Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney on Living the Dream in “Strawberry Mansion”

There’s a new item on the menu at Cap’n Kelly’s Chicken, one of the last places left to get a meal in town in “Strawberry Mansion” and the fast food chain has long prized convenience over quality, but they’ve taken it to another level with the Chicken Shake, a blend of the chicken meat they’ve long been known for along with the gravy so you don’t need to bother chewing. At under 500 calories, the ease of a predigested meal without not too much damage done to the heart seems downright reasonable, though James Preble (Kentucker Audley) isn’t entirely sold as he sits in the drive-thru placing his usual order of a Barnyard Bucket, eventually giving into unknown – still showing curiosity when making the shake a last minute addition to his tab, but acknowledging his place in a culture that no longer seems to welcome it.

The glorious second collaboration between Audley and Albert Birney would seem to be the antithesis of that shake, a feast for both the eyes and the mind that you’ll want to take your time consuming as it observe Preble investigating the dreams of others as a tax collector with a twist, auditing people’s fantasies when they’re hooked up to VHS recorders at night. His work takes him to the house of Sarabella Isidore (Penny Fuller) where he’s charged with sifting through the thousands of tapes, an arduous task made easier when he comes across her younger self (Grace Glowicki) who may hold the key unlocking the mysteries of her case as well as some in his own life. Still, those waters are murky with the constant appearance of a seemingly well-meaning friend (Linas Phillips) popping up every now and then as product placement personified and the arrival of Sarabella’s family (real-life relatives of Birney, including his uncle Reed and aunt Constance Shulman and their son Ephraim), eager to lay claim to her estate in the event of her passing.

While the initial idea for “Strawberry Mansion” had been kicking around in Birney’s head for over a decade, it seems to meet the moment we’re in head-on, taking the time to mount a response to slick CGI effects extravaganzas that one can turn their brain off with by turning it on with dazzling handmade effects as Preble goes deeper and deeper into Arabella’s subconscious, having his own humanity awakened with the encouragement of Glowicki’s Bella as the wildly inventive and tactile environments they travel to warm the heart and speak to the boundless imagination of the filmmakers working with the limits of what they were physically capable of. After transporting audiences to another world during the COVID-ravaged Sundance Film Fest of 2021, the film is now properly being projected in theaters across the country and recently Audley and Barney shared how they were able to pull off a film of such ambition and not being so intimidated by it to start work, as well as giving such a palpable feeling to a film that largely takes place in fantasy.

You’ve been carrying around the seed for this for over a decade – was the scale of this always there?

Albert Birney: It’s funny because you think back on that initial seed, which was just an image of a house, a home in a field and a character walking towards it. It seems so simple and yet it’s definitely a big part of the movie and as we keep making projects together, it’s like we’re realizing that a lot of our seeds are maybe a similar image of this place that someone’s trying to get to, so from that seed, you work backwards and you’re like, “Well what’s in the house? And who’s walking towards the house?” And you just start connecting the dots and hopefully a story emerges.

Kentucker Audley: It’s funny because we’re making a new film now and we’re trying to both really dream big and go real ambitious with it, and also just getting to the point in our life where it’s like how can we possibly do this again? Knowing what you know before, it’s like you’re flying blind for the first 10 or so years of making movies, and you think either, “Oh, this is going to get easier” or “You’re not really thinking about how challenging it is and how many years it takes,” and you’re kind of really at a more loose, free flowing part of your life. Then you get to our age and it’s like how could we possibly make this happen [again]? It takes five to six years to put these things together and the people that start the movie are completely different people that finish it. It’s incredibly daunting. Albert started this project 13 years ago and it’s just now coming out, so you put so much of your life into these projects and just hope for the best, but it’s certainly an undertaking a sane person might not go through with.

Albert, I wonder do these things take shape pretty early on as far as production design or costumes? Everything is so detailed and ornate, I imagine it begins years ahead of time.

Albert Birney: Yeah, I’m always thinking out the masks or the props and thinking who could do this or make that, or animate this, so it’s a slow process coming. On the one hand, I wish movies got made quicker, but on the other, having the time really helps you figure it out and gather the right people and make the team what it needs to be. Once we got the word that we could make this movie, the next day I started just collecting and hot gluing and taking things apart and building. The more time you have to do all that, the more it’s going to show on the screen that you put the thought and the love into the movie.

Kentucker, you’re being in such crazy get ups throughout the film, was there one that you just couldn’t believe that you were getting inside?

Kentucker Audley: The grass suit was particularly surreal to embody. Then, particularly to act alongside Grace wearing that big suit and also try to be directing her at the same time wearing it. She’s looking at a person covered in grass, and I’m telling her to do another take and really feel at this time. And she’s like, “Whoa, I can’t really take this seriously from a person covered in grass.” That was the most challenging, but it’s really fun. I haven’t had the chance to do a lot of crazy costumes in my acting career so this was a real fun opportunity to just go wild and wear exaggerated captain’s outfits. The fun of this movie is definitely the visual style, the costumes, the masks, the stop-motion animation, the miniatures and green screen. It’s just like putting all those things together. It’s definitely more of Albert’s world, but the more I work with him, the more it’s just “Yeah, why would you make a movie that’s not putting all of these fun elements together?”

Albert, does anything come back from your collaborators that you could get really excited about?

