There’s a moment in “OBEX” where the phenomenon of the cicadas that swirl around the suburban home of Conor Marsh (Albert Birney) is indistinguishable from the static that’ll overtake his television at times, leaving him without anywhere to go. Since his mother’s death years earlier, he’s found that he has pretty much all he needs at his place, particularly when his neighbor Mary (Callie Hernandez) has long offered to get groceries for him and he has a constant companion in his beloved dog Sandy. He’s even found steady work on his computer where in spite of being in the pre-internet age, he connects with other tech enthusiasts in the back pages of trade publications where he advertises his eerily accurate recreations of photos people send in made entirely of keyboard characters, resulting in his dot matrix computer spitting out pointillist masterworks. Yet when the once-in-a-generation cicada migration blacks out the sky, it brings along other grey clouds when his avenues of escape are diminishing by the day with the patchy reception off his antenna leaving his many televisions mostly blank and Mary warns she may be moving soon, instilling a fear he may be abandoned all over again as he felt he was in his youth.
As in his previous wonderment “Strawberry Mansion,” it feels like writer/director Albert Birney is throwing open the doors to another world with his latest bewitching feature before Conor steps across such a threshold himself. A grainy sheen of black-and-white has an inherent frisson before learning of all the cicadas buzzing about and when set around the same period as “Tron,” the nascent promise of technology offering a virtual life that could be better than reality leads Conor to send away for a floppy disk of a fantasy game called “OBEX” that offers an unprecedented level of interactivity. Just how much Conor finds out only when Sandy goes missing, leading him to find out really how much of an adventure there is in his backyard, but Birney engages audiences with a tale where one has to question how much they might be encumbered by their own nostalgia for the past as the pleasures of the analog era dig in both off screen and on.
Teaming with Pete Ohs, who has been known to create epic quests from the most intimate of existential journeys in such films as “Jethica” and “Love and Work,” Birney fashions a world where “The Legend of Zelda” and Gary Numan’s “Cars” have a magnetic pull upon their invocation, but gradually appear to inhibit Conor from moving forward, making the obstacles of the video game that he must break free of extra poignant and the film’s emergence as a true original all the more impressive. An immediate delight upon its premiere at Sundance last year, “OBEX” is now poised to break out as potential cult favorite as it begins its theatrical run across the U.S. this week starting at the IFC Center in New York and before a weekend of Q & As in the city, Birney was gracious enough to talk about how he pulled from resources around him to craft the enchanting fantasy film, the responsibility and freedom he found in taking on the leading role himself and the long drive that changed the trajectory of the story.
How did the story start taking shape for it?
It’s always that thing when you finish one project and you think, “Well, maybe I’ll never ever get another idea again in my life and I’ve done everything I can do.” But I had finished the “Tux and Fanny” video game in 2021 and had a wonderful time and thought, I would love to do another game, but maybe also at the same time it will be a movie. That shifted and I said, “well, maybe I’ll just do a movie about a game,” and then it just so happened that it was 2021, which was the cicada brood here in Baltimore. We had these wonderful cicadas coming out of the dirt and landing on you and ending up in your trashcan in the backyard and I started filming them. Then a couple of weeks later, I found these two old Macintosh computers at a junk shop and bought them without even thinking twice and then the final component was we got a dog and you put all those things together and you apply a little bit of Elmer’s glue and some scotch tape and somehow that becomes “OBEX.”
All the cicada footage at the beginning that’s from decades ago – that wasn’t a recreation, right? You actually had to find that.
Yeah, that was a beautiful discovery. Because these cicadas are the 17-year brood, [which is] a big deal locally, and every time it happens, people love talking about it on the news. It becomes a big thing to celebrate or a newsworthy item all summer, so I knew that if I did some digging, I bet there’d be some local news story from that time and stumbled upon this wonderful footage of making an omelet with the cicadas, and it was better than I could ever have expected. I found other footage from the news of that time and 17 years later, I found some news stories, but when I found that one cooking [segment], I said, “This is a little bit too perfect here.”
It really is. Was it much of a decision to star in this yourself? You pull it off well, but it’s the first time you’re really carrying this on your shoulders.
When because we were making it [initially], it was just myself and Pete [Ohs] behind the camera and I gave consideration to finding someone to play the role, but logistically it would have complicated things. I had this feeling that whoever I got to do it, I would be micromanaging their performance or getting annoyed by how they were doing the character where I could just do it myself. And I’ve enjoyed acting in the past, but I’ve worn masks. In “Sylvio,” I wore the gorilla mask, and “Strawberry Mansion,” I was wearing a couple masks, but I was excited to take the mask off and see if I could do it myself. And the character’s not too far off from who I am. He’s obviously a fictionalized version, but I thought it was within my wheelhouse enough that I could do it convincingly.
What was the dynamic like with Pete? I know you’ve got your dog there as a scene partner as well, but you probably need something to react off of.
