On the heels of his review of the film DAD & STEP-DAD, Daily Grindhouse new blood and cohost of Butcher Bordello of Blood podcast, Zach Butcher, sat down with director Tynan DeLong, and the titular Dad (Colin Burgess) and Step-Dad (Anthony Oberbeck) to talk about their creative friendship, the journey of making DAD & STEP-DAD, and their respective futures through comedy and filmmaking. DAD & STEP-DAD is on VOD now for your absurdist comedy-viewing pleasure.
How did DAD & STEP-DAD come to fruition initially? What’s the history of this piece?
Anthony: Colin, Tynan, Brian, and I all moved to Brooklyn more or less around the same time (2013-14) to pursue comedy. Colin and Tynan worked together a lot, and Tynan had worked with Brian. I was friends with everyone, but we hadn’t worked together all that much and just out of wanting to get to know all three of them better I asked Tynan if he would direct a short with me Colin and Brian acting. The idea of a dad and step-dad handing off custody of a pre-teen son came up just as a pretty easy situation to film and improvise through. We mostly wanted to do something fun and casual and quick without a lot of planning put into it. We made a few shorts this way – just fully improvising for an afternoon while Tynan filmed it, and then Tynan, Colin and I would edit together and eventually figured out the tone and rhythms of this world and these characters.
Colin: I remember it very differently. I think I came up with the whole thing.
Tynan: I agree with Colin and Anthony.
How did you three come together? How did each of you get involved with DAD & STEP-DAD?
Anthony: I really appreciated Tynan as a director because everything he did had a very unpretentious, lived-in feel that I gravitated to, and I admired that he seemed to always be able to let the comedy get weird and dumb and funny but still held onto a respect for the characters that let their humanity come through at the last minute in an unforced and genuine way. And all of us share a sensibility as far as finding comedy in silence and restraint and awkward tension, so I think it made sense that we all just wanted to do a project together.
Colin: Tynan and I met through the “Brooklyn alt comedy scene” in 2013. We had a mutual admiration for each other’s bits. I remember the first time I saw him perform live he was doing a one-man re-enactment of the Family Matters opening credits (characters doing something and then looking into the camera and smiling) and he would end it by miming putting down a dog with a shotgun and then looking “into the camera” and smiling. Made me lol. We pretty quickly figured out we both liked movies and wanted to make stuff together. We worked on a bunch of shorts together and that eventually led us to DAD & STEP-DAD. I met Anthony in 2014 through performing and watching shows at the short-lived Annoyance theater in Williamsburg. There was sort of a wave of Chicago people that had moved to NY to be involved in that theater, “the big Chicago Invasion”, and Anthony was part of that. He was one of the few doing stand-up with hard jokes and would do these sets that would really command an audience. I have a memory of him standing on chairs in the middle of the theater and pausing for long periods of time between jokes. I thought he was very funny and also possibly a psychopath. He had this joke I love where he says “I just found out I’ve been doing yoga wrong this whole time. Now I only have a few weeks to live.” I think that’s how it went? We had maybe chatted a few times before we shot the first DAD & STEP-DAD short.
Tynan: I second all of that. I think things for the 3 of us truly clicked when we made a short titled THEMATRIX061702_ROUGH.5.WMV in 2017. This more or less set the table for the DAD & STEP-DAD shorts in terms of the “low stakes, rough outline & improvised dialogue” template. I don’t think the outline was more than a page. We got together one Saturday afternoon and knocked it out in a few hours and it was really fun, very loose, just us with a camera being dumb, but also adding a touch of heart to the silliness. It was such an effortless, enjoyable shoot. I think it established a certain chemistry and vibe that we knew was worth tapping into again.
Anthony (addendum): I don’t know if either of you remember but I biked to Crown Heights from Greenpoint for the MATRIX shoot and it was raining that day, so I showed up for that shoot shirtless and soaking wet.
Anthony (second addendum): That is in fact exactly how the joke goes.
Tynan: Yeah, I remember, that’s why we still call you Wet Oberbeck.
Colin: I remember you being bone dry.
All three of you have been doing film for at least ten years, what drew you in? What were your dream jobs as kids and did any of you have those before acting?
Anthony: I wanted to be a writer when I was a little kid, and then in high school got really into movies and sketch comedy, and at some point in my twenties that all translated to performing and acting. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a dream job or a real goal or anything, I just sort of always do what the next thing is and see where it takes me.
Colin: I wanted any job I saw in a movie. I remember when I was 9, I did a project for school based on what I wanted to be when I grew up and I chose “boat builder” because TITANIC had just come out and I was obsessed with it – both the movie and the historical event. Eventually I realized I didn’t want a job at all, I wanted to pretend to have a job (acting).
Tynan: I wanted to be the lead guitarist in Guns N’ Roses, but they seemed pretty set on Slash for whatever reason. I made my own videos in high school and studied video production in college, but fell out of it afterwards, bouncing around to improv and comedy. When I moved to New York, I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to stand-up fully, but was confident another path would open up. It led back to video. I started making sketch videos shortly thereafter, then quit my job in 2018 and started making “short films” in earnest. I don’t think Slash is in Guns N’ Roses anymore though, so I’m still hoping to swing some axe with Axl should this not work out.
