‘Funny Pages’ Director Owen Kline On Underground Comics and Frantic Faces [Interview]

How do you feel that discovering comics influenced your journey through independent film, and what you were open to exploring as you found a voice of your own?
In terms of what we’re talking about with singular voices, it all definitely started with “The Squid and the Whale.” That was a small movie, and it was autobiographical; some of the details in it are still veiled, [in terms of] what’s fiction and what’s reality. It was playing with that, taking the fabric of your life and putting it toward something. You don’t get that a lot with movies, I don’t think. People do it to degrees. But on a smaller film, you have to be more resourceful. You end up stuffing in people wearing your clothes or a T-shirt that your friend wore in high school. Those details imbue it with some shade that enhances it for you and helps you engage with it on a deeper level.

Besides mumblecore — which didn’t really appeal to me besides “Frownland” — there weren’t any voices I was finding [after that.] And when I found Josh and Benny [Safdie], and Ronnie [Brownstein], after Josh moved from Boston University, they were doing [cinema] more personal than mumblecore, than people trying to work through minor problems in their early twenties. The Safdies were wrestling with more personal issues on film, and they were doing it in a way that was unexpected and funny and frantic — and contagious, as a friend of theirs. Their voice, and Ronnie’s voice, in particular, was also pretty formed by comics, from [Robert] Crumb to [Peter] Bagge to [Daniel] Clowes. We spoke that same language, and he could tell I was trying to tap into that with this movie. That’s partly why it happened.

It’s interesting, the way you asked that. At the time, there were very few voices in New York film that were exciting. To work on their early stuff and perform for them in one of their early shorts, that was very meaningful. At the same time, I was taking in contemporary independent comics as well as the older stuff, [via] a store called Rocketship in Brooklyn that was the first graphic novel and small press-focused comic store that wasn’t just run-of-the-mill Midtown Comics or what have you. I was influenced by those independent comics and their approach to film, from Crumb to Joe Matt to Chester Brown, who did “Yummy Fur” and all these really personal, confessional works. They imbue them with details from their lives that are microscopic to many, but when you have them in the panel of a comic and can make people focus on them, it brings forward a certain significance. 

Underground comics, in caricaturing marginalia as they often do, apply this exaggerated focus to otherwise-ignored areas of society, which feels like part of why they appeal so much to the socially privileged Robert. There’s a vicarious aspect to his obsession and a certain tourism to his journey. Tell me about finding that character.
It didn’t become imbued with anything more personal until a few drafts in. I was starting to go in that direction for a couple of years, while I was trying to get anyone interested. When Josh and Ronnie got involved with it through Elara, they helped me push it to more personal, strange places. They knew me, which was lucky. I had people whose sensibilities I shared, and who helped form my sensibility, who were trying to tap into me in the same way the teacher at the beginning of the movie is trying to tap into [Robert.] 

It all started, though, with this kid I’ve since played in bands with, in early college. He was in high school but looked about 20. He was this dopey kid, who lived in Princeton. We connected over having had similar paths, but his path was a more weirdo, outsider, New Jersey version of mine, looking up to the guys at Princeton Record Exchange and playing in bands with them. Later, I started putting more of myself into it. The film is pretty self-reflexive.

Given that impetus for Robert, I’m curious how you found the perspective of “Funny Pages,” which follows him closely but doesn’t exactly share his point of view — and is unsparing about the grotesqueness and absurdity of the situations he puts himself in.
There’s schadenfreude there. The film is self-critical, inherently, but that all just comes from observation. He’s an archetypal 16-year-old city kid who wants to really rail against the world without understanding the world. He happens to be from where he’s from, to have his background, and the people around him have another background, which says things about their marginalized industry. All of the details in that way are coded, but it’s not intended to be political. 

Setting Wallace at Image Comics was particularly funny to me, because the guys who created Image were all commercial Marvel artists who wanted a piece of the pie and decided to make their own independent company. Wallace was at the bottom of that independently focused, creator rights-focused system and was a casualty of that system. There’s some coded irony there. Those guys had the privilege of being able to leave Marvel, create their own heroes, and start their own company — and he was under their thumb. Then, here comes this kid who thinks he can just do it all and clearly doesn’t have any aspirations, financially, for the kind of work he wants to do. He’s just focused on his own weird, personal work. These artistic inclinations link back to class, if you follow them there.

I don’t think the movie’s political. I think it’s social. I wasn’t intending for it to be out of step, and I was just thinking about characters I’d known, how I connect with them, putting myself in all of them in different ways. If you’re a kid who draws comics like Robert, you can still see a lot of bitterness and frustration in Wallace, because plenty of people do their own thing and get bitter that way too. They don’t work in the system but try to create a voice for themselves and stick to that. Comics are not generally profitable. That’s why Marvel is moreso a movie studio now and creates merchandise; comics are merchandise, for a place for Marvel. You sell a new Hulk comic along with some Hulk hands.

In concert with cinematographers Sean Price Williams and Hunter Zimny, you find a style of extreme close-up that mirrors the distorted, exaggerated feel of comic caricature, and this incredible range of character actors whose faces you present that way. How did you approach those shots and sequences?
It’s a behavioral comedy, I think, and more of the humor comes from behavior than it does from anything writerly. There’s a lot going on in the human face, you know? Sean really likes the human face, and he likes to shoot it up close.

For short films I did, I had a close friend, Johann Carlo, who played the taxi driver Dixie on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” but is also just a great downtown New York theater actress. She’s been in a ton of films, and she coaches actors. I’d bring in first-time actors, and I wanted to capture them; to some degree, there’s a level of anthropology. 

With someone who’s not a performer, you hope their personality is strong enough that, when you put them on camera, they don’t change a molecule. An actor lights up and changes the second you yell “Action!” They step into another place. But with someone who has a strong personality, they’re holding a bunch of lines in their hands and have to say each one the way they would say it, or react to it the way they would react to it. Or there are no lines, and they just have to interact with where they are. A scene in “Funny Pages” with a guy [dressed as] Santa Claus was roughly scripted, and he knew the beats of the scenes, but in the two shot between him and Wallace, I just let him improvise and do his thing. It creates an interesting variable for the actors that also keeps them on their toes. That challenge as an actor is to keep it fresh and keep it alive. If someone interrupts you, you have to still be there for that take.

Anyway, I’d bring these first-time actors to Johann, and they’d try to perform. They would change a molecule; they’d change many molecules and try to act. She’d say, “You’re doing a lot. Remember, the human face is gigantic on a big screen. Even a blink does so much in a close-up, on a 50-foot screen.” That concept always stayed with me, and I was thinking about that a lot with some scenes between Miles and Robert at the comic store, where you’re just right there amid some pressure-cooker dynamics. Staging is important for directors and actors; you can do so much with psychology when considering where someone is, why they would move there at this line, and what line motivates them to move. All of those natural, microscopic mechanisms are [in play,] and you have to pay attention to that.

The beauty of a close-up, too, is that it gives you range and freedom in the edit to play around with the performances, if you have it covered that way, because it’s more mysterious. It doesn’t matter where they are; you’ve already established the atmosphere with your wides, you know where you are once you’re in the comic-book store because you’re surrounded by comics, and eventually you just have to block all that out and be right ‘here.’

“Funny Pages” is in theaters and on VOD August 26, from A24.