Comedian takes centre stage

Otago Daily Times

11-07-2025

Friendship gets an uncomfortably funny examination in director Andrew DeYoung's new movie.
Filmmaker Andrew DeYoung didn't initially set out to make a Tim Robinson film, but that's what ended up happening.
The writer and director, who has helmed episodes of TV's Pen15 and Our Flag Means Death , makes his feature film debut with Friendship , starring Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson as two men whose bromance sours quickly.
While the movie plays out like an extended I Think You Should Leave sketch, DeYoung is not a member of the show's creative team and had never worked with Robinson before Friendship .
DeYoung talks about how the movie came to be and how it came to be so Tim Robinson-esque in style and execution.
Q I'm interested in the nature of the movie, because it seems like it's such a Tim Robinson project. Was it written as such, with Tim Robinson in mind?
A It started off as just a regular movie idea. As I started to write it, I of course started to imagine who could possibly play these roles and Tim popped in my head probably halfway through the process. I loved the idea so much and it felt so right, that I started to kind of write it toward his strengths, never knowing if he would do it or not. But it just helped me picture the character, as if he was doing it and thankfully it worked out.
Q Once he came on board, did you work with him to mould the character, or was it your words on the page and then his performance? Because it screams Tim Robinson and his very specific style of humour. What was your collaboration like?
A Tim is Tim and I think people would say that no matter what he does, just because he's so unique in his performances and his performance choices. But he, of course, would have ideas to pitch and I love collaboration. On shooting days, if things weren't working, we'd do alts on certain lines and things like that.
But the structure and how the team moved and played, that was on the page.
Q How is Tim as a collaboratorand how was he to work with throughout the process of making the movie?
A I've never worked with anyone who cares as much as he does. He really cares about quality and I think that's why people are so rabid for his work. And if something doesn't feel right, he'll let you know and if it goes right, he'll let you know, too. And he's really good at expressing if something's not feeling right and then we'd pause and kind of figure out how to make it feel organic and honest and as real as possible, because everything he does comes from such a real, honest place.
Q Paul Rudd is such a big deal and he has his own gravitational pull as an actor, but he really kind of bends to the universe of Tim in this movie. How was he in terms of shaping his performance to fit into this world and reacting to Tim's utter strangeness?
A Rudd is an absolute professional and also just the best, most lovely dude in the world. He had a tonne of ideas coming into it and I love when actors have ideas and I try to incorporate them as much as possible. When we started shooting, he kind of did a bunch of levels and we figured it out.
From the jump, we knew we were gonna shoot this and perform this as if we're in a drama. Of course there's a lot of silly stuff happening and goofy situations, but we play it as if it's high stakes for these characters. And he was really good about committing to the drama and the emotion underneath it, while also knowing, like, what behaviours would get a laugh.
He's really good about knowing when to go to the line of something that feels joke-y and not crossing it. I think why he's so brilliant and so loved, because he really has such a precise gauge on his performance and what's funny and how to make things grounded or do what the scene needs.
He's in all kinds of stuffand he can go so many places, but for this, he really knew from the jump that this needed to be a certain kind of underplayed performance. And it's ultimately Tim's movie and he's there to support Tim in the best way possible.
Q In the real world, if you came across someone like Tim Robinson's character in the movie, how could you control that situation and not let it get out of hand, the way it does in the movie?
A We can't control everyone, that's for sure. (Laughs.) I wrote the (Rudd) character in hopes that he would display, at least in the first act, healthy masculinity. And to be someone who's so OK in themselves that they can let other people have hard feelings by saying, "This friendship is no longer going to continue".
Which is, I felt, so rare, not only in male relationships but in relationships in general. We're so under-socialised now to let people have hard feelings. And I was hoping to exemplify in some way that this character has the ability to express themselves and put boundaries in place that are healthy for themselves.
The fun of the movie, quote-unquote, is watching (Robinson's character) not listen to those boundaries in such an adolescent way. Hopefully by the end, he has a seed of how to handle it. — TCA