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| Kimball Farley in Hippo |
Mark Rapaport and I first met back in 2021 when he produced and starred in a breakthrough low budget horror comedy which he described as “the first Jeffrey Epstein film,” Berlinale Best First Feature award winner The Scary Of Sixty-First. At the time he was trying to break into directing, and he told me about a film called Hippo which he had shot during Covid lockdowns. Now, in 2023, Hippo is screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival. When we got a few minutes to catch up, I asked him about the film, a dysfunctional family comedy, and how it was shaped by being made it that restrictive context.
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| Lilla Kizlinger, Jesse Pimentel and Eliza Roberts in Hippo |
“The writing process started during Covid, and it did come from the place of ‘What can we make right now?’” he says. “That's a combination of Covid and also just, you know, ‘What do we have access to?’ My grandmother's house. My acting team that I know – we weren't trying to cast some A-list celebrity. I consider my cast A-list celebrities. But yeah, Covid definitely focused us even sharper to be like, let's make this movie despite all of these constraints, because we just wanted to make a feature so badly. For me to direct my first feature, for Kimball to star in his first feature, my co writer.
“We followed Covid protocols, and having a small cast definitely helped as well. But I will add a caveat to everything I just said, which is that I definitely love contained pieces regardless. I love The Whale, you know, and just the ability to make drama in such a small space. My short film Andronicus, which was at Fantasia last year, was also a single location. So I'll never know if I was pushed in that direction because of becoming a director during Covid, but it's where I've landed, and still every movie I write is a contained chamber drama.”
It’s a very intimate film, no doubt partly due to that but also, I would suspect, because the cast and crew knoe each other well.
“Yeah, totally. And having a co writer who's also your best friend, in this case, Kimball Farley. We connected on my short film. Of course, I've worked with Eric Roberts before, and then Lilla I met at Berlin through The Scary Of Sixty-First. I'd message her on Facebook, like, ‘I have a movie idea. with you in mind. Is that okay? If I like write it and send you the references will you do it?’ She was like ‘Yeah, that would be amazing!’ I'm like, ‘Okay,’ because she's incredible, and she won a Silver Bear. I didn't know if she'd actually be down for some random movie. But she trusted me.”
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| Lilla Kizlinger in Hippo |
Why choose to shoot it in black and white?
“That's a really good question. On my short film Andronicus, my cinematographer, William Babcock, he was obsessed with black and white photography at the time. He was pushing me to actually do my short in black and white. At the time, I was like, ‘What are you talking about? This has such vibrant colours. We want to do the Garden of Eden thing with green bedsheets and they'll make it really use colour to our advantage.’ But then he got me thinking about black and white and then by the time the feature rolled around, I couldn't get it out of my head.
“I become obsessed with movies like Cold War and Persona, and then modern black and white like The Lighthouse. It has these these pieces of such striking imagery, and it's something that colour it seems like not that colour doesn't let you have – striking imagery, yes, but the black and white focuses it on the light and dark. I started to realise that if you do it in black and white it makes your brain think about light, which is cinematography, which is film. It's all about light. I even set my iPhone for black and white mode so I could see the world in black and white during that time, and it became an obsession.
“Me and Kimball talk about this – this might sound a little religious or spiritual, but we can also come to love black and white because it's very pure and unencumbered. And apparently, when we're born, we only see black and white. I'm not super religious – my film, obviously, is part of a response to growing up religious – but I like to think that there is a God, and that He created the world in colour. And when we create our worlds as filmmakers, as not a creator of the universe, we want to have reverence for creating this fake world. And, and one way to differentiate between the real world which is so beautiful and in colour, is to make our films in black and white, out of respect for like the real creator.
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| Eliza Roberts, Kimball Farley and Lilla Kizlinger in Hippo |
“Again, I'm not really religious, but it also helps us remind ourselves that movies are just that: just a man made creation. Having that mindset informs a lot of the dialogue and staging. So I don't know that every movie we do is going to be black and white. My cinematographer certainly doesn't want that to be the case. But it's become an obsession.”
I remark that the characters in this film are quite cut off from the rest of the world, and it seemed like maybe, by taking colour out of it, he was taking away another element of their connection to everybody else.
“That's a really good point, too,” he says. My cinematographer and I discussed something along those lines, not quite how you put it, which I love, but we talked about how the humour and all that was a little raunchy at times, and black and white helps to combat the attack on the senses that this movie can be at times. It helps us focus in on the world. And yeah, it helps with the feeling of isolation as well. It definitely contributes to the mood in this case, because these characters are so alone and there's a bleakness to their tale.”
So where did the characters originally come from? How did they develop in that way?
“That's funny.” he smiles. “I sat down with Kimball. Again, he's he's my best friend, my favourite lead male actor – well, he's a creature. I don't even know if he identifies as male or female, but he's literally a creature. We joke that he can just play anything he wants to play. He wants to play the most ridiculous characters. But anyway, we thought, ‘What can we do?’ We found this common thread that we weren't aware of before, in our first collaboration. It turns out he grew up Mormon. really religious, and I grew up really religious, Jewish.
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| Kimball Farley in Hippo |
“I told him a story about my mom – I remember, by my mother would dispute this – she gave me a sort of sex talk that made me feel like I was an alien. It was her puritanical way of maybe protecting us against some raunchiness in the world. She thought she was doing us a favour by being vague. And I was like, ‘We have to write a movie that incorporates this complete misunderstanding. What if a mother or a parent gave a sex talk that was just so confusing, and one of the children were mentally ill and took it the completely wrong way? Where would this go?”