Pete has made films this way before where he just is the entire crew himself, so I knew he could do that and I had trust that he could come to my house in Baltimore and he has a good eye and he could put the camera where it needed to be. and give me the space and energy to be in front of the camera and to act. Because it was such a small crew, it was really just two friends hanging out, just having fun. And Dorothy, that’s my dog who plays Sandy, would be here anyway. This is her house, and if I was sitting on the sofa and there was no camera, she’d be sitting next to me, so we brought Pete in and the camera, and it was very natural for her. She took to Pete right away and I’m not even sure she knew we were making a movie most of the time. It was just another Wednesday afternoon for her.
From what I understand, the first part of the film’s was shot in five days and then you took some time to figure out the rest. What was it like to give yourself that leeway?
Yeah, the first half was only five days of filming and then we took two or three months to put that together and figure out what it was. It was very much just letting the movie tell us what it was, and I’ll never forget we filmed that first five days in September of ’22 and then in March of ’23, I was on a car trip by myself, a six- or seven-hour drive, and the stereo doesn’t work in my car, so there’s nothing to distract me. I just started thinking about where the movie could go, and I think driving is one of those great pastimes where often ideas would almost come out of the highway, and they lodge in your brain.
I just started talking out all of these ideas on my phone doing a voice recorder, and by the end of the trip, I had 20 or 30 minutes of just talking. Then when I got home, I typed it up and shared it with Pete. There was no script for the first part of the movie, but the second part, there ended up being about a 20-25-page script and that worked because we were bringing in other actors like Frank Mosley as Victor and Callie Hernandez as Mary, so it was nice to give them a little something of the character and the dialogue. I think if you have that time, [that gap] is a great tool. It can really let the movie develop unhurriedly and too often I think movies have these small time pockets that you have to hit because the actors aren’t available, or you’ve got to edit it and get it released, and get all the effects. It’s this sprint, but I think if some movies maybe allowed themselves to go a little bit slower, you can find new things that you wouldn’t be able to plan for or figure out until that time washes over it.
At Sundance, I remember you saying the effects weren’t too thought out in advance of the shoot. What was their evolution like as you had the time to think about it?
We filmed it in black and white and I knew what that would allow us to have the effects be a little bit more forgiving in terms of figuring it out right away. For example, the demon coming out of the TV, I knew if I film myself in this kind of morph suit with a light around my chest, that’s enough of a building block, I can figure out the effects a year from now. And a lot of the effects were done that way [where we’d] get the raw material and then we’ll edit it and figure out what effects does it need. Like the fairies in the second half, they were discovered in the edit. We weren’t really sure there were going to be little fairies floating around when Conor first gets to the land of OBEX. So a lot of the effects [took shape] in the same way that we were discovering the story in the first half, let’s just discover the effects in a similar way and let them develop naturally.
The score of this is really beautiful. How did the initial melody come to mind for the theme?
It’s one of those things where I was working with Josh Dibb, who is a great musician, on the rest of the score and we had two weeks together and then he was busy. We were editing the movie and Pete [Ohs] was in town for four days and we actually shaved off 12 minutes and moved a lot of scenes around and found a different ending. But because we were doing that, it needed a new piece of music. And I’ll never forget it. I was right here where I’m sitting now at my computer. Pete was in the guest room, which is right through that wall. And I just woke up early that morning, maybe 7 or 8 a.m., which is early for me, but I just came in and I have my little keyboard over here and I just started playing something because I [thought], “we need something here if we’re going to edit today to help us feel the scene.”
I recorded that song [that became the theme] and then Pete woke up a little bit later and I said, “Hey, I got this thing. “It’s a kind of a temporary song. I did literally one take.” And as we’re listening to it, both of us were like, “Hmm, this feels pretty good. Maybe this is it.” It’s one of those things where if I went back and tried to do it again, I don’t think I would remember what I was playing. It was very much just how we did the first half [of the film] with intuition, just picking a sound of a synthesizer, playing some notes, recording it, and you end up where you’re like, “Oh, that’s it, that’s it. Let’s not think twice, let’s keep moving forward.”
It came out so well. What’s it been like putting it out into the world?
It’s been a great year. We started last January and got to go to Sydney, Australia with it, where I had never been, so that was wonderful, and then got to go to Germany and Switzerland. It’s always just the cherry on top to be able to go and show it and my favorite part is hanging out afterwards and people coming up and talking about it. The really nice thing is people all around the world love Dorothy, who plays Sandy the dog, and I love her, so it’s nice when people love her as well and then talk about their own animals. One couple came up after the movie and said their dog was named Sandy, and they showed me a picture on their phone, and it looked like Dorothy. Like any movie, it’s not for everybody, but the people that do relate to it are the people that are riding a similar wave that I’m riding and so it’s nice to make those connections.
“OBEX” opens on January 9th in New York at the IFC Center.