Olivia (Mary Neely) and Amir (Kareem Rahma) couldn’t know when they both enter the apartment of Teddy (Brandon Wardell) that they’re looking for something more than the $1200 he owes to each of them separately, but the deadbeat has a way of bringing out parts of their personality that they wouldn’t be aware of otherwise. For Olivia in particular, who can be seen pawning off clothes to make ends meet before heading to Teddy’s, the discovery that she isn’t alone in collecting a debt is initially aggravating but potentially comforting as the day wears on when she can share her desperation with someone else as she and Amir find out that to claim the money that’s rightfully theirs, they’ll have to make the trek from Brooklyn to Harlem to see a man named Uptown Mike (David Zayas).
When Teddy gives the two only the vaguest of addresses – a street corner is coughed up after Olivia and Amir apply all the pressure they can muster, which is not much when they are hardly professionals at this – it opens up a path for the film, written by Neely and Rahma and directed by Jeffrey Scotti Schroder, to go all over the place as keeping a conversation alive is to remain engaged with an unfair world that the pair could understandably cut themselves off from. Both in their capacity as writers and actors, Neely and Rahma conjure the magic of the kind of walk-and-talk dramas that show up at the root of indie film movements both in the 1990s and early 2000s and it’s fitting that the stars who both first gained traction on the Internet by force of personality — Neely with the viral recreations of Broadway musicals in her apartment during the pandemic and Rahma with “Subway Takes,” in which he takes something to task within the very public space of the New York transit system — add up to something more when sparring with one another, working out their thoughts on gender dynamics and what attracts them to someone.
Although it appears unlikely that Olivia and Amir will become lovers themselves, the thought of gaining the clarity of another perspective is what ends up being swooningly romantic in “Or Something,” as well as making their presence known in a city where so much can be passed by without notice and as Neely tells it, that instinct is what led her and Rahma to start out documenting their own contentious (and cordial) conversations with the goal of turning them into a film. In fact, the two give themselves a showcase to stand out when they not only keep each other on their toes, but put the audience on theirs as well with provocative ideas and a quick wit and already the film looks like the first steps towards a promising career when Rahma recently showed up on “Poker Face” and Neely can soon be seen in a supporting role in the Lily James comedy “Swiped.” With “Or Something” now strolling into the Quad Cinema in New York this week en route to other theaters around the country, Neely spoke about the genesis of the charming urban adventure, the exhilaration of filming in public places and embracing other parts of the artistic process than what she initially set out to be.
How did this all come about?
I made these videos in 2020 just on my iPhone in my apartment that went really viral on Twitter, and there was a guy who works in tech who saw the videos. He watched all my previous work — my shorts and my Web series and my music videos, and he just DM’d me and [said], “I really believe in you and I want to give you money to make something.” I didn’t think he was serious, but then I moved to New York and he [said], “I am serious and I’m still thinking about wanting to give you money to make something.” I met Kareem right after I moved at a rooftop comedy show, and we just had this banter and discourse between us that felt intriguing to me. We didn’t really agree about a lot of things, but I really enjoyed talking with him. And Kareem actually posted on his Instagram a screenshot of Mathieu Kassovitz’s film “La Haine,” and said, “I want to be cast in a serious movie like this. I’m quitting comedy until somebody casts me in a serious film.” So I said, “I’ll cast you because this guy wants to give me money and I want to make a classic New York indie film.” And that’s how it started.
Unbelievable. What was it like to develop a kind of story where you could talk about everything?
One of the kernels of the idea was that sometimes you can open up to someone that you have just met more than someone you’ve known for a long time, like the “Lost in Translation” effect of being able to be immediately vulnerable with someone that you don’t know because perhaps you’ll never see them again. For me and Kareem, it was interesting because when we were writing the script, transcribing all of our conversations where we would pick a topic and just talk to each other, we were actually just getting to know each other by writing this script, so there was a meta aspect to it.
It was very low stakes at the time. We weren’t putting a ton of pressure on ourselves. It was very much like, “Okay, you can meet up at this time?” And then months would go by and we’d [say], “We need to meet up again.” And we would go to either Kareem’s old apartment in Williamsburg or to a coffee shop and I would take my laptop out. We would say, “What’s something you’ve been thinking about recently?” Then we would just start talking and then I would transcribe the conversation into the script and depending on where it was landing structurally, we would maybe change a few things around, but it’s very much our own thoughts.
The locations are tied so well to the conversations. Were those actually in mind as you were putting this to paper?
