'The Climb' Filmmakers & Stars Michael Angelo Covino & Kyle Marvin On Their Patient, Impulsive Buddy Comedy [Interview] - Page 2 of 2

You’re always maintaining continuity of space. But if I recall, there are a couple of times when there are some time jumps within the shot where we’re supposed to assume that it jumps ahead slightly.

Michael Angelo Covino: Yeah, there are fantastical, impossible moments that exist within the film, but they all lend themselves to the understanding that this is a movie. It’s these little reminders of like, this is a movie … it’s supposed to be playful. It’s supposed to be fun, which is obviously why we have those interludes in there.

At what point in the development were the more playful moments coming into play? When did you have the confidence to say, “Okay, we can take this leap. It doesn’t just have to be literally an hour and a half of us riding uphill.”

Kyle Marvin: I think, for us, when we came up with this idea of the vertical storytelling and traveling over long distances of time, we knew that we needed to break up the takes just from a practical standpoint. We need to give the audience a breath and let them know that this is a new thing, that time has passed, but we won’t tell you how much time or where you’re going. We will let you know that you’re going somewhere. That became something that, early on, we knew we had to address. And I think for us, it was more playfully deciding how we wanted to do that transition and taking things that we thought were interesting to send audiences into the next place.

Michael Angelo Covino: Yeah, it was the early stages. Those ideas were very much like, this movies gonna feel maybe a bit too slice of life if we’re butting these scenes up against one another or trying to connect them all in this very immediate way.

There was also a big conversation about music. At a certain point, we initially talked about all the music being diegetic and then maybe dialing [in] with the subjectivity of that, dialing it up in certain moments, which is what we still do. But once we opened up and just said, “you know what, we’re just going to lean into the fact that we’re going to use certain tools of filmmaking at our disposal, we’re going to underscore certain areas, and that underscore might transition into diegetic [music] or go into the car radio.” And vice versa.

It’s interesting to have some ground rules and shake them up a little bit to jolt the audience out of complacency.

Michael Angelo Covino: Really, no one’s aware of the rules that we’ve set for ourselves. It’s a movie; we can do whatever we want. But I think there does seem to be a level of desire for … not conformity, but like, “Okay, this is what we’re going on a journey for. Don’t all of a sudden in the third act start chopping the scene!”

Some movies employ showy one-takes where you’re very aware of the camera. Here, I was aware of the complexity of the shots, but that never got in the way of me interacting with the characters, feeling the emotions, or just being present in that moment.

Michael Angelo Covino: I think that is a testament to Zack [Kuperstein], our DP, and the conversations that we all had together going into it. His approach, which was really smart and amazing, was, “What’s our mantra? What are our keywords? What are we trying to accomplish here?” At first, I said, “Okay, it’s patience.” And then he was like, “Okay, so we’re gonna try just to be patient wherever we can.” And then he would start to challenge me, “But that’s not patient.” I was like, “Okay, TWO keywords, patience, and impulsiveness.” [laughs] And those became our keywords; these contradictory elements fit the character and the tone of the film in an exciting way.

And to his credit, he would push and say, “What is the motivation for the camera here?” Every moment in the film, we were talking about camera motivation. So, rather than shortlisting in a traditional sense, we were shortlisting in the sense of like, “Let’s go through this entire eight-minute scene and come up with motivation for if the camera moves or doesn’t move. What is it doing? What is it saying?”

The only times that I think I can recall where the camera is wandering in a slightly less motivating way is in this funeral scene and this wedding scene where there’s God’s presence. Why is this moving here? I was like, “Because God’s here!” This is the one place where we can really say to the audience, “Hey, we’re going to go show you what’s going on over here.” Whereas in other circumstances like in the Thanksgiving scene, for instance, we would have characters pull us from room to room, and we did sort of go on this journey in a bit more of an immersive fashion. Our choreography and our blocking [were] working hand-in-hand with our camera.

It’s interesting talking about the patience and impulsiveness seeming contradictory, but from conversations I’ve had with other filmmakers, you often need to have them simultaneously. By being patient and rehearsing things, that’s how you can allow yourself to have the environment to create spontaneity.

Kyle Marvin: I think one of the things we always discussed was to cut down the number of variables in terms of all the things that could go wrong. Or what are all the things that add motion, and how do we mitigate as much of those as possible? That [way] we can have these sorts of spontaneous moments inside finite sort of ground rules. And, for us, that was a big point of it. To say, “Yes, here’s our playground, and spontaneity can happen here, but let’s not make everything chaos. Let’s try and try and give ourselves a box to do that.”

When it came down to brass tacks, how many times did you have to do each of the scenes?

Michael Angelo Covino: On average, 20 times. Some were like 38; some were like 13 or 14.

Did you have much of an opportunity to rehearse or block them beforehand?

Kyle Marvin: The way we did the scenes was always one day for a full group, full cast, just for blocking rehearsals. And then one, the second day, which was the shoot, top to bottom. So that first day was a chance for us blocking and iron[ing] out certain things, for Mike to direct the pace. The crazy thing is that he would have to edit on the rehearsal day. Because really, that is the time to edit the film and be like, “We need to move quickly through this, or more time here, or this needs to be played out.” So that was really a chance to craft a little more, and then the second day was [snaps repeatedly].

