Interview: Nick Robinson of “The Kings of Summer” (and the Hilarious Cox Commercials)

Posted on June 9, 2013 at 3:59 pm

I love the hilarious Cox commercials, with Nick Robinson as the perpetually-humiliated teenager whose father thinks he is super-cool as he shows off all of the great features of Cox television, internet, and phone. And I love “The Kings of Summer,” the hit independent film about three boys who run away and build a house in the woods. He also appears on “Melissa and Joey” and is getting ready to go to college. So I was especially pleased to get a chance to talk with Nick Robinson about the movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuLH6P2PE7I

It must have been really hot filming in the woods in the summer.

It was hot and it was the humidity that killed me. But the natural beauty in Ohio made up for it. The locations were amazing. The best day was when we got to swim around in the quarry.

What made you want to play this role?

I fell in love with the sensibility of the script. It really captured the experience of being 15, stuck in that weird no-man’s-land between childhood and adulthood. It’s awkward, no one really knows how to treat you, you’re aware of the world and know all kinds of things but still have this childlike wonder and imagination and creativity.

It looked like you guys really were friends who had known each other forever.

It’s hard to fake chemistry. Everything you saw on screen was very real. Jordan Vogt-Roberts gave us improv training beforehand to let us get to know one another and get ready to go toe-to-toe with some of the funniest people on the planet. Have of the film is improv. Jordan would just take us out to the woods with the camera. The pipe scene, where we’re all banging on the pipe, that was completely improvised. They just said, “Go for it,” and we stared messing around. The sound is just iPhone sound.

How do you keep a straight face acting opposite Nick Offerman, who plays your dad?

I don’t! I ruined I don’t know how many takes. It was intimidating when I first met him, but once you get to know him he’s a complete teddy bear. Also, just one of the most talented and funniest people I’ve ever worked with. He has that stonewall, straight-drive delivery and it just kills me. I could hardly keep it together. That was me biting my tongue to keep from laughing.

What did your character, Joe, and the other boys want to find when they went to the woods?

They really just wanted to be independent for once in their lives, to be free from their parents, who were overbearing or in Joe’s case downright mean sometimes, to be their own men and kind of find themselves and find their potential. They wanted to live off the land free from any societal pressures and free from their parents especially.

But not free from Boston Market!

No, thank goodness! Without Boston Market it would have been more like “Lord of the Flies.”

What would you bring if you were going to live in the woods?

A tent, a pocket-knife, and some matches or flint, just the essentials. You can find water and food.

What’s the best advice you ever got about acting?

Acting’s not particularly complicated. But the great thing is you can step into somebody else’s shoes without dealing with the consequences. It’s very therapeutic in that way.

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Actors Interview

The Kings of Summer

Posted on June 6, 2013 at 6:00 pm

When Mark Twain had Huck Finn leave the kind-hearted widow who hoped to “civilize” him to “light out for the territories,” he tapped into the dream of all teenagers and the teenagers inside all of us to escape from all rules and restrictions and create our lives from scratch. Peter Pan and the Lost Boys had Neverland. Baby boomers sang along with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young about “trying to get ourselves back to the garden.” Every generation wishes for the simplicity and purity of the natural world. In the wise, touching, and often wildly funny “The Kings of Summer,” three 15-year-olds follow their own call of the wild to run away from home and build a house in the woods. Their parents may see them as boys, but they want a place where they can define what it means to be men.

Nick Robinson, who perfected a look of exquisite pain at the humiliating behavior of his father in a brilliant series of Cox cable commercials, plays Joe Toy. He lives with his widowed father, Frank (“Parks and Recreation’s” Nick Offerman in a witty and heartfelt performance). Of course at that age, a parent does not have to do anything to be excruciatingly embarrassing. It is bad enough that Frank actually exists, but he also has the nerve to tell Joe what to do. Worse, he is dating someone, and worst of all he expects Joe to play a board game with her. The horror!

Joe’s best friend Patrick (Gabriel Basso), is smoldering with his own adolescent fury. His parents say things like, “Rope in the attitude, mister” and just because his ankle is in a cast, they want him to be careful. How dare they! “I’m happy to be where my parents are not,” he says.

