After taking the internet by storm in recent years with his Emmy-winning sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave, Tim Robinson has found his first lead film role in Friendship, a surreal buddy comedy co-starring Paul Rudd that’s making its world premiere tonight in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto Film Festival.
Tonally familiar to anyone who’s a fan of Robinson’s, with its socially awkward characters, offbeat dialogue (“It’s not trespassing, it’s adventure”) and bizarro bits of slapstick, the film follows Craig Waterman (Robinson), a suburbanite disconnected from his wife (Kate Mara), who sees no reason to change his life or make new friends…until weatherman Austin (Rudd) moves into the neighborhood. Mysterious yet friendly, macho but vulnerable, Austin transforms everything for Craig, until his obsessive and childlike nature threatens to ruin the friendship, and possibly everything else in his life.
At one point a writer and performer for Saturday Night Live, Robinson has since Friendship reteamed with DeYoung — a TV veteran making his feature directorial debut — on HBO pilot The Chair Company. Robinson would address neither that project nor the future of I Think You Should Leave, which aired its third season last fall. But in a Zoom conversation with Friendship‘s director and lead actors, the trio discuss the inspiration behind their new Fifth Season pic, the state of the theatrical comedy, Rudd’s recent John Carney collaboration and forthcoming Anaconda pic, and more.
DEADLINE: Andrew, could you tell us about the inspiration behind the film?
ANDREW DEYOUNG: The seed of it came [during] 2018. I asked someone that I thought was going to be a new friend, someone I worked with…The job ended and I was like, I think this could be a new buddy. I asked them to hang out, and I got blown off, and I caught myself spinning out about it. I’m like, “Oh, wow.” I’ve never seen two grown men’s friendship fall apart in a movie in a certain way, so I just started playing around with that idea, and then it eventually became this.
DEADLINE: Did you intend the film as a sort of send-up of buddy comedy tropes?
DEYOUNG: No, I don’t really think that way. I just write from a place that feels interesting. I want it to be entertaining, in a way that we ideally haven’t seen before, so I’m trying to write from that instinct. So it’s less about pointing to things, but just trying to find what’s going to make my parents, or anyone’s parents laugh, and also me laugh, Paul laugh, Tim laugh. In an interesting way that feels like something universal, but in a way that’s kind of timeless. That sounds kind of pretentious, but that’s where I’m coming from.
DEADLINE: Tim and Paul, what appealed when you read the script?
TIM ROBINSON: When Andy sent it to me, it was like the fastest I’d ever read anything. It was just really funny and sad, in a lot of ways, and I liked how sad the character is.
PAUL RUDD: Same. I really love things that exist in that funny and sad world where everyone’s trying to do their best, but they don’t have the tools to do it well, whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish. I think the characters are funny, relatable. I just thought it was funny. And tonally, I was like, what is this, exactly? I couldn’t quite put my finger on it when I read it. I certainly love Tim and Andy, and so that was really a huge part of the appeal, but I liked that it was this story that I didn’t know where it was really going. I didn’t know how it was going to resolve itself, and it seemed funny, and sad, and the right amount of weird.
DEADLINE: Paul, it seems like you’ve recently been signing onto smaller, more out-of-the-box projects after a number of years working on tentpoles. What would you say the choices you’ve been making say about the place you’re at, creatively?
RUDD: I don’t know. I judge each thing kind of just individually. My whole thing is, I just really like working with people that I like to hang out with, whose work I find inspirational, and usually in some of the smaller stuff or indie stuff, you get that more. I have had a bit of a run where I was in these big studio films, which was a bit of a new thing for me. It was never like that before the Marvel stuff. I guess [right now] doesn’t feel that different to me because I’ve always tried to do smaller, interesting things, but that is part of the appeal. They are fun to work on because you can get into them a little bit more. You’re not painting on such a wide canvas.
DEADLINE: Tim — this being your first big film, was acting for the big screen always a goal? Or was this just a case of the right project coming along? Do you see yourself getting into film more going forward?
ROBINSON: I think this was just the right fit for me. I was a big fan of it. I don’t think of anything like “I want to do more of these,” or “I’m planning on doing more of these.” If it comes to me and I read it and I want to do it, I do it, or I don’t. So it’s like I don’t have any plans, but this was something that spoke to me and I thought was funny.
DEADLINE: Your character here feels very in the vein of those you play on I Think You Should Leave. What is it that interests you about socially awkward characters in scenarios taken to extremes?
