‘Friendship' Director Andrew DeYoung on Shooting His Tim Robinson Cringe Comedy with ‘High-Arthouse Aesthetics'
Are the guys OK? So rarely do we get smart, subversive screen comedies about male friendship these days, and writer/director Andrew DeYoung's feature directing debut 'Friendship' turns the genre inside out.
Casting Paul Rudd as forlorn weatherman Austin Carmichael, neighbor to Tim Robinson's anxiously neurotic Craig Waterman, in his A24 movie will immediately bring to mind another male friendship comedy, 'I Love You, Man.' 'Friendship' is like the dark mirror of John Hamburg's 2009 cult classic, as the desperately friendless Craig strikes up (or even forces) a bond with the charismatic man across the street who keeps getting his packages. It proves ruinous for all, including Craig's wife Tami (played by Kate Mara), who is obsessed with an ex and oh-so eager to get Craig out of the house.
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The Los Angeles-based DeYoung, who has directed episodes of you-name-it every beloved single-camera streaming comedy series from 'PEN15' to 'Dave' and 'Our Flag Means Death,' was inspired by his own brush with a male companionship that wasn't gelling.
'It was less of an established friendship and more of a wanting,' he told IndieWire. 'I thought there was a friendship blossoming, and that person didn't seem to be as interested as I thought. And I'm like, wow, you see the romance version of it constantly. I've never seen the middle-aged version between two straight men. That's happening all the time. Men have friendships, and they have issues with their friends, and I know it's most predominantly portrayed in 'I Love You, Man,' but what's my version of that that's closer to my reality? And so that's where it started from.'
The arthouse-cringe, let's call it, comedy of 'Friendship' is filled with the familiar and not-so-familiar iconography of male buddy comedies: Craig is trying to bond with his son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer) over the latest 'Marvel,' Craig and his corporate co-workers at a company that makes their clients' products more addictive hang out in the garage over beers, and Craig and Austin seek bond-forming adventure in the most unlikely of places (here, a sewer system, for one). But Craig's agonized fixation on finding a new friend only turns alienating for Austin, who has it all figured out, unlike his neighbor, who's no longer having sex with his wife since she had cancer.
'Tim's a friend, and as I wrote, I was imagining him and I never told him about it until I finished it and sent it to him,' said DeYoung, who next directs 'I Think You Should Leave' star Robinson in HBO's half-hour comedy pilot 'The Chair Company.' 'The Austin character was kind of an amalgamation of all kinds of different archetypes and people in my head, so I never knew who that quite would be, but when Paul's name came up, I was like, that guy is perfect.'
DeYoung said that Rudd 'asked to be in the movie more' and 'it really made the movie even better. I imagined in my head I was going to get someone totally on the drama side. [Paul] has a little bit or a lot of everything he could do. He's this handsome guy who's really funny, but also such a good actor and will be able to play off Tim in such an incredible way and knows the comedy moves without winking at it.'
DeYoung shot 'Friendship' in Yonkers, giving his A24 buddy comedy a wintry, folksy twinge that wouldn't have been possible had he shot the film in California, where he's from.
'I grew up in Fresno, California. It was a gift to have to shoot in Yonkers during the dead of winter because I'm a California boy — it just sounds like pure pain, but it added all these gifts with the coats and the snow. There's an underlying sadness and grief to it, and the weather really helps set that tone in place. Split-level homes were a new thing that I didn't know, and I just had to embrace that.'
'Friendship' is unusual for a studio-adjacent comedy in that it's rife with moments of portentous dread, cinematographer Andy Rydzewski's camera slowly zooming at times like a horror movie. In one sequence of the film, Craig takes a strange drug trip after licking an amphibian, which sends him into a hallucinated Subway franchise brick-and-mortar. Meanwhile, there's Tami, lost for half the movie in the sewers underground after Craig leads her down there trying to spice things up. (Whoever thought that would end well?) There's even some straight-up horror violence toward the film's end that feels ripped out of A24's arsenal of chillers.
With Rudd and Robinson on board, DeYoung said he had the 'leverage' in terms of pitching the movie, and at a moment where he was 'so kind of disappointed by the overall state of cinema that I'm like, 'I'm not going to make anything that's not exactly what I'm going to make,'' he said. 'We're going to shoot it with these high-arthouse aesthetics.' He pitched the film as in a vein more like 'The Master,' 'The King of Comedy,' 'Toni Erdmann,' or 'Force Majeure' than 'I Love You, Man,' 'all movies that are successful and work. So I'm not pointing to things that are shaky.' ('Friendship' was produced by Fifth Season and BoulderLight Pictures, with A24 acquiring it out of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, where the film premiered.)
DeYoung added, 'Paul and Tim have massive cult followings, and to me it [felt] so safe. I never tried to soften the movie. I only tried to make it feel scarier to financiers, to be honest, to see who is actually down to get in the mud with me and try something different.'
I asked why DeYoung is 'disappointed by the overall state of cinema,' and he said, 'I just feel like there are a lot of safe choices that don't respect the audience. It's so nice to feel respected by a filmmaker, even if I don't like the movie or agree with what it's trying to do. If it feels like it's trying to do something and treat us as the intelligent people that I like to imagine we are, I'll respect it. A lot of films really sell out the audience and treat us dumber than we are.'
DeYoung pointed to Sean Baker as one such filmmaker whose smart work 'sneaks through' and doesn't pander to audiences. Beyond his work, the Oscar-winning director's recent comments about the financial headwinds faced by indie filmmakers resonated with the 'Friendship' director, too.
'If I didn't have TV, I would be trying to slum it in the commercial world or flipping houses, I don't know,' DeYoung said. 'Some working at the highest levels [are] still getting fucked over financially. People project onto us as having a certain kind of financial life, but it's actually not the case. The system's rigged against us, and I love A24, truly such good partners, but the culture is rigged against the filmmaker. And there's a lot of people who didn't do much on these movies who are getting paid more than the filmmaker.'
Speaking of filmmakers pulling it in financially, there's a running gag throughout 'Friendship' in which Craig is just dying to see 'the new Marvel' because it's apparently so good that it's driving people crazy. 'I have to choose my words wisely because I know these things bring a lot of joy to people,' DeYoung said. 'The reason why maybe talented filmmakers go to bigger tentpole projects is kind of none of my business, and I hope they're getting paid to do it regardless, but it just doesn't interest me… [Marvel is] almost boring to make fun of. But I think a character who likes it is interesting, and it's a way to comment on it without the usual tearing down of it. All those arguments have already been made.'
'Friendship' is now in select theaters from A24. It goes into wide release Friday, May 23.
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