![]() ![]() It was clearly one person doing it, every day. For me, “ Peanuts” was probably the first comic voice that I was drawn to. Before you have any grasp of Andrew Sarris and his definition of auteurism, before you read all that great literature in high school or they force it on you, you inherently pick up on that. I always just looked for really singular voices. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.Īs a young artist growing up today, when did you first encounter underground comics, and what appealed to you about their styles, that DIY aesthetic? Sensing an opportunity for mentorship from someone with industry experience, Robert begins to pursue Wallace, with increasingly chaotic consequences.īelow, Kline spoke about his initial discovery of underground comics, the art of behavioral comedy, and collaborating with legendary indie cinematographer Sean Price Williams. Rejecting the socioeconomic leg-up afforded to him by a cozy suburban upbringing in Princeton, New Jersey, Robert buys a cheap car and moves into a diabolically grimy, overheated basement in nearby Trenton.Īt a public defender’s office where he picks up a meagerly paid job inputting data, Robert meets Wallace ( Matthew Maher), a recalcitrant and mentally unstable man who once worked as a color separator at Image Comics. ![]() ![]() (Though both are acknowledged in the film, Kline often strikes a more niche note than that, such as during an early sequence of Robert flipping through pornographic Tijuana bibles from the ’50s as if studying the pages of some holy text.)Īfter the death of a boundary-pushing mentor ( Stephen Adly Guirgis) who’d encouraged this subversive streak, Robert decides to drop out of school, seeking a more up-close and personal connection to the underground aesthetics he idolizes. Starring Daniel Zolghadri (“ Eighth Grade”), “Funny Pages” focuses on Robert, a high school senior obsessed with the scuzzy underworld of small-press comix and their outsider artists, from Robert Crumb to Art Spiegelman. READ MORE: ‘Funny Pages’ Trailer: Owen Kline’s Safdie Brothers Produced A24 Film Comes In August Though he first started to write the script that would become “Funny Pages” about a decade ago, it wasn’t until Kline sent a draft to the Safdies’ Elara Pictures that it started to coalesce more completely. ![]() Initially, Kline planned to become a cartoonist himself, before gaining experience on short films in college - at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute - sent him swinging back toward moviemaking. READ MORE: ‘Funny Pages’ Review: Owen Kline Examines The Limits Of Privilege In Sharp New Comedy īut Kline, now 30, didn’t travel a direct path back to the big screen, and his invigoratingly queasy first feature is informed more by teenage years exploring underground comics and assisting Josh and Benny Safdie as a crew member on their early short films than it is by his memories of acting for Baumbach (though Kline, son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, still considers that project his first brush with personal filmmaking). With that early role on his resume, it perhaps follows that “Funny Pages” (in theaters and on VOD August 26, via A24) occupies a similarly fraught middle ground between caustic dark humor and self-reflexive upper-middle-class caricature. In Noah Baumbach’s painfully semi-autobiographical “The Squid and the Whale, ” about a middle-class New York family torn asunder by divorce, Kline played the 12-year-old brother of Jesse Eisenberg’s neurotic teen his character’s compulsive habit of masturbating in public added to the film’s already-laudable cringe factor. Rambunctious and rough-textured in ways reminiscent of the independent filmmaking boom that had fully erupted out of New York City by the mid-late 2000s, “Funny Pages” is the debut directorial feature by Owen Kline, previously best known for co-starring in one such film from that era. ![]()
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