From the moment Pasqual (Pasqual Gutierrez) comes up with the idea to hire an impersonator for himself in “Serious People,” you know it will not go according to plan. It’s a novel solution to a problem the music video director faces when he needs to be in two places at once as his wife Christine’s (Christine Yuan) due date is approaching for the birth of their first child and he ends up booking a job he can’t turn down when Drake needs a video for his latest single. Always somewhat hidden behind a pair of sunglasses, it isn’t difficult for Pasqual to find someone that’ll resemble him, particularly employing the same casting pipeline that he’d use to actually audition talent for one of his productions, but even when he finds Miguel (Miguel Huerta), a suitable doppelgänger who can somewhat throw around the right lingo as Pasqual’s filmmaking partner RJ (Raul Sanchez) calls the shots, each moment that passes feels like one step closer to the jig being up.
As disastrously as this goes for Pasqual on screen, it turns out that the best thing that could’ve happened for Gutierrez off-screen was for his best laid plans to go awry when he initially imagined chronicling the lead-up to the birth of his first child as a more typical documentary and instead reimagined it with Ben Mullinkosson as auto fiction ripe with comic potential. “Serious People” at once feels quite real in the concerns it raises as Pasqual awkwardly tries to balance his professional and personal commitments while also affording his own story with the style he brought to videos for The Weeknd and Bad Bunny as part of the directing duo Cliqua that he’s a part of with Raul Sanchez. Inviting Mullinkosson, the mischievous nonfiction filmmaker behind the delightful 2018 doc “Don’t Be a Dick About It” about a pair of rambunctious brothers, into his life to recreate some scenes as he and Christine hurtle towards becoming first-time parents and capture the pure reality in others where the most outrageous can feel like the most authentic.
After becoming a major crowdpleaser when it premiered at Sundance earlier this year, “Serious People” is now rolling out into theaters where it’s bound to sneak up on audiences and recently Gutierrez and Mullinkosson spoke about how the sly comedy came to be, blurring the lines between reality and fiction and getting everybody in on the act.
I don’t want to start any trouble, but it was interesting to me that Pasqual usually is part of the directing duo known as Cliqua with Raul, who’s in the film, but the two of you partnered on this. What made Ben the right guy to team with?
Pasqual Gutierrez: I’ve actually known Ben longer than a lot of my friends. We went to film school together and were roommates, so we had always were talking about working some sort of project while we were living together. We met in the documentary program and I studied nonfiction when I was in film school and I went into the music video space and met Raul. Ben went into documentaries, so we went in different paths. Ben moved to China and made “Last Year of Darkness” and “Don’t Be a Dick About It,” so when the idea of this film came to be, it was a big question [of] am I going to do this with Raul or am I going to do this alone? Who am I going to do this with? Honestly, Ben was the first person I thought of because it had just been a long time coming. We’d been thinking about doing something in this capacity and Ben had tried to make a documentary about me and Christine one year prior, and it ended up not working out. But with his sensibilities, I just knew it was going to be a perfect team. Also, transparently, I really wanted Raul to be present in his role in the film and I knew if he had been involved behind the camera as well, it would have complicated the film’s process a bit. He was very understanding of that, so that’s how we got here.
Ben, when your practice generally is documentary, was it exciting to do something like this where you’re confusing the issue?
Ben Mullinkosson: It was really exciting. When I arrived in L.A., I thought we were making a documentary. I remember going to the very first shoot and we’re like, “Okay, we’re going to roll camera now” and we set up in this big wide shot. The first scene was where Pasqual was talking to Spencer [Creigh] about the amnesiac phenomenon in a bar, and I remember we did the first take and I was like, “Okay, that was amazing. Let’s move into a closeup.” And Pasqual [said], “Wait, let’s maybe do