All Square

By starrymag | October 15, 2018

By: Taylor Gates

 

 

Michael Kelly (John) and Jesse Ray Sheps (Brian):

 

Q) What excited you about your character and what drew you to this project?

 

Jesse: My character Brian is just a normal kid who doesn’t really have a father figure in his life. I have a great father, but I envisioned what it would be like if I didn’t and how that would be. You can just read the script and it’s phenomenal.

 

Michael: I think that’s what drew me to it, too. My friend wrote it, but I’ve read many things that he’s written in the past, but when he sent me this I was like, “Oh my god.” This is the first time I read something and was like, “I have to play this character. We have to make this movie.” And we did very, very quickly. It was the material that drew me to it.

 

Q) Are you guys baseball fans or did you play when were you a kid?

 

Jesse: I’m a diehard Yankees fan and Michael’s a big Braves fan, but I still enjoyed doing the movie even though I had to suffer through doing it with someone who loves the Braves. [Laughs]

 

Michael: He played when he was a kid, although he’s still a kid, and I played as well for a short bit. I am a diehard Braves hand. I know everything about it, I’m friends with some of the guys on the team, and I love baseball. It’s funny because this movie both is and isn’t a baseball movie. It’s got a lot of heart and it’s funny as hell. It’s not just baseball.

 

Q) I love Pamela Adlon’s character, too. She adds something so great to the mix. What was it like working with her?

 

Jesse: The entire time she was on, everyone was hysterically laughing. No matter what room she walked into, everybody was hysterically laughing.

 

Michael: I had met her prior and had loved her as a person and an actress. I think she’s amazing. When her name came up, I was like, “We have to get Pam.” We worked really hard to do it. Working with her was everything I wanted it to be and she was everything I imagined for the character. She brought so much to it and made her so multi-dimensional. She’s a great actor and she’s a hell of a lot of fun to be around.

 

Q) You guys seem like you have a great dynamic as well. Did you do anything special before filming or did the connection naturally happen?

 

Jesse: The first time I met Michael was during the callback. I went in and my mom is a huge House of Cards fan. She was kind of obsessed with Michael. [Laughs] She was like, “Oh my god! Jesse, if you don’t get this. Don’t worry, I’m not going to watch House of Cards anymore.” But I know she wasn’t being serious because she loves it too much. We went in, she was panicking, she said hi to Michael and then I went in. From the start, we had a connection. From the first reading.

 

Michael: We knew when he left the room. We were like, “We found him.” We knew having seen the tapes, but when we got him in the room and saw his ability to take direction and just hang out and be a cool, nice kid meant a lot to us. And our relationship developed over those next eighteen days of filming we were together nonstop pretty much.

 

Q) Do you guys have a favorite scene in the movie that was really memorable to shoot?

 

Jesse: Definitely when John (Michael Kelly) gives me a fake beer because they just put in a random assortment of stuff like ginger. It was the worst-tasting thing I ever had.

 

Michael: The beer scene was fun. Looking back, for me the scene on the curb when I’m apologizing and giving Brian money. I remember so much happened organically when we were rehearsing it. It came to the point where I leaned back, and he leaned back the exact same way. Everything came together at the end of filming. That to me was probably my favorite moment.

 

Q) I can’t have you here and not talk about House of Cards. Can you tease what’s going to come next for Doug this season?

 

Michael: No. [Laughs]

 

Q) Your lips are sealed, huh?

 

Michael: I can tell you this–Doug is still Doug. He might not have his partner-in-crime and the person he served five years prior, but you’ll still get your fair-share of crazy-ass Doug. This season was a lot of fun. I’m thrilled. I can’t wait for people to see it. To bring it to a close after six years is crazy.

 

Q) How do you think people are going to feel about the ending? What emotions will they have?