There’s a lot of multi-plane action in the film where scenes play out in the foreground and the background. At what point do you work through all those things?

Michael Angelo Covino: All along. I mean, we talked a lot about mise en scene and the importance of blocking the characters, camera, and the frame, all working in tandem to tell a story that was maybe bigger, deeper than what was on the page. That was just a fun thing that we’ve got to do. We had this great blank canvas to paint with these brilliant actors. It was like working through and then adding things, and adding things, and adding things. Some things were clearly just in our heads from the beginning. The camera coming out of the church, just sitting on that empty spot looking at the church, the car buzzing in, and then that whole thing happening, that was a very intentional, deliberate thing that we built toward.

But other things like when we’re coming out of the church, and there’s just a guy in the back row wearing headphones, and he’s listening to music. We go by, and we can hear the music emanating from his headphones. When we come back in, there’s this underscore playing, and then the music just sort of transitions into his headphones. Those were fun things that we discovered and got to play with, and no one will notice. But, to us, those are the things, as we ironed more and more things out,  where the little cherries on top became fun for us.

Where are you looking for inspiration, either for the long takes or for the film’s overall look and feel? I’m sensing some French New Wave in there, a little silent comedy…

Michael Angelo Covino: In rewatching a lot of silent comedy, you realize the efficiency and storytelling economy.  How punchy and how funny the situations and jokes are, they’re just so beautifully set up. And the rules are established so perfectly that you can sit, the frame doesn’t have to move, nothing needs to happen to watch it play out in real-time, and it’s captivating. That happened 100 years ago. The fact that the traditions of cinema and the starting place for cinema … they had really cracked it at that moment, and we’ve moved away from it. A lot of what we were trying to do was really keep it as simple as possible in that capacity, and I think that was heavily inspirational to us, in terms of how we would allow the comedy to play out.

Kyle Marvin: In the early comedies, they were also really patient with their jokes. Like, they would bring in a cat in a box, put it in the room, and then, seven minutes later, the final joke came out of the cat. They would set up and pay off jokes in these long ways where you knew it was coming. And then you are like, “Oh my God!” And you would miss it and miss it and miss it, and then it would happen. And I think that was always something that we really responded to.

Michael Angelo Covino: Thematically, for sure French cinema from the ’60s and ’70s was really in our minds. We had ingested it and let it sort of percolate. And that was an enjoyable thing, thematically, to explore. Characters dealing with these issues, how they deal with it, how they speak about it, how they process it. Aesthetically, probably less so, although certainly, the color was essential to us. And I think we definitely pulled from the color spectrum of a lot of Godard films. And there’s this movie that we put in the movie theater scene in our film, “Le grand amour” by Pierre Etaix, a really playful, beautiful film where all his extras are clowns. And he breaks the fourth wall and does these enjoyable, playful things at a time where people weren’t really doing that. In the last couple of years, when we saw that film, that was really eye-opening to us regarding how to straddle that line of dramatic, character-driven story and playful, slapstick comedy.

This isn’t your first rodeo because you’ve done commercials, written and produced, but this is the feature that’s truly yours. Did anything surprise you along the way? Any big takeaways or learnings as you’re moving forward as a creative team?

Michael Angelo Covino: What’s been really amazing is the takeaway that different [people] we speak to have from the film. That’s been really surprising and interesting. Showing this film to a French audience versus showing an Austrian audience versus showing it to an American audience, the universality of the themes, and the character dynamics we’re dealing with. The differences in how they perceive it and how they want to talk about it also. Like a French or an Austrian or a Swiss audience might completely overlook certain aspects that American audiences really latch onto. But, as a whole, they end up still laughing in the same places at certain moments, and that I always find surprising and fascinating. It’s reassuring that there are these threads within humanity. We showed the film in Hong Kong, and I poked my head in the theater, and people laughed at certain moments. And I was like, “What is it about this that people connect with?” And it’s exciting to explore moving forward.

What are some of the more culturally specific takeaways?

Michael Angelo Covino: I think when Kyle’s dick gets flipped. It’s the biggest laugh in France. I think it gets a huge laugh in America. Maybe I should actually have taken notes in terms of when you hear different laughs…

Kyle Marvin: The things that are more specific to American culture definitely hit in different ways, like the Rob Thomas haircut. There’s a swath of America who gets that instantly.

What’s on the horizon for you all now?

Michael Angelo Covino: We’re writing our next movie together. If we ever get a chance to sit down. We had the idea in the fall, and we were like, “Alright, let’s get rolling.” And then we started rolling with the company who made “The Climb.” So we’re writing it to make with them, and they’re like, “How’s that script coming?” And we’re like, “Ahh!” Like, we just did 12 hours of interviews. Which is great, but it’s also…

Kyle Marvin: … it’s just a different part of your mind you have to exercise.

Michael Angelo Covino: Yeah, it’ll be fun to get rolling on this one. We’re excited about it.

“The Climb” is in theaters now via Sony Pictures Classics.