Albert Birney: For the longest time I wanted to work with Clockwork Creature. They made four masks for us — the werewolf, the blue demon, and two rat heads, and when we started looking at that footage, I was just giddy because especially the rats looked so good on film. Every scene that I would look at after we had filmed it, I would just smile and I couldn’t believe that they looked even better than I had imagined. With a movie, sometimes you’re used to things not going exactly how you wanted them to go and you’re a little bit disappointed, “Oh well, this will be as good as we can get.” But that was an example where it was like the rats were beyond what I had imagined.

Then a lot of the animators and the VFX artists we’ve worked with — animator Lawrence Becker and VFX artist Matt Lathrom, they did very different things, stop-motion and then CGI, but every time I got footage from them, it would surprise me and excite me because it was just above and beyondwhat I had imagined. So those are great moments. You’ve been working on an edit for six to seven months and you had no skeleton in the graveyard. All of a sudden you’re given the skeleton footage, you put it in and you’re just like “Oh, that’s what’s been missing. That’s what this scene needed.”

What was it like getting the right texture? It has this ethereal glow and I understand it was processed on film after shooting on digital.

Albert Birney: Because the movie was inspired by so many of these films that we grew up watching, which were all shot on film, and knowing that we were going to be using so many different types of effects and animation styles, it felt like it needed some cohesion. For me, there’s nothing worse than seeing some new digital project or film. It just looks too clean or distracting to my eye – it doesn’t feel like a movie should feel to me. And growing up watching movies shot on film and then on a VHS tape, they’re pretty dirty and degraded, but that somehow felt more cinematic to me than like a perfect HD image, so I don’t really ever want to make something too clean. I really love the texture that happens with film, and ideally, we would’ve shot on film, but that would’ve cost more money and it would’ve been more limiting in the amount of effects that we could have done ourselves, so to me, it’s like the best of both worlds. You get the look and the texture of the film, but with all the ease that the digital filming and post-production allows.

And I’ve got to give a shout out to our DP Tyler Davis because he was open to the idea of doing it on film. We did many tests with him where we would film some and [once we decided on digital] he also used really old lenses because he knew that certain lenses would look different once we put them on a film. They would get a little bit blurry around the edges or all these little small details that maybe we don’t even perceive, but it somehow lends to the authentic nature of it. I’ve had so many people say, “Wow, you fooled me. I thought you shot on film,” and I think that’s a testament to Tyler lighting it how he did and using the lenses.

From what I understand, the scenes inside the house were at the start of the shoot, which made me wonder if it really felt like the world was opening up once you got to the beach and exteriors?

Albert Birney: Oh, definitely. I remember that beach day, we were all so excited to be outside, to be out of the house, and that added to the joy that the characters are feeling in that moment when they’re embarking on this wonderful dream vision together and starting a new life. That was a palpable feeling in the crew. And we also shot all the dreamscapes and the surreal elements later as well, [which] really helped to get all of the claustrophobic house stuff out of the way, and then go and play and have fun and get lost in a fantasy world together as a crew.

Was there a particularly crazy day of shooting on this?

Kentucker Audley: For me, it was when we were filming on the ship. It felt like I was wandering around this giant deck of an old ship wearing this captain’s costume and it wasn’t completely closed to the public, so there were definitely some people wandering around looking with some side glances of what they’ve stumbled onto, like this series of surreal rat sailors brandishing a sword and yelling like, “There’s a blue demon over there”. But it really felt like a movie and you really let your imagination run wild and it’s fun to just like actually see the places that the movie is supposed to take place in.

The film is really tied together with Dan Deacon’s score and it sounds like you got him involved pretty early. What was it like working with him?

Albert Birney: We’re friends with him and we were just telling him about this project back when it was still coming together, so he still started to give us some demos, maybe three or four songs with all the stems, so we had multiple tracks of different instruments. That was so helpful in the early edit because we could put that down and say, “Okay, let’s take away these three tracks and leave just this track, so now when [the music] builds, we’ll put this track back in.” Having those demos early did a lot of heavy lifting, and then we would send him the export and the cut, and then he would be [like] “Oh, this is really cool here. Let me rework it with the version that you’ve done with the stems” [or] “We’re using too much. Let me give you a whole new thing for this part,” so he started to actually write the score as we were getting further and further along in the edit. But Dan’s just a very thoughtful human being and musician and really would put a lot of time into figuring out what the different characters were going through and how he could use different instruments and melodies to bring that forward. I’m not a composer in any way like that, and it just kept blowing my mind every time he would send us an MP3. We’d put it on the timeline and all of a sudden it would be like, “Oh my God, there it is. There’s the scene.” It was only half there, and the music just elevated it to this new realm.

After living in your head for so long, what’s it like getting this out into the world?

Albert Birney: It’s actually kind of surreal at this point. For many years I had come to peace with the fact that maybe this was a movie I wasn’t going to be able to make, like this was just one idea that got away, but to be able to make it was amazing and now for it to be premiering in 40 cities nationwide, that’s just a dream I could never have imagined. That is unreal. I don’t know exactly know how to answer that question because I haven’t seen it yet really with an audience in [the U.S.]. I’ve seen it a couple times overseas. We saw it in Paris and South Korea, but I’ve not really been able to experience it in Baltimore or New York with an audience, so I’m looking forward to finally having that, and if it goes well and we get maybe some laughs or some applause or just a couple of cheers, I can breathe a sigh of relief and put it behind [us] into the next thing Kentucker and I are working on.

“Strawberry Mansion” opens on February 18th in select theaters including the Quad Cinema and Nitehawk Williamsburg in New York, the Landmark Westwood in Los Angeles, the Roxie Theater in San Francisco, the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, the Grand Illusion Cinema in Seattle and the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among others. It will be available on demand on February 28th.

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