A CONVERSATION WITH CASPER KELLY

Rodney Ascher: Hey Casper! Do you want to talk about your yule log movie or Electra Glide in Blue?

Casper Kelly: Oh, yeah, Electra Glide! I loved it. It's what you said, “It had the inverse of Easy Rider’s ending.”  A likable cop gets shotgunned by hippies. Um, spoiler.

RA: … it’s a 50 year old movie…

CK: Fair enough. I love that period of movies so much. And just when I think I’ve seen almost all of them I discover a new gem.

RA: Well I only suggested it to you because you recommended I watch Straight Time, which really knocked my socks off.

CK: Oh, yes. Yes. That movie is so great! It’s shocking, moving, surprising, funny, sensual. It has such an authentic feel to it of a time and place and small time crime. Harry Dean Stanton is so good in it. A very young Kathy Bates. Dustin Hoffman. Gary Busey! The list goes on.

I had a dream last night that you recommended another movie to me. And in the dream I watched it and to my delight I still remember part of the movie from the dream, and it kind of delivers on the goods of some Rodney Ascher weirdness.  Like this is a movie I would watch.

Basically a character is in a world that he's learned is a simulation. I love that stuff, like your “Glitch In the Matrix…”

RA: And ‘Final Deployment’…

CK: One of the glitches in this movie’s world was that any object that people are holding isn't aligned properly. It’s six feet above where it should be. So they're at a park. And so there's people holding umbrellas or hot dogs or phones, but they're just floating above where they would be…and it was a kind of a really cool image, you know. Somebody holding nothing and eating it and floating six feet above we see a hot dog disappearing.

So that's it.

RA: Haha that’s great! Only one time in my life did I have a dream in which, a movie or show that I was watching, in the dream, I was able to remember the morning after.  And I still remember it…

CK: Tell me!

RA: I even remember the song that was part of it.  The show I was watching in the dream was what would have been the  pilot installment of a sort of ongoing Saturday Night Live-type sketch. Like a film sketch,

like ‘TV Funhouse’ or ‘Mr. Bill.’ The set up was that there was this white miniature poodle. And it was so filthy, covered in soot. Like it climbed through like a chimney or something? And it came across a college campus where on the lawn all of the college students were sun-bathing nude, right?

CK: Like college kids always do on campus. (laughs)

RA: And the little dog wanted to play with them. So he squeezed  underneath a fence to get in….

CK: Yeah?

RA: Yeah! And that wiped a clean stripe down his back.

CK: Uh-huh. Like it's a skunk. Okay.

RA: EXACTLY like a skunk. So when he ran over to play with the  college kids, they thought he was a skunk and they ran in terror! I guess that’s the entirety of the bit, which, you know, as I say it out loud, maybe needs another escalation or two, but in fairness I was I was asleep when I came up with it.  

But, wait! The other thing was it had a theme song! Because he was a poodle who looked like a skunk, a simple transposition of the letters in skunk and poodle get us his name, which was “Punky Skoodle” and the theme song went:

“When you sunbathe in the nudle, oh oh, here comes Punky Skoodle!”

CK: Isn’t the unconscious mind just a Miracle of Miracles? It's unbelievable what came just pop in your mind. I think the unconscious mind is often smarter and more creative than the conscious one. Or Rodney do you believe that ideas come from another dimension and we have antenna to receiver them or something like that?

RA: They’re out there someplace, ready to find their way into your head?

CK: It’s the Lynch philosophy.

RA: Yeah, he calls it something like “diving for the fish.”  I know he does Transcendental Meditation to get them. Do you meditate? Do practice TM like he does?  Is that your secret?

CK: I’m interested in learning TM but I haven't paid the money yet. But I did find a bootleg description of the process which I've tried, and it works. It works so well, like I'm sitting up and my head just falls to the side. It just flops over and I feel very relaxed. It's weird. I'm trying to get a routine where I do it twice a day like everybody says you're supposed to but I haven't accomplished that yet. But it does work. And at some point I’ll have the money to learn it properly haha..

RA: When you say it works, do you mean you get ideas for things like Yule Log from it?

CK: Um not really, but it helps me turn off all my buzzing, humming tension. I more get ideas from taking a shower or just daydreaming, or driving, or being at the airport. But one thing I realized was that once podcasts were invented, I started listening to them in the  shower and I think that it slowed down my creative process.

RA: Maybe when you're listening to a podcast you're thinking someone else's thoughts.

CK: Yeah exactly. It prevents that idle daydreaming.

RA: Well, it's funny because I've been working on this script idea recently so I've been listening to that ‘Scriptnotes’ podcast…

CK: Love that one.