ROBINSON: I think it’s as simple as, it’s a sensibility thing. These are the types of guys I think are funny, how they behave, and so it comes down pure and simple to sensibility. It’s just what is funny to me.
DEADLINE: What kinds of conversations did the three of you have ahead of filming, as far as the creative vision?
DEYOUNG: When I sent Tim the script, I was like, “I wrote this for you and I want to shoot it like [Paul Thomas Anderson’s] The Master.” Because The Master is really funny and could be all kinds of things, and any kind of reaction is right. There’s so many different reactions to have that movie, and to me, that’s the most rewarding thing in watching something, where I’m like, I could feel almost two feelings at once happening here, and there are some hard comedy moves, there’s some more artful, maybe more pretentious moves in here. But that is something that I was always reaching for. Master was a touchstone, but in terms of acting, everything was to be played grounded, so we would just make sure we were always touching the reality of the emotion in every scene. And these guys are just so brilliant and effortless. You don’t really need to do much with Paul and Tim — they’re already so locked into delivering something that feels so real and natural.
RUDD: I feel like [Tim and I] just both kind of innately knew what this was. I think we all saw it the same way, so there really weren’t that many in-depth conversations about “How do we play this?”
ROBINSON: When we started shooting, even stuff that was in the script, we realized on the day some things weren’t fitting into the tone, the groove we had found. So, we threw out some stuff that was like, “Oh, this is funny on the page, good on the page,” but then you’re like, “Oh, that feels different than what we’re shooting.”
DEADLINE: Paul, you got to flex your musical skills a bit with your part…
RUDD: If that’s flexing, I think I need to work on that a little.
DEADLINE: Is that fun for you, though? Or do you just happen to end up in comedies asking that of you?
RUDD: I don’t know. I think it was just, that part was in the script. It just seemed to be like, oh, this would fit in a checklist of things that would be generally considered cool, from the perspective of Tim’s character. The fact that the guy’s in a band is cool, and the fact that he’s on TV.
It’s fun to do. It’s also fun to play characters who maybe seem cool, or try to, but they’re not really, and I think that the character I was playing would be somebody that might seem pretty secure in who he is and has it all figured out, but he doesn’t at all. He’s got his own insecurities and things that make him sad in his own right.
DEADLINE: Was there much improv on this set?
DEYOUNG: No, barely. Tim and Paul are so good at it, so naturally, small additions would come up, but it’s the page, for the most part.
DEADLINE: How did you get Subway on board for a toad venom hallucination sequence?
DEYOUNG: Honestly, that’s a producer question. I didn’t think we would ever get them. I thought I’d have to make up some fake sandwich place, and immediately, they were like, “Yes. And do you want money?” It was like, “Oh my God.” They were just down for anything, and it was fantastic.
DEADLINE: The state of the theatrical comedy has been in the public discourse lately, with Vince Vaughn, for one, lamenting that studios seem less willing to take big swings these days. How do you feel about the relative lack of comedies made for the big screen, compared to a decade or two ago?
RUDD: I mean, comedy movies aren’t going anywhere. They’re always around, and they’re the ones I want to watch. It’d be nice to see a renaissance where they start making a lot more, but I don’t know. I can’t figure out my frickin’ thermostats, let alone the movie industry.
I don’t understand what the reasoning behind most things is. Is it because humor just doesn’t work as well globally, and that’s why they don’t want to put money into this kind of thing? I always thought that comedies do well when people are sad and the world is on fire, so it seems to me that comedies [should] be doing gangbusters these days, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
People are seeing movies in a much different way than they did 10 years ago, and certainly, studios are making them in a different kind of way. There are more television shows. It seems like they put more into that.
DEADLINE: Andrew and Tim, you’ve recently reteamed on the comedy pilot The Chair Company for HBO. What can you tell us about it?
DEYOUNG: I absolutely love it. Fingers crossed that we get to make more.
DEADLINE: Paul, you’ve also got some exciting projects coming up, between John Carney’s new film Power Ballad and a new Anaconda film with Jack Black. What are you most excited about at the moment?
RUDD: Football season. [Laughs] I mean, I think that with every job I’ve ever done, I’ve always gone into it really excited and hope that it works. The Carney thing, I just finished. He’s terrific, and it was a unique and fun experience. The next thing you were just talking about, this Anaconda movie, I think is still getting figured out, but I really like those guys [Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten], the last movie they did, and Jack is great. So we’ll see. I’m excited if it all comes together, seeing how that is.