INDIE SPOTLIGHT: Interview with 'Hippo' Director and Co-Writer Mark H. Rapaport

HIPPO examines the coming-of-age of two step-siblings: Hippo, a video-game addicted teenager and Buttercup, a Hungarian Catholic immigrant with a love of classical music and Jesus. Like the Ancient Greek Aphrodite, Buttercup’s love is unrequited by a brother who prefers to indulge the art of war and chaos. The result is a hormone-fueled, tragicomic waking nightmare that must be seen to be believed. 

Looking for a fresh indie film, that is outrightly absurd, oddly nostalgic, yet full of heart? Well, look no further, filmmakers Mark H. Rapaport and Kimball Farley have you covered with their dark comedy coming-of-age feature, Hippo. I equate the spirit of this film as if Jim Jarmusch tapped into his inner John Waters to make a magnum opus coming-of-age film.

Director and co-writer Mark H. Rapaport recently spoke with Script about his feature directorial debut and tapping into his adolescence to develop the heart of this film, his writing collaboration with co-writer and star Kimball Farley, and how they created their own guidelines as an anchor for the film, utilizing narration as a storytelling device, and more. Plus, he shares great advice on how to take a chance on yourself as an indie filmmaker and attach well known executive producers to your film.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: I know it comes from a personal place, and like you said in your director’s statement, ‘it’s a hug to your younger self.’ What was the process like in fleshing out this narrative with your co-writer and star the film, Kimball Farley?

Mark H. Rapaport: Starting with sort of the emotional elements of that, I think that after I made my first short film, Andronicus, with Kimball as well, which is about a boy who forces his parents to have sex at a family therapy session. [laughs] I think that experience made me realize that the therapeutic nature of my writing and realizing that it all comes from a place, whether I call it a hug to yourself or making sense of myself and the world around me. 

And so, Hippo had a similar goal from the outset, was just realizing, ‘OK, I've clearly displayed my discontent for growing up in a household of parents who didn't like each other,’ but I still had something left of my childhood that just didn't feel right, and I didn't want to do another divorce thing. And so, I thought, what can we focus on here that's also personal? What else do I have to say about my childhood? Because, again, it still felt like I had to get something off my chest.

And I realized, there was so much to be said about the sexual coming-of-age elements of my childhood. I think I took for granted that. I think we all take for granted our personal experiences. I started writing this before I got married, but I've since been married, I think I'm able to reflect back on those times and give myself a little grace and look at it with a little more humor and have enough separation from my teenage years where I can say, ‘Yeah, that was super fucked up.’ I thought that you'd wake up in a puddle of goo - my mom did tell me that. Of course, I wasn't Hippo, I wasn't mentally ill, or at least not that mentally ill, you know, anxiety, OCD, and what have you. That was sort of the emotional core of the script.

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I think like anything I'm now writing since the short, because that really awoken my writing style. The short before that, I'd written a couple screenplays. One of them was a werewolf movie. But I wasn't writing for myself or anything important. Before that, I was doing what a lot of screenwriters in Hollywood try to do, which is make a puzzle. And make it work for the audience and there's something fun about that. And the audience does matter. But I think the short and then Hippo now taught me that I could say something about myself that I feel personally connected to, and it doesn't matter if it's not exactly what our audience might be used to because it makes me happy, and that's maybe a little bit of a selfish way to write, but that's how we approached Hippo.

And then the technical aspect of your question, when I had met Kimball, after Andronicus, we hit our heads together and realized, ‘Oh my god, we have the same taste in movies, and we should write something together.’ And we wrote a couple of scripts…that were too big to make during COVID. And, and then we realized, ‘OK, let's do the Mark Duplass thing. Let's write what we have.’ Like, I have my grandmother's house, so we filmed this at my grandmother's house. What other actors do we know? We know the Roberts’ is from our short. We know this actress, Lilla Kizlinger from Hungary. I'll ask her. And of course, we had Kimball. And so we sort of wrote that in mind.

And it turned out Kimball and I had similar feelings about childhood and misunderstandings of sex. He grew up Mormon. I was Orthodox Jewish. And he thought that if you laid in bed next to someone, that's sex. So, these sort of funny things that we look back on, but realize, if you heighten it, you can create a really fun story that…it's a cathartic thing for real life, but it’s also a fun thing for the audience and for ourselves.

Sadie: What's so great about this movie, especially with all the twists and turns that come out about the second and the third act is you guys do a great job of finding this fine line of absurdity and innocence within both the story and the two main characters. Was there a thematic North Star or anchor too make sure you didn’t go completely over the ledge? Or was it, just like throwing wet noodles at the wall and seeing what sticks?

Mark: I think it was a little bit of both. What kept us grounded and out of the absurdity, I think, or out of too much absurdity, mine and Kimball's approach is still very rooted in drama and classic cinema and our favorite movies, like, There Will Be Blood, and We Need to Talk About Kevin. And Kimball's such a serious actor, he's not a comedian first. And so, I think that helped ground the story.