RA : Yeah? That’s funny because it certainly made me wonder about you in particular. And about something like Yule Log, which, is not a conventional, by-the-book screenplay, but is packed with story and payoffs and character development and theme.  So I'm wondering…are you using those Scriptnotes / Syd Field /Robert McKee/Save the Cat types of screenwriting approaches or are you sort of free-styling? Do you sit down and start at the beginning not knowing where it’s going? Or are you outlining and beat-sheeting and Dan Harmon story-circling your way to success?

CK: That’s a great question. I’ve written a few conventional movies, including ones I was hired to do with heavy involvement from a studio in breaking the story. And with those I definitely leaned into structure from Save the Cat and so forth. You need to have escalations, reversals, the character put to the test in the way that challenges their flaws and bad beliefs and so forth. The all is lost moment.

With this movie I didn’t worry about that so much. I just worked intuitively as I wrote - typing what felt right as I played the movie in my head.

Adult Swim Yule Log was unusual because usually my ideas begin with a protagonist with a problem or in a situation, and in those cases the theme is readily apparent. With Yule Log, it really just started with a funny gimmick: Wouldn’t it be great to have a regular yule log video after a while you hear off-screen a door opening and then see legs walking across the foreground out of focus, and they’d hear talking, and it’d become a story.

So I had to dig in and figure out what the story would be from there.

That was part one. Now part two. For a long time, I’ve had the desire to write a movie. I wanted it so badly but I just kept getting in my own way and it didn’t happen. I’m a procrastinator and I'm scared of writing screenplays, but I’m also  a good student, so if I have an assignment, I'm going to do the assignment. So once I pitched that movie and had the assignment, then I knew I had to finish it.  And those books helped, but I wonder if I had read them all because it's a great procrastinatory technique.

RA: Yeah, because it feels like working but nothing is getting done.

CA: Yeah. So I had all those ideas in my head, but I I didn't religiously follow them. They're just there as a useful thing if you need it. But ultimately you just want to do what feels right.

RA: How premeditated a structure did Yule Log have early in the writing stage? Did you use index cards and diagrams, mapping out characters and plot points?

CK: I’ve done that so much unsuccessfully in the past that it sort of stresses me out. So I just had a document where I would move paragraphs. I started getting ideas and I think I started off with just brainstorming. One early idea was that the first thing you’d see is some killers come into the house. I shouldn't even say this because this could still work for a sequel but yeah, some killers would come into the house in the first shot and they're throwing bloody clothes in the fire like evidence they're trying to destroy. So that was the entry into it and then I had another idea that the house would burn down. The whole movie would be a lock-off shot focused on the fireplace, but the house would burn down, and the fireplace would get bulldozed, so suddenly you can see outside, but you haven't moved the camera.

RA: That’s cool. And that kind of idea maybe connects your film to quasi-ambient cinema like Michael Snow's Wavelength or Andy Warhol's Empire. Were those were those kind of experimental films important to you in general or of some inspiration here?

CK: Not really. I'm not actually familiar with either. Well, I know Empire, but I think my first idea was just messing with the Yule Log genre, to do it all with a locked-down camera on a tight shot of a burning log, which I feel like I could have done, but then there was another part of me, that was like “Hey, you're getting to make a movie, why not just go for it and throw in everything you got?”

But also I think I was inspired by Too Many Cooks, I sort of treat it like a painter might have a small sample artists study that they use to then paint the bigger piece. And I thought “I should try to do some of whatever worked with that in this movie.” And one of those things was trying to be mindful of the audience’s attention and when the audience starts to get a handle on what is happening throw in something new.

RA: Well I think you did that, and then some. They’re both hugely effective hijackings of familiar formats and they go so much further and deeper than anyone would expect which I think is why they have a great way of short circuiting people’s expectations. I was looking through a Reddit page about the Yule Log and there was one post that leapt out at me. I don't know if you heard this one:

I was in prison last year when it first aired on the Cartoon Network and I was just lying in my bunk watching my TV all sad and depressed because I was in prison for the holidays and this shit came on and threw me for a loop, LOL. It seriously brought me out of my feelings for a bit and I was able to forget where I was, and just be absorbed by the craziness and absurdity. if I can say I had any good memories from prison. This would definitely be one of them.

I just loved imagining  this guy watching it in his cell and not knowing what he was in for.

CK: Oh, that makes me so happy. It feels good when you reach someone, and they like it. It's just the best feeling.

RA: Can I ask you about the portal between the fireplaces, It is such a beautiful dream-like idea. You’re sure it didn’t come from one of your bootleg TM sessions?

CK: No, that one came from my daughter Ava. I had the idea of going into the fireplace and that there would be a man there, but she had the idea of an elevator that goes to other fireplaces. That was all very early on and she didn't know hardly anything about the movie. I was in that phase where I'm just brainstorming so I'm like, “Okay!” When I shot it, I made her an extra in that sequence.

