If you didn’t see the first Uncle Kent, you’re still in luck. In fact, that’s kind of part of the joke.
Uncle Kent 2, the sequel to director Joe Swanberg’s underseen 2011 comedy drama, made its debut at SXSW, and while it technically continues the adventures of cartoonist and “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Adventure Time” scribe Kent Osborne, the new film is very much its own animal. Playing himself (and providing the screenplay), Osborne opens Uncle Kent 2 with a scene wherein he approaches Swanberg and asks about making a sequel. Swanberg tells him to make the film on his own and what emerges is a trippy, sci-fi tinged meta breakdown of reality itself, falling stylistically somewhere between David Zucker and David Cronenberg.
ComingSoon.net sat down in Austin with Osborne and director Todd Rohal to learn the strange story of how Uncle Kent 2 came to be.
CS: Obviously, the two of you have the same sense of humor. What initially brought you together creatively?
Todd Rohal: We were actually trying to figure this out today! His first movie was a short called “Herd” that Kent did with his brother Mark.
Kent Osborne: Well, Mark shot the [stop motion animation] stuff. Mike Mitchell directed it. Mike Mitchell, the legendary director of “Sky High” and “Shrek 4.” That was back in ’99.
Rohal: Kent stars in it and I was living in Baltimore at the time that I saw it. Our friend Skizz Cyzyk ran this thing called MicroCineFest and we saw it in this old mill. I thought it was just incredible. Then I had a short film that showed here at SXSW in 2001 called “Hillbilly Robot.” Kent and I met there.
Osborne: I had a short, too. My short was early in the program. It was really quick. I was playing a robot who malfunctions. I get naked and run laps. I was just getting drunk and going, “This is the greatest!” But I remember “Hillbilly Robot” played and I thought it was amazing. I was like, “Yeah! SXSW!” [He was like,] “I want to kill myself.” (laughs)
Rohal: It was just as everyone’s shorts were going online, so all the other ones were two or three minutes long. I made a 20-minute, real-weird short about Baltimore. It was a strange, strange movie. It was all “joke, joke, joke” and then mine was this vast landscape of weirdness. Afterwards, I remember this other filmmaker coming up and saying, “Keep trying!” I was like, “Oh, God!” Baltimore had totally embraced the movie. It was called the film of the year in Baltimore. I guess it was for a specific audience — and Kent. That was one of first festival experiences, though, just having the wind sucked out of your sails.
Osborne: The filmmaker who said, “Don’t give up,” was Tommy Wiseau! (laughs)
CS: Are you from Baltimore originally?
Rohal: I’m from Ohio, but I lived in Baltimore for awhile. I lived in DC. I love that part of the country. I moved there because of John Waters. This guy Steve Yeager made a documentary about John Waters called “Divine Trash” and I heard he was making a movie about Kuchars. These two filmmakers named George and Mike Kuchar, who I love. I wrote to him and asked, “If I move to Baltimore, can I help you with this?” He said, “Sure!” I packed up my stuff and moved to Baltimore and found him. He had no memory of the letter, but he hired me to do these government videos with him. He never made that movie, but we became friends through that. I learned to follow up a little bit more with people!
CS: How factual is the first ten minutes of “Uncle Kent 2”?
Osborne: When I originally asked Joe [Swanberg], “Hey, do you want to make a sequel to ‘Uncle Kent,’ I don’t know if he thought I was kidding or not, but he said, ‘Sure! But I’m busy right now. I might be free next September.'” Then, when September rolled around, I went back and said, “Do you still want to do that?” He said, “I’m sorry, but I’m really, really busy. If you want to make it with someone else, though, you don’t need my blessing, but I’m giving it to you.” It never really went anywhere, but I kept telling people, “I’m going to make a sequel to ‘Uncle Kent’! Joe said I can!” I was telling Todd about it and Andrew Bujalski and David Zellner. I did a cross-country trip and stopped in Austin to tell them about it. When I told Joe, I told him, “Hey, I want it to open with me pitching you and you saying no.” He said, “Great!” I asked, “Will you shoot it and edit it?” He said, “Yeah, of course!” Then when it got time to shoot that scene he was like, “I want it to be that I don’t like sequels. I want that to be my reason for not making it.” So it’s pretty accurate, but it didn’t happen exactly like that. It’s a really condensed version. But there wasn’t tension or awkwardness between us or anything. I don’t think!
CS: There are so many little laugh out loud gags in ‘Uncle Kent 2.’ The guy who keeps burping in the doctor’s office is a great example. It’s not really vital to the story, but it’s really, really funny.
Osborne: When we shot that one, Todd was like, “Can you burp?” Tom [Fitzpatrick] was like, “Sure!” After the first take, he was like “Do you want me to keep doing it?” “Yes, please!”
Rohal: Yeah, it was really just something to have in the background. In the script, he was this guy in the waiting room and, when you come out, he’s on a gurney. People are starting to get hints that things are going wrong. But yeah, then he dies of burps! I guess it came about because we were trying to have him say things, but it just became too distracting. We moved into burps.
CS: Did you have any sort of rule in place about gags having to serve specific story functions?
Rohal: Kent had a pretty solid five or six-page story that is what we shot from. I added some things to that outline and then we’d bat along some ideas as we were shooting. We knew where we were going with it and there wasn’t a lot of time to make things up on the fly. They would, though. Like, we were shooting in the hotel room. We were playing a song and Kent was dancing around and his boobs were jiggiling. I shot something on my phone with it and we were laughing at it. he said, “We should do that for the title sequence!” Even though we had something else planned, the ideas would just kind of grow.
CS: How does the end result, then, compare to what you had in mind during the film’s inception? Did it change quite a bit?
Rohal: Actually, I went back and reread it and it’s still those lines exactly. I kind of held the script the whole time we were shooting and would always reference it.
CS: I think that one of the reasons I found the film so funny was just the balance of very, very serious moments with completely ridiculous aspects. Was that very targeted, the notion of combining those two poles, or is that just your natural sense of humor?
Osborne: Oh yeah. It wasn’t intentional or planned or anything. That’s just the story we were happy with writing it and shooting it and, really, editing it, too. We cut some stuff out that wasn’t working.
Rohal: Yeah, at first it was “story, story, story, story” and we had to slim that down. You kind of want to take these turns and get really serious and really goofy. I think that’s fun. Then you’re kept on your toes while you’re watching it. I love the movie “Top Secret!” It really tripped me up as a kid when the guy falls from the guard tower and just shatters on the ground. It disturbed me equally as the guy on “The Twilight Zone” with no mouth. I was just like, “How do they do that? Why?!” There’s this weird feeling where it’s like you didn’t even know they were allowed to do that. It really messed with me and I actually feel like had a big effect on my life.
CS: There’s a very uneasy horror that comes out something defying the laws of physics. In your film, it’s actually genuinely scary when people get digitized and vanish.
Rohal: Yeah, it’s kind of playing with your expectations for both horror and comedy. It is a comedy, but it has horrific moments. Which is funny, because I think the best horror movies tend to have a few great comedic moments.
Kent: If anything like that ever happens in real life, I hope it feels just like that movie.
CS: What happens with “Uncle Kent 2” now? Is it a search for a distributor?
Osborne: Yeah, and it’s going to play at some other festivals… It didn’t get into Sundance!
Rohal: Don’t say that!
Osborne: It’s getting in next year! (laughs) We’re applying again and are going to change our names!
Rohal: “Hey, Sundance. We applied last year and didn’t get it, but we did play at SXSW! We’ve already been sold, but is there any way?”
CS: Does having a “2” in the title make it challenge to find an audience?
Osborne: Yeah, especially because no one has seen the first one.
CS: You really don’t need to have, though.
Osborne: Right! We’re trying to figure out a way to elegantly have on the poster a tagline Todd came up with: “Nobody saw the first one, so he’s back for the second!” That’s our best way of telling people they don’t have to have seen the first one.
CS: Can you tell me a little about how all the special effects came together?
Osborne: My friend Dylan Haggerty is a buddy and he’s a writer. We write comic books and he said, “I could do that for you!” I wanted like on “House of Cards” or “Sherlock” where you see the phone on the screen. I said, “You know how to do that?” He said, “No, but I’ll figure it out.” He figured it out! We had a lot of fun with that.
Rohal: There’s a lot of Apple stuff in it. I think every iPhone sound effect is in the film. You can pull them all off your phone. The film really takes place where Kent has sort of integrated himself into his phone and becomes part of Instagram.
Osborne: Then the really big effects are Arts+Labor, a local Austin place.
CS: Do you know what’s next for you?
Osborne: Todd’s making a movie.
Rohal: Yeah, one I’ve tried to make for seven years called “Sweet Cheeks.” It’s like a really messed up “Little Rascals.” That’s hopefully coming together this summer.
Osborne: It’s one of the funniest scripts I have ever read. It’s a crime if it doesn’t get made. Everyone should go to jail if it doesn’t get made. Everyone on the planet! But I’m just going back to work at Cartoon Network. They were nice enough to let me take a week off to shoot this. I know that sounds like a joke, but it did take week!
