences later: “I’m assured it’s destined to become a cult favorite.”

At a young age, Kline has a singular point of view and the confidence to try some weird shit. “Comedy is like that,” he says. “If you tether it to reality, you can make excuses for all these things that are unreasonable concepts.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: How did this movie start?

Owen Kline: Ten years ago I started to play around with these characters. Originally, I had written a comic version called “Robert in the Boiler Room.” Just figuring out who this kid is—that would want to go down there and be excited by this—was the starting point. I wrote the first draft of the script over 2014, 2015, and then it was years of trying to get interest and nobody even reading it. Then Josh Safdie read it.

How’d you originally connect with him?

I had known Josh since I was about 15, when he graduated from Boston University. The Safdie Brothers’ shorts just made an impact. When he moved back to New York, I held the boom mic for a couple of their projects and I acted for a short called John’s Gone, along with Benny [Safdie]. I just got in the weeds with those guys on the script, really figuring out a tone and a sensibility. They really helped me tease it out as a character study.

Eventually we were on set, and the first stuff we were filming was that basement stuff. It felt like we were starting where I had started with the comic, and it just set the tone for the rest of it. We just had such delirious fun spraying this glycerine all over these kids and old men. Sean Price Williams, the director of photography, kept saying more sweat, more sweat, we need to spray more sweat! We played around with smoke machines, to create a certain fog. We wanted it to feel like a steam bath. A geriatric steam bath.

Did you always want to shoot on 16 millimeter?

That was alway the intention. As a really young teenager doing The Squid and the Whale—that was shot on 16 millimeter, and it was a very personal movie that was playing with personal fabric, although it was not directly autobiographical.

I’ve only ever wanted to direct; I never wanted to act. But Noah Baumbach really wanted me to play this kid, and I was like, I would love to do this and just be on a small movie set. The agreement was that I would get to shadow the cinematographer Bob Yeoman and learn the design of a scene and staging and blocking. That movie was all handheld cameras. There’s a lot of whip pans and cheapo independent film comedy grammar. Just seeing where they would make a decision, how they were being deliberate with the camera while also letting it run free—it was inspiring.

So you’ve been thinking about shooting on 16 millimeter for years?

In high school, I was pretty focused on 16 millimeter. I collected these old cartoons that I’d find at flea markets, and I’d run them through this old projector that my school library gifted me because they had no use for it. I’d find things in the basement of the Anthology Film Archives—I interned there in high school, and I helped the archivist Andrew Lambert a little. He’s a friend of mine. I helped catalog a huge part of the Harry Smith collection, which was very exciting, but a lot of their preservation was on the Kuchar Brothers stuff and all these personal movies which were shot on 16 millimeter. At least in the mid-century it was basically reserved for cheap porno and independent productions, and rich people would shoot their home movies on it. So 16 millimeter as a form in itself was sort of always in my head.

How do you feel now about the way you used 16 millimeter in Funny Pages?

It just lends so much to this particular movie. I intended this movie to be more drab and gray, really going against the neon aesthetics sensibility of our time a little bit. Make things gross and fluorescent. But then once we were shooting and getting the rushes and playing around with these very colorful Kodak stocks, we ran toward the saturated Looney Tunes colors.

We were pretty economical. You can find a way to shoot film if it’s important to you. You have to make other sacrifices. And it focuses you in a way: You have to know what’s essential. I had to storyboard a lot of stuff, which was a learning curve. But thankfully in high school I was determined to understand animation. I discovered Frank Tashlin’s cartoons. He was a Looney Tunes–Warner Bros. animator who wanted to be a filmmaker and a studio director but was trapped as a cartoonist, so he was auditioning with every cartoon. How many gags could he stuff in? How many wild angles could he have? There’s so much filmmaking in his cartoons—cuts, whip pans, angles, getting under Daffy’s beak in some sort of weird way. Beak? Bill? Bill! He’s a duck!

You mentioned wanting to react against contemporary aesthetics. By choosing to shoot on 16 millimeter, do you feel like you’re positioning yourself against your generation’s culture more generally?

I live under a rock. I don’t even know about this stuff. I don’t see the trailers. I live with a bunch of old magazines and cats and dead bodies—dead cats—skeletons—cat skeletons. I’m pretty focused on old stuff. This movie was created in a hermetic seal. It’s characters that are disconnected from culture, and suburbia helped that, and the basement helped that. It was a focus on this vacuum-sealed sensibility.

A lot of the coverage of the movie has suggested that it’s veiled autobiography, kind of like The Squid and the Whale, specifically in the way that the main character pushes back against his privilege. Is that an accurate reading?

The movie is definitely self-critical. In some ways, it’s me making fun of myself when I was 16 or 17. Some of the fabric and the environments within the movie I know really well. I’m sure that elements of the main character reflect on me. I wasn't quite as angry. But that’s what you want—the horrible decisions create the drama in the story. And I didn’t drop out of high school. But I wanted to.

Where did you go to high school?

To high school? I went to [extremely long pause] I went to. Um. Rock ’n’ roll high school.