RA: Oh, that's awesome. My son has given me some pretty great ideas too. We were at the airport last week and we dreamed up a pretty good lineup of second-rate superheroes we should cook up a project for.

CK: Save them for Marvel, It could be valuable haha!

RA: No doubt. Did you two keep rigging until you came up with that beautiful but terrifying but hilarious but horrible section where the man in the fireplace tricked Henry into going back in time and erasing himself?

CK: I’ve I always have been attracted to the idea of sending my consciousness back in time to my 18 year old self.  And using what I know now to help me, even in a shallow way. Even just  “Invest in Google” you know, and I'll be a billionaire.  Or “Should I befriend these producers and directors before they're famous?”  But the only thing I keep bumping up against is that the odds of me having the same kids would be almost nil.

Like, once you start living a different life, even if you MacGyver to meet the same wife, the odds that you would have the same kids, is almost zero. So that kind of led to that idea. And then, when I finished that scene, I was like, “Oh, well, I guess Holly would obviously have found another boyfriend if Henry never existed, so there's gonna be another boyfriend there.” which was a funny button to that.

I love that flavor combination that, well, obviously horror and comedy do go well together, but I like trying to mix emotional flavors that maybe shouldn't mix quite as naturally. I think that's my well. Trying to do things that I emotionally connect to. Personal things.

RA: So ultimately, how much autobiography is there in these projects?

CK: I think that is unavoidable for me. I put in things that interest me and I respond to emotionally. And a lot of that is going to relate to my life story. And when you write a character, any character, you might be putting yourself in it, figuring out what would you do if you had their experiences and what would you do in that situation.

There’s a story in the film that Alex tells about Zoe, that she was supposed to deliver money from a charity, but a coworker volunteered to do it for her and got killed. That literally happened to my wife maybe two months before we met! She was working at UCLA and was supposed to deliver money after this fundraiser and her co-worker, this guy Kevin Jeske said, “Hey, I'll do it for you.”  and he got mugged and killed.

I can't stop thinking about that, and how fragile life is, and the unpredictable effects of little choices and I mean, yeah, it's just so sad that that happened to him.  And it could have been her.  And then I wouldn't be married and I'd have a whole different life. And my kids wouldn’t exist.

RA: Whoah. I was also surprised and impressed that you decided to wrestle with the legacy of slavery in this project.

CK: Yeah that was scary for me too. But I just felt like I was going to go for it. Again, it’s autobiography. I’m a Southerner and I remember I had an aunt who was a history teacher and she had a hobby of getting as many records about our family as she could. Wills, marriage records, and so forth. She found a will from a great great great uncle of mine that bequeathed an enslaved person. And I couldn't stop thinking about that.

It makes you think about, I guess, that we have time-privilege. It’s easy to condemn things that are long gone but if I was around back then, would I have said “Slavery is wrong. I’m going to protest this. And I’m gonna move to the north and rebel against this?”  Or would I have just gone along with society and done my job and lived my life? You want to think you would have done the right thing, but would you?

I mean like right now I eat meat and I'm pretty sure eventually society is going to decide that it’s just wrong. And yet I know that I'm doing it so I don't know.

I like to think I’m a nice guy, but I’m probably doing wrong things. Maybe I’m in denial about them, maybe I justify them in some way, or maybe I’m so unaware of it I don’t even know enough to be in denial about it. I think Isaac thinks he’s a nice guy. But he’s very clearly doing wrong things. That interested me.

RA: Well yeah, exactly. And the way those different time-settings bleed together in Yule Log is one of my favorite parts about it. There’s that quote ‘The past is never dead. It's not even past.”  

My family just came back from a trip to Rome, and we were struck by how the ruins and the ancient artifacts of are just everywhere. On the side of the road, at the airport. Not just in a museum or an archaeological dig. Today there’s a cat sanctuary at the site of Julius Caesar’s assassination. I guess we’re living the same way here even if you have to squint a little harder to see the remnants of the past.

CK: That quote is from William Faulkner. I love that quote.

And yeah it’s so fascinating to think about how the past affects us in ways we don’t even realize.

RA: But I don’t want to focus so much on the horror and tragedy in the film because it’s also very funny in ways both smart and silly. One tiny thing that cracked me up when I read the first draft, and again on the next one, and then again both times I watched it….I know it’s not the most sophisticated joke in the world, but what kills me is “Eenie meanie meanie meanie.” Just saying it now, I’m laughing again.

That's what I really want to know. How did you write that? Why is it so funny? Eenie Meanie Meanie Meanie.

CK: I wish I could tell you.