Director Owen Kline Calls Funny Pages His ‘Self-Critical’ Debut

On a recent weekday afternoon in Manhattan, the director sat on a glass doored conference room couch. He had a brooch of a dancer-type figure on his fleece. He wore reading glasses around his neck.

His parents are an actor duo. His sister is an independent musician. He played the small brother in The Squid and the Whale. He is releasing his first full-length film on August 26.

It is a coming-of-age comedy about Robert, an aspiring cartoonist who abandons the suburbs to follow his dreams and live in a basement boiler room with strange old men. One of the best movie moments of the year is when a man says, "Dennis the evil menace with his slingshot." You only need to watch it once to remember it. The representative review from Deadline said that it was unpleasant from beginning to end. It is destined to become a cult favorite.

Kline has a singular point of view at a young age. He says that comedy is similar to that. You can make excuses for things that are not true.

The interview has been edited to make it clearer.

WIRED asked how the movie started.

Owen began to play with these characters a decade ago. I wrote a comic called "Robert in the Boiler Room" The first thing to do was to figure out who this kid is that would want to go down there and be excited. After writing the first draft of the script in 2015, I tried to get people to read it, but they didn't. Josh reading it.

How did you first get to know him?

When Josh graduated from Boston University, I knew him. The shorts of the brothers made a difference. When he moved back to New York, I held the boom mic for a couple of their projects, and I acted for a short called John's Gone, which was also filmed in New York. I got in the weeds with those guys on the script, trying to figure out a tone and a sense of humor. As a character study, they helped me tease it out.

The first thing we did was film in the basement. It felt like we were starting where we left off with the comic, and it set the tone for the rest of the story. We had a lot of fun spraying this stuff on these people. Sean Price Williams said we need to spray more sweat. Smoke machines were used to make a fog. We wanted it to be hot. The steam bath is for older people.