We always knew that we wanted to start in Brooklyn and go up to Harlem, and then when we were deciding where the conversations were actually taking place, it was like, where would people go who are trying to kill time? That’s why [we thought] if we have to go up to Harlem, we have to get on the subway and then we get to the house and he’s not there, we have to go to a diner because we have to have lunch and kill some time. Then there’s still time after that, so we’re standing outside the diner and then we’re just in Central Park. It wasn’t super specific in terms of it had to be this block. It was just like, “We’ll figure it out when we are actually making the movie.” When we were in prep, we were location scouting and that’s when we were really deciding what do we want to tie into the themes here and it all came together very nicely. My friend doesn’t live in Harlem anymore, but she lived at this house that is literally two houses down from where they shot “The Royal Tenenbaums,” so it’s that really classic Harlem architecture, and when we were going around that area, it was like, “Whoa, there are these really cool planters that are in the shape of heads and it was the holidays, so there were all these blow up Santas or a really cool church that we could be walking by.
What was it like to actually shoot such a crucial scene on the subway in a live environment like that?
I think our anxieties were worse before we started doing it, like, “Are we going to get this? Are people going to kick us out?” It was the L train and we literally got on at Lorimer and rode it all the way to Canarsie and then we rode it back. I think we did that a couple times, but our crew was so amazing. We had two cameras rolling always at the same time and [the crew] were just really good at blocking off what we needed to get. Nobody bothered us and I was just really excited to be able to finally fully do [that scene]. It was one of our first days, so I was just really excited.
When you wrote it and it’s lived in your head for a while, is it difficult to keep it fresh once you get to the day of filming?
No, I think that being in the subway and in a situation like that, with all the sounds and just the cityscape makes it like, “Okay, I’m fully in this,” and it’s fresh, just from getting injected with the energy of being on the subway or in the city. But we did rehearse a lot because we wanted to make sure that we were getting all the lines and [we knew] what the scenes meant and workshopping if we needed to cut anything, but it didn’t feel stale.
Was there anything that happened that you may not have anticipated, but ended up making it into the film and you really like it now?
This is so random, but there’s this wide shot in Central Park where me and Kareem are [walking] and the camera zooms out as we’re walking towards it, and we start from behind this corner and we come around and there’s this light post and all these fallen leaves and it’s just a really beautiful Central Park moment and [there was] this random woman and her dog when we round this one corner. We’re walking towards the camera and she comes on behind us, perfectly into frame and undoes the leash for her dog and her dog runs off and it was a natural moment. She’s not an actor. She didn’t notice that we were filming a movie and it just felt like such a perfect sprinkling of what was happening at that exact moment in that location.
Was it different working on a longform feature like this when your previous experience was largely shorts?
The way I made a Web series [“Wacko Smacko”], it was like my secret first feature just because it’s the length of a feature [in total], but all of those things totally helped prepare me to be able to do something like this. At the same time, it’s completely different. When you’re in the post-production process and you’re watching passes for color or for sound, you’re not watching an eight-minute short film where you can watch it a couple times in a row, and that’s only 16 minutes out of your day. It’s like, “Okay, I’m watching an 82-minute pass” and the detail that it takes to really lock in. Like what you asked about how to keep it fresh, the post-production process [requires thinking about] how do you keep it fresh and not lose your sight of what’s happening. Just the stamina alone in terms of the quantity of content, but then how much many people it takes, keeping everyone updated, it’s just a lot bigger.
You’ve said that you primarily started writing as a means of establishing yourself as an actor, but you’re obviously good at it. Has it become something your more comfortable with?
Yeah, I had major imposter syndrome for a long time. Now I’m much more accepting of just the skill sets that I’ve literally been practicing, so I can’t say I’m not good at this or I don’t do this because it’s like I wrote something that now is made and good or bad is not really a good way of looking at it, but just in the sense of being able to literally do something, like “I can do that.”
What’s it been like to see this get out into the world?
It’s amazing. I’m so, so excited. I’m so proud of everyone for sticking with it this long. It’s a long process and a lot of dedication. Kareem and I have really been driving this from the beginning and the journey of doing this with him has been so unique and special, not just because it’s l very intimate to be able to make something like this with another person, but I’ve been able to watch him become this New York figure in the time between when we met and now he’s become quite well known. It just feels kind of emotional, and I’m so lucky to have been able to witness everything that’s gone on and I’m so, so excited for more people to see the movie.
“Or Something” opens on August 22nd in New York at the Quad Cinema and September 14th in Los Angeles at Braindead Studios.