I think one of our North Stars, as you say, we kind of come up with our own sort of set of principles, which I've never told anybody, but we call it katharos, which is a Greek word for purity, or pure by fire, which is kind of a silly thing, but I think Kimball has it tattooed on his arm. And our idea there is, for example, man or woman handles their own problems. We don't get the police involved. We try not to use cell phones, things like that…there is a long list, but the idea being of just taking us to a cinematically heightened place where we feel maybe it's kind of like the real world, but we don't get tied up in the nitty-gritty of facts, or criminal proceedings, because that would have unwound our whole film the second anyone called the police. We like to take it to a bit of a fable, biblical-esque place, because it's just fun.

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I think also black and white helps lower the absurdity. That was a conversation I had with my cinematographer William Babcock. We don't want this to feel like a Will Ferrell movie, even though some of the moments are very like man child over the top. But the black and white, I think, was a little thing that helped ground it in a different world. We never wanted the audience to laugh necessarily. It was more about making them feel uncomfortable. If we can make the audience feel uncomfortable watching this in their own skin, OK, well, now you're capturing a bit of what we felt as children, as teenagers. The discomfort will lead to laughter, naturally.

Sadie: Back to writing the script and utilizing narration to frame the emotional heart of what's going on. How did that come into play?

Mark: I remember with narration and seeing American Beauty. And I just remember thinking it’s so fun and witty and it adds to the story. I just was like, ‘If I ever write a movie, I want to use narration.’ And when we were writing this movie, and realized, for budgetary reasons, you can achieve a lot in narration. There was a practical element, but also there was a guiding, sort of paternal hand, because the whole the theme of movie is the absent father figure, which, again, my father wasn't dead. He wasn't buried in our backyard, but he wasn't the most present father.

So that's where the narrator, almost like a false comfort, because the narrator couldn't do anything to help.

Sadie: For all the indie filmmakers out there, looking to attach names and well-known executive producers that can bump the merit of the film, especially those that you’re a fan of their work, could you share advice on how to attract these EPs, like you did with Rough House Pictures, which is ran by David Gordon Green, Danny McBride and Jody Hill? How did you go about presenting yourself and your project to them?

Mark: I'm so humbled that they came on. It was definitely a dream for a first time, young filmmaker, to get someone like David to watch your movie and like it. It was not at all in the plan when we made it. We were very much a little movie that could and we had a local New York company called Rollin Studios that came on to do production services, and we made the thing super scrappy.

The whole plan was, let's get into a festival and see what happens. And then we had a rough cut, and I had a manager at the time and he was like, ‘Let's send it out.’ Because we realized, it's so hard to get into festivals, and it's also so hard to get any attention. There was no guarantee you're going to get into any festival. And in fact, we spent, even after we got the EPs on, we spent months getting rejected from every big festival, Sundance, South by Southwest, Tribeca, and then Fantasia finally took us.

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The way we got them on was my manager - this is an inspirational thing, because my manager wasn't a big manager. He was young. He was younger than me. I was one of his first five clients. So essentially, all he did was email it to people who worked at these bigger companies, but people who were not the heads, and say, ‘Would you want to consider this to join as an EP? We think this is very much an XYZ style. And David Gordon Green and Dan McBride, and Jody Hill’s company was one such company - reached out to a producer there, Julian Lawitschka, their younger producer and he watched it. And then Julian said, ‘You know what? I think David would love this.’ Once it hit David, he's like, ‘I do love this. We'll put our names on as EPs. Let's help you get it out there.’

I think my lesson there is, and I can tie this back into the beginning of the impetus of Hippo, which is just reach out to people that you respect and love their work, they might answer you even if it's 20% of the time, that's two out of 10, that's not bad. And even if you don't have a manager, if you get someone’s right email, send them a trailer, a poster, you never know what will catch their attention. And I love when I see EPs come on other people's films like that.

But also, tying this back, the way I met Kimball was he reached out to my website as a cold email at the time, it was my old producing company, and I wasn't even directing then, and he reached out actually trying to talk to the director of the two movies I produced, ‘Can you put me in touch with Daniel?’ The director was one of my best friends and I was like, ‘Daniel, do you want to meet this guy, Kimball?’ 

Daniel was busy, and I was like, ‘All right, I'll meet him.’ I took the meeting, met him in LA for coffee. He was like, ‘I think you can direct. I'd love to be in your next film.’ And I'm thinking, ‘My next film? I've never even directed a film. Why does this guy have so much faith in me?’ But he did, and we did the short, and so I think it's all about those positive vibes and spreading them. If Kimball didn't do that same strategy that we did with Rough House, I never would have made any of these movies. I'd probably still be producing, which is great, but I would still be waiting to figure out how to take the leap to write my own film. 

Hippo is now available in Select Theaters.