What scene in this movie had the most takes? Improv and free form writing leaves so many variables.
Anthony: I think we kept it pretty tight as far as takes (from what I remember). We outlined the movie in the months leading up to the shoot, we talked about the emotional arc of each scene and how each piece led to the next. And we’d have a few ideas in mind for jokes for each scene, but for the most part it was us improvising all the dialogue. I think knowing that we only had five days to shoot and had to keep moving helped, and also after the shorts we had a pretty good idea of what works and what we’re going for. So there wasn’t a lot of “figuring it out” on set, mostly running a scene once, quick notes and bookmarking what we liked, and then running it a couple more times.
Tynan: Yeah, we only had a couple hours for each scene so we’d run through roughly 4 takes and that’d be it. I do remember the scene with the dads in the living room at the beginning of the film being pretty loose and exploratory, veering into some unexpected and very funny territory – “age of consent is 13” was not in the outline, but had to make the final cut – guys were in the RIFF ZONE™ that day!
Colin: I think the scene that took the most takes was a dramatic one! Originally we had planned to make more of a scene out of when Suzie arrives and she finds out Dave is still there. We kept improvising dialogue of how we thought our characters would react and it was either feeling too melodramatic or too underplayed or frivolous. We did a take where Branson storms out and one where Suzie angrily asks Dave “why are you still here?” We just couldn’t hack it. I think I suggested we just do a look and a hard cut to Dave and Suzie arguing in the entryway so we could move on.
What’s everyone’s favorite quote from the movie? Mine is “replacement gym parts. Replacement Jim…parts”.
Anthony: “Some people like to have something to worry about. It keeps their mind occupied.” And also “It’s like we have a bunch of gold. We’re a rich family. You don’t need gold to be rich. You need love. And that’s what we’ve got.”
Tynan: The charred hot dog meal scene is seared in my memory. I will often quietly say to myself “It’s not bad” after eating something now. Also Anthony’s little smile when he’s pouring the orange juice.
Colin: “Juicy, juicy franks” and “?Everyday, in every way, I go crazy?”
Why was this the idea you chose to make into a full length film? What made it stand out from the other things you’ve worked on?
Anthony: It was Tynan and/or Colin’s idea to make it into a feature, and when they told me their idea I said “Sure!”
Tynan: Yeaaah, we were feeling the stress of not having made anything during the pandemic and we didn’t really have any new ideas, so we just thought, why don’t we run with something we already enjoy? It was good exercise in not overthinking things – we already have something with legs here, let’s just roll with that. We were already exploring a larger narrative and world with these characters by the 3rd short and I think there was a lot left on the table that we hadn’t dug into, so it made sense to build this one out on a larger scale.
Colin: I remember Tynan was really itching to make a feature. We saw Hong Sang-soo’s GRASS together at Metrograph and got obsessed with the idea of making a 60 minute feature – ultimately we failed and made a 78 minute feature.
What’s a dream project for each of you?
Anthony: I want to play Norman Bates in another PSYCHO remake.
Tynan: I want to direct another PSYCHO remake.
Colin: I want to re-make PSYCHO and star in it, but a different one than Anthony and Tynan’s.
What’s next for this trio? What’s the rest of 2024 look like for film fests and the movie playing? What’s the physical release plan for DAD & STEP-DAD?
Anthony: Myself and Graham Mason (DAD & STEP-DAD producer) and our friend Matt Barats are shooting the third in our series of “visual comedy albums” called “Reveries” (the first two are on Vimeo, look them up)
No more festival or big screening plans for DAD & STEP-DAD. Last year was our big screening year – we were able to build a year of really great screenings all completely through word of mouth and we’re really proud of that – Nitehawk Cinema and then 8 nights at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, Brain Dead in LA, Violet Crown in Austin, and then a six city Alamo Drafthouse tour (LA, San Fran, Austin, Denver, Chicago, NY). And we just did five nights at Beacon Cinema in Seattle. March 22 is our official VOD release – Amazon, iTunes, Vimeo, etc, and it’s also available on nobudge.com
Tynan: I edited a feature from Stavros Halikas & Wes Haney that should come out sometime this year. I’m also currently pitching another PSYCHO remake around town.
Colin: If you’re flying Cathay Pacific Airlines in May, you can watch DAD & STEP-DAD in flight with options for Mandarin or Cantonese subtitles. I’m also in another micro-budget comedy called FREE TIME opening this weekend March 22 in NYC and then LA the weekend after. Also coming to Chicago, Seattle, Jacksonville, New Haven and more in the next few months.
Tags: Anthony Oberbeck, Colin Burgess, Dad & Step-Dad, Free Time, Graham Mason, Grass, Hong Sang-soo, Matrix, Matt Barats, psycho, Reveries, Stavros Halikas, Tynan DeLong, Wes Haney
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