 

Michael: I don’t know what ending they’re going to use! We toyed with many different things, so I’m curious. I can’t wait. They sent it to me, but I always wait and watch it with my wife when it drops to the general public. That’s how we’ve always done it because in the beginning they didn’t give it to me ahead of time, so we always watched it when it came out – except for one time she cheated on me when I was out of town and she watched it. I’m excited because by the time it comes out. The first episode will have been shot over a year ago. So much of it is new when I see it. Yes, I read it all, but I really focus on my stuff when we’re filming so everything else is kind of new again.

 

Q) I’m a huge Constance Zimmer fan and I know you guys are pretty good friends. Did you guys get to interact at all this season? I know you can’t tease very much.

 

Michael: [Laughs] She’s on the show and I’m on the show. That’s all I can say. I’ve got like one month left to hold everything in. It’s been like six years of trying to keep secrets even when everyone thought I was dead filming in Baltimore. Everything was like, “What are you doing here?” And I had to be like, “Oh, I’m consulting on production.” It was easier to sell because I had scruff on my face. They were like, “No, you’re not! You’re filming!” And I’d be like, “Dude. Have you ever seen Doug with facial hair?” And they were like, “…No. I guess not.”

 

Q) People are rabid fans.

 

Michael: I know! It’s crazy! It’s exciting.

 

Q) Is there anything else for you guys on the horizon?

 

Jesse: I’ve got a few projects in the works and I’ve been working on my album. I play guitar and I write songs–a lot of love songs.

 

Michael: How great is that? And he’s going to be Spider-Man someday.

 

Jesse: Yeah. That or Deadpool.

 

Five Novogratz (Brett)

 

Q) This is one of your first movie roles. Would you say you learned anything on set?

 

A) Definitely from all the older actors.

 

Q) What do you think was the most important lesson you learned?

 

A) Being real, not being over-the-top and being very authentic.

 

Q) What did you love about the script when you read it?

 

A) It was a funny movie and I loved that. I thought it was a great message and it was kind of cool how it was about baseball, but it was also about a bookie. It’s an important movie that I think deserves to be seen.

 

Q) Did you have a lot of fun behind the scenes?

 

A) Definitely.

 

Q) Was there a favorite moment from filming?

 

A) There was a scene where Jesse and I had to get really tired because we’d just gotten in a fight. We were like, “Let’s get sweaty,” and started running around the entire field up and down. We were like, “We got this!” and patted each other on the back. That was really fun.

 

Q) Are you an athlete in real life? Do you play baseball yourself?

 

A) When I was like four I played baseball but not as much anymore.

 

Q) Do you watch it on TV?

 

A) Not as much as I should but here and there I’ll catch a game every now and then.

 

Q) What are you most looking forward to at the premiere tonight?

 

A) Popcorn. [Laughs] And reuniting with the cast and crew.

 

John Hyams (Director)

 

Q) What drew you to this project?

 

A) It was an interesting project in that it was a movie that was made by some close friends of each other. We all wanted to do something together, so it was a very organic project. The writer, Tim Brady, and I go way back. So do Michael and I and a number of other people in this. Tim had started out as a playwright and then moved to be a straight comedy writer and in the process, he had the idea of writing this feature film script. He had always mentioned the concept to me and I thought it was a great idea I would love to read and if the script was any good, would love to try to help him get it in the right hands.

 

I think Michael had the same idea and when it was finally done and he showed it to us, we were like, “Wow. This is so much better than I ever could have imagined.” It’s the kind of movie they just don’t make anymore. The kind of movies I grew up seeing and loved so much. Movies by Michael Richie and Hal Ashby and these great filmmakers, they just don’t do in cinema anymore.

 

Fairly soon after reading the script, both Michael and I both started to feel like, “Well, I don’t want anyone else to make it. I don’t want anyone else to have this role but me.” We decided to make it together and Tim was open to that idea, so that’s how we did it. It was very grassroots. Through Michael’s relationship with [producers] Yeardley Smith and Ben Cornwell of PaperClips [production company] and Tim’s relationship with Jordan Foley and Jonathan Rosenthal at Millhouse it all came together very quickly.