“Luckily, I didn't take it that way, but it's kind of like the ‘What if?’ and it helps us look back on the past and the absurdity and hilarity of being a parent and a child. And Kimball, who, again had the same experience – for whatever reason he actually thought that sex was when two people are naked in their bed and their energies transfer, and you don't even have to touch each other – we laugh that we bonded over this, and that's where Hippo came from. It's the person that we both could be, the person I saw myself, and I'm sure the person Kimball saw himself.
“The stepsister was for me a fabrication because I don't have any sisters, I only have brothers, but that felt so limiting. I love my brothers but we really wanted to give the full perspective from male and female sides of things. And so Lilla’s character was invented as a Hungarian immigrant, to come into the story, because another another part of the film, other than coming of age, is that it was intended originally as a bit of a satire on American culture and how we raise families. It was originally titled Hippo, Or The Spectacular Detonation Of An American Nuclear Family. And that was where Lilla's character came in. She was the one who was going to survive this detonation of the American nuclear family. It takes an outsider's perspective sometimes to survive American culture, I think.”
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| Lilla Kizlinger in Hippo |
I note that there are quite a few films out there now about brother/sister incest, but it's always seen from the brother’s point of view, and it's always the same kind of story. The fact that this desire exists is supposed to shock people enough by itself to be a story. So I liked that he and Kimball did something very different with this and gave Lilla’s character a lot more control.
“I appreciate that. Yeah, that was an intention. Because we also joked, yeah, that's the typical trope of the step siblings, the brother wants to have sex with the stepsister and he's so lucky if he can. And it's like, well, yeah, let's think about this. Growing up, I certainly was like Hippo. I thought sex was a little violent, for whatever reason. I was a little troubled by it and I didn't quite understand it. Me and Kimball were happy just not engaging in such things as teenagers. And I thought, well, let's bring a woman into this, a young girl who maybe has a different perspective, maybe comes at it less from a corrupted place and more from a biblical place, and sees it as multiplying. She's a Christian. So it's also the two sides of religion. It can make you confused, but it could also make you really want to have babies.”
I like the fact that as we go through the story with Hippo, he does just seem like an ordinary, troubled adolescent early on. And then he's gradually building up strange ideas, but it's not until we see him from the point of view of a visiting therapist, who has come to enquire after his mother, that we realise just how far gone he is.
“Yeah, it's funny because he's slowly being peeled open as the movie goes. It was our way of addressing that fact. The movie’s a fantasy, a fucked up fairy tale, but we wanted to have a little grounding in reality. It seems like this boy, his mom would have a therapist, because of just how messed up they all are.
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| Kimball Farley in Hippo |
"I've had therapists in the past. My mother is a therapist, so therapy was a big part of the dialogue growing up. And you know, we don't want the therapist to control the situation, but let's have those worlds meet at the end and take us back to reality like ‘Oh, wait, yeah, Hippo is mentally ill. He’s not just a troubled boy.’ It is also a movie about mental illness and how, when it goes untreated, it could lead to terrify things – or hilarious things, depending.”
We are running out of time but i make sure to get in a question about Eric Roberts’ narration, because it’s the perfect counterpoint to all the darkness and dysfunctionality in the film.
“Oh definitely. Eric crushed it and Eliza killed it. Obviously Eric and Eliza Roberts are a Hollywood couple. We met on Andronicus, when they played two parents being forced to have sex at gunpoint at a family therapy session. They've both been so supportive of what I'm trying to do. The narration is inspired by movies like The Royal Tenenbaums or American Beauty. I've always been fascinated with narration. I think it's a nice storybook way to tell a movie, especially with black and white. I was like, ‘Let's just go there. Let's let's not hold back.’
“I wanted to tell a full story, using all the tools at my disposal. Especially in a low budget film, narration is a great tool to fill in those gaps of knowledge without having to film everything. But then Eric, he just absolutely crushes the narration. It's so soothing and calming. I think he does audiobooks and I understand why because it's just so easy to listen to. But again, I want to note about Eliza because Eliza is an absolutely radical comedic force. And she's the glue that really holds the family together, for better or for worse.”
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| Kimball Farley in Hippo |
She has some of the best lines as well, I note.
He nods enthusiastically. “And so many of those lines, you know, yes, some of them are in the script, but we just had so much fun on set – I mean, she can improvise. She can write too. Her father was legendary screenwriter David Rayfiel from Three Days Of The Condor and other films. I mean, she's absolutely a genius. And so having her play the mother, this brilliant writer, performer, actress, was just a godsend. And my mother's in on the joke – she's not offended. My mom and Eliza are actually great friends. But yeah, the Robertses, I just can't say enough good things about them, especially in this time. They believe in indie film. They really represent the spirit of what I hope Hollywood embraces, trusting young filmmakers.”
He already has another project on the drawing board.
“I want to do a movie called Cornucopia. We have a script. We're hoping to have to cast soon. It's a bit more of an ensemble. It's a cult movie, about a boy of his father, and it takes place in the days leading up to this call to alleged cosmic ascension. And the father and son see things very differently. The son starts to come of age himself and realise maybe there's more to this life than this cult. It really touches on religion and, you know, is there a god? And if there is a greater power, how far should we go to buy it to the system? Because those things – for me, growing up in an ultra or a super Orthodox community, they seemed to come to that a lot, where morality and rules don't always mix. And I think that's fascinating." He laughs. "And now that I've covered my origin stories, my mother and father, I feel like I can move on.”