Another kid named simply Biaggio (the wonderfully oddball Moises Arias) wants to join them. He does not have any special problem with his family. He just “didn’t want to do nothing.”

Joe, Patrick, and Biaggio build their house in the woods. They breathe the air of free men and rejoice in their liberation from all rules and conventions. They vow “to boil our own water, kill our own food, build our own shelter, be our own men.” If foraging for food in the woods means a stop by the Boston Market across the highway from the forest, well, no one can argue with how good it tastes.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts and writer Chris Galletta bring a fresh and sympathetic eye to the story, evoking the pleasure of what feel — for a little while — like endless possibilities. The film perfectly captures that liminal moment when teenagers live in the space between childhood and becoming an adult. And they’re old enough to carry it off, at first. They are young enough to be certain their parents are wrong about pretty much everything — and to be confident that they can do everything better. The house is like something the Lost Boys might build for Peter Pan, with a stolen door from a port-a-potty for the entrance and essentials like a mailbox, a slide, a basketball hoop, and an air hockey table.As is often the case with boys of 15, they look like they are from three different planets. Patrick is muscular and physically much more mature than the others and Biaggio could be 12. Joe is somewhere in the middle. Biaggio’s random and inscrutable pronouncements are amusingly accepted by the other two as if they made as much sense as anything else, or as if making sense did not matter. And of course the most unexpected complication is when a girl comes through the port-a-potty door.

Like that other icon of the dream of escaping the oppression of civilization, Henry David Thoreau, the boys learn that there is a time to go to the woods, and a time to come home.

Parents should know that this movie has very strong and crude language and teen drinking and smoking.

Family discussion: What was the most important thing Joe learned? What about Frank? What would you bring to a house in the woods?

If you like this, try: “Stand By Me”

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Interview: Jordan Vogt-Roberts of The Kings of Summer

Posted on June 4, 2013 at 7:17 am

Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s first feature film is “The Kings of Summer,” the story of three teenage boys who run away and build a house in the woods. It’s one of my favorite movies of the year, so I was very glad to get a chance to talk to him about it.

How did you get involved with this project?

I made a short a few years ago called “Successful Alcoholics.” It balanced tone in a similarly tricky way, starting out funny and then getting more serious. And the company that did “Little Miss Sunshine” had this script. They were looking for a director and I was looking for a movie. I got into this business because I want to make movies. I’d been doing TV and commercials and that’s great to work your way up. But then I read this script and I fell in love with it. I knew it was exactly the movie that I needed to make. Not that I could or wanted to — I needed to tell this story. So I just pitched my ass off, and spent the next couple of months trying to get the job. I didn’t want to say that someone else beat me on merit. It had a jumping off point I wanted for my first feature, a lot of different things at once, magic and beautiful and hilarious — there was so much fun that I could have with it.

You were working with young kids, which is a challenge.

The movie lives and dies with the kids. I have an incredible adult cast — stand-ups and improvisers and brilliant comics like Alison Brie, Nick Offerman, and Megan Mullally. But the movie rests completely on the kids. All of them had to be good. When you watch “Stand By Me” or “The Goonies,” all of those kids are great. I couldn’t cast 25-year-olds. I had to cast kids who as much as they could go through what the characters were going through, who could be as real and awkward as the characters they played. And Gabe and Nick and Moises really took over the roles at a certain point. I forgot what the characters were as scripted and it started becoming them. We did improv training, not so they’d be super-quick and witty and punchy but just so they’d be comfortable enough in their own skin so that if I didn’t yell cut or changed something on the fly, they could adapt to it. My favorite stuff in the movie, a really important part of the movie, is those moments, just glances or mannerisms, that’s what it was to be that age. A movie like this is made up of small, little moments, where watch it and you say, “I love that.” I just wanted to give those kids the trust and faith so they could elevate it themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYQvwJ0G7qQ

The moments that I love are the three jump kids of him exiting the house in different ways, that’s how a kid would pass time. That came from him and me just playing around about the best way to do it. There are so many weird little moments that stem from them cracking me up. I made a weird decision on set where I didn’t want them to think of me as the boss or watch themselves around me. So they would punch me in the arm and treat me as though I was a kid. We created a fun environment. The stuff where they were banging on the pipe, finding out that Gabe played the violin and adding that to the movie. That adds authenticity because it is so particular. The unscripted things are what make me laugh.