 

Within a couple of months we were out in Baltimore scouting locations. At that point, it was about bringing it everyone we knew that we thought were great and should be involved in this movie. We brought in [actors] Josh Lucas and Tom Everett Scott and through Michael we got [actors] Isaiah Whitlock and Pamela Adlon – between people that we knew and loved or people we didn’t know but wanted to work with Michael or loved the script. [Actors] Jay Larson, Andrew Sikking, Craig Walker…There’s just a whole list of great friends and talented people that got to work together. I’ve never had an experience before or since. I’m a few projects removed from it already and I love every project I do, but this was special in a different way.

 

Q) Do you have any advice to aspiring directors?

 

A) Number one: generate your own material. If you’re not a writer, hook up with writers. Don’t go out and just try to get yourself hired because it doesn’t really work that way. The greatest commodity in this town is great material. No matter what level people are working on, that’s the one thing that’s democratic. If you have great material, people are going to want to hook onto it and be part of it. It’s about generating good material whether you read a book and love it or read an article and want to make that into a project or if you just have friends who are writers and want to generate content with them. It’s controlling the material and attaching yourself to the material like we did with this. He could’ve hired another director, but we grabbed onto it. That would be my main advice. And beyond that, watch a lot of movies and develop your own voice. Those are the most important things.

 

Yeardley Smith (producer; actor in the role of Beaches)

 

Q) What is it about this project that drew you to it?

 

A) Michael Kelly. I had met him at an Emmy event about a year before. I literally saw him across the room and went bounding up to him screaming. I lost my mind and he was cornered. He couldn’t go anywhere. [Laughs] So I introduced myself. Lisa Simpson is always the best door-opener because who doesn’t like Lisa Simpson? He didn’t run away and that was the plus. A few months later he contacted me and my business partner Ben Cornwell saying he wanted to do this comedy and asked if he had any money. We were like, “Probably. Maybe for you.” We read it and loved it and it was just a couple weeks later that we went into pre-production. And now here we are.

 

We founded PaperClips on the premise that we wanted to be the people who were able to say yes first because that’s so hard. Nobody wants to be the one to say yes first in this town, but once one person says yes nine people say yes, but so what? Who’s going to be the first? So, we wanted to be the first and that’s how it all came together. Us and Milhouse Motion Pictures are the other financiers. I spied this great little role of the bartender in this movie and thought, “Maybe if I put up half the money I can play this part.”

 

Q) Seems fair to me.

 

A) Seems like a fair exchange, doesn’t it? It was actually the only way I was going to be able to have dialogue with Michael Kelly.

 

Q) That is important.

 

A) My options were few. They were really few. [Laughs]

 

Q) Do you have any advice for people trying to break into the industry?

 

A) Don’t do it. Just kidding. I think the path to success is so nonlinear and different from everybody. All I can say if the things that used to throw me off balance, the amount of rejection you get, it’s not that it doesn’t bother me anymore it’s just that I recover from it much more quickly. That’s the win. I don’t know if you ever get to the point where it doesn’t bug you unless you’re a different kind of person than I am. I’m really much too tender-footed for this business, but I feel like I’m one of the last ones standing. Thank God for The Simpsons because without them I wouldn’t be I don’t think.

 

I always had a singular focus and one of the things I always heard was, “Only do it if there’s nothing else you can imagine doing.” And that’s really true because it’s unkind and there is a kind of, “What have you done for me lately?” There are going to be times they exalt you and there are going to be times when they say, “We’ve done that enough,” and knock you off your pedestal. You just have to be able to roll with the punches. It’s a stupid phrase, but it really is true.

 

One thing I didn’t do well that I would really share with young people is create some balance in your life right out the gate. Don’t tie your identity to your job because when you aren’t able to do your job to the extent and with as much frequency as you would like, you will have a huge identity crisis.

 

 

Red Carpet Coverage of All Square