What I love about Michael Rees’ brand of comedy is that he always finds a way of creating situations that feel utterly bizarre yet completely believable. That was the case with Middle Sized Things, the last film we spoke to him about, where a professor gets precious about his nonsensical theory, and it’s the same with His Parents Never Taught Him, his latest comedy about the antics that arise at a double-booked AirBnB. It’s a film purely about a situation and the chaotic energy it generates with a fun turn at the end that’s hinted at continuously throughout the short. We spoke to Rees and Co-Writer/Actor Haley Stiel about creating the chaotic energy of the film, not being precious with the specifics of dialogue in the script, and the challenge of wrangling the cast and crew to shoot the film with two cameras in six and a half hours.
Much like Middle Sized Things, this short is based around a really funny core concept, do you remember when it came to you?
Michael Rees: I spent all of May in California, mostly LA but was on a trip back from San Francisco when I started spitballing ideas for something I could shoot with the ensemble of actors I had in LA after I did a screening there two weeks earlier. Haley had expressed interest in also shooting something while myself, Kyle, and Veronika were all in town. While also texting Haley on the ride I kinda settled on the idea of having two groups of people run into each other somehow. I had recently met Liam and thought the idea of him not knowing how to swim was funny. Haley was having a different experience with some friends in Palm Springs and it just seemed fun to smash our ideas together and see what happened.
Haley, what do you remember about the origin of the short?
Haley Stiel: I had just returned from a weekend in Palm Springs with some friends who are the kind of gorgeous people that always seem to show up to places with a baguette and a sunflower being like, “It’s crazy, someone just handed me these!” They brought along a friend of theirs, equally stunning but perfectly random, and we spent the weekend at an Airbnb, lounging by the pool, topless. I was immediately obsessed with how funny straight girls act when they’re topless, like the constant talking about how great it feels to be free. When I got back from that trip, I met up with Michael. We had been discussing writing something to film while he was in LA for the month. The characters we had in mind made us laugh enough that we knew we could craft a story that would showcase the characters’ quirks. We met up at a coffee shop and started writing the girls’ dialogue, brainstorming a scenario that would throw a wrench in their perfect getaway.
I was mostly focused on everything just feeling nuts and less worried about what is being said.
How was it working with Liam and finding the look and feel for his character?
MR: I went to Walmart the day before the shoot and had a lot of fun just deciding what this young guy would be wearing to learn how to swim, especially those shoes.
The film has this kind of loose spirit to it, was that captured during the shoot? How long were you shooting for?
MR: We shot about thirteen pages of script in about six and a half hours with two cameras and a lot of chaos. I had very little time to get through each of the five scenes but wanted to prioritize the moment when they clash together. In a situation like that I was mostly focused on everything just feeling nuts and less worried about what is being said. I tend to work with people who are quite good at flying all over the place and my job is often just to set them up for success and capture what happens next.
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What cameras/lenses did you shoot on that allowed you to be so mobile and shoot multi-camera?
So Adrian and Jake each had an Alexa Mini with some older zoom lenses. It’s the only way to move that quickly and get thirteen pages in half a day of shooting. I’m still trying to perfect this method but it has proven to be really helpful in most situations and then sometimes I will just use one camera if it’s a very specific shot that needs to be nailed, the reveal of the girls watching Liam swim at the end, stuff like that etc. using comedians as actors who can improv stuff better than I’m capable of writing, I just always like to maximize my chances of getting them doing something funny that would be hard to replicate time and time again.
How does such a hard and fast shoot impact an edit?
MR: Because of how hectic the shoot was I didn’t know where to begin when cutting it. I waited about six weeks until I had shot another short of mine Guzzle Buddies and then edited them both at the same time once the writer’s block had subsided. Alex Sovoda helped me get an assembly together and Madison Van Buren also assisted in helping wrangle all the chaotic footage we got.
I always have so much fun mixing scripted things with non-scripted stuff in the edit and to me its the most fun because the film can really take a new shape and life.
Initially the script had called for the girls opening the film and then going to the guys in the car but it just didn’t feel right or set up the clash as well as opening with the car stuff which feels more dramatic when you don’t know what they are referring to. Going from their seriousness to the girls acting fun and insane was a way more satisfying cut and also creates the movement in your head that oh wow these people are going to run into one another. Figuring out that switch made the edit make way more sense to me and then it only took a day or so to get cut. I always have so much fun mixing scripted things with non-scripted stuff in the edit and to me it’s the most fun because the film can really take a new shape and life and you can end up with something that is so much different than initially conceived.
Have you begun thinking about any ideas for your first feature film? How do you feel about the challenge of taking your brand of comedy and translating it to something feature length?
I am currently developing this feature starring Veronika and Kyle and it’s essentially the architecture of a romcom but littered with our humor and more left field ideas that I don’t think other romcoms would try to get away with. I think, or rather hope, my brand of humor will fair well for an hour and a half or whatever when that time comes. All of these shorts have been such a crash course in directing actors and dialogue and making a scene work. I can go on for days about how important I think all of that is because it’s just still the hardest thing to get right. Just my opinion.
What else are you working on at present?
I am working on that feature and two others as well. One with Lewis Pullman who’s the lead of Guzzle Buddies which I just released, I’m super stoked about but need to keep a lot of it under wraps because it’s kinda a scripted/doc hybrid idea.