In another movie, some of the things Joe’s father said could be disturbing, but you made it feel safe.

A lot of it is that it is from the perspective of the kids, so we know that it is heightened. They can feel a little bit more overbearing or harsher because that is how the kids were perceiving it. And we ran the spectrum of emotions without turning them into caricatures. We did some ridiculously funny things but to ideally always have it be informing the character and the story and the moment.

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Directors Independent Interview

Interview: Gabriel Basso of “The Kings of Summer”

Posted on June 2, 2013 at 7:18 am

“The Kings of Summer” is the story of three teenage boys who run away from home and build a house in the woods, and it is one of my favorite films of the year. One of the boys is played by Gabriel Basso, who talked to me about making the film.

I suspect that it was not nearly as comfortable to be out there in the woods as it looked in the movie.

Yeah. I grew up in the woods so it was fairly easy for me to readjust to living there. At the same time it was my first time in the Midwest, where it’s super humid and the mosquitoes are out. It was a hard working environment. But we adjusted to the surroundings and we were able to work really hard and produce a good movie.

How long were you out there working on the film?

Jordan Vogt-Roberts was out there for two months maybe two and a half and I was there for a month. We started I think July 5^th and ended at the end of August.

Tell me a little bit about the audition process. How did you come to be in this film?

I saw the script and I immediately fell in love with the script immediately. I went in and a couple days went by and I went in again and then I was called back in again and there was a mix and match and that’s when I met Nick Robinson who plays Joe and we read opposite one another. It was a real pleasure to work with them and thank God they asked me.

You and Nick play lifelong friends and it really comes across that way on screen. Tell me a little bit about what the two of you had done so that you would come across as having known each other all your lives.

Jordan had us in an improv class before we flew out to Ohio. It gave us a chance to really to spend time with one another. In Ohio where we were staying we were kind of forced to spend time around one another and it was a pleasure. The first couple of days we were out there we had to find ways to occupy ourselves. Just because it was so boring and then the work kicked in. It gave us so much time to catch up and be boys in the woods. That you know thank God it came across as though we knew each other for a long time on camera but we really are friends. It was a pleasure to spend time with one another.

Your character has to do everything with his foot all taped up. Did that make it more difficult?

Yeah. I had to do everything with that boot. Sometimes it was just impossible. No kid should do what I did with a boot, sprinting, jumping. It was pretty ridiculous. But it got to be pretty nasty. By the end I had sweat in it. Like it was muddy. It was disgusting. But it was fine. Like I’m not going to sit here and complain about it. It was tough with most of the things with the cumbersome weight on your leg.

I loved your character’s frustration with his parents. The way that you responded to them is very real and authentic.

My parents were played by Megan Mullally and Mark Evan Jackson and they probably are two of the funniest people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. It was very hard to work with them just because I had to keep a straight fact the entire time. And that one dinner scene where they are just talking and talking I was dying. Like when the camera was not on me I could not keep a straight face. They are just so funny. Whenever I was about to laugh I would have to eat the burger. And not laugh. But I held my own for most of that scene. And I did the best I could at keeping it together. But it was just so difficult. They were a pleasure to work with. It was really amazing.

I think all teenagers have at one time or another the fantasy of running off and building a house for themselves. What do you think teenagers will think of this film or what do you want them to think about it?

I really hope that teenagers get outside after seeing this film. Rarely do you walk down the street doing anything that my grandparent’s generation did. And half of that comes with the technology advances. You’d have to appreciate the outdoors. And you really have to get out there and see things. I really want to experience that and like live in the woods and be able to appreciate nature just because it’s such a beautiful thing. You just sit there and appreciate even the heat and the mosquitoes. In its own way it’s something special. And hopefully after someone sees this film they can appreciate what we went through to make this film. And where we shot it. And there were times where we were shooting the film and I was like I’m so glad to be back in the Midwest. And to be here in the woods and see stuff like this because it really is amazing. And I would strongly advise someone to get out there and see what is nature and experience that. Yeah I think as much as we rely on technology, part of us wants to escape our dependence on them. And I think this film really captures like what we don’t need. We don’t need those things in order to be successful and have fun. And it’s important to not rely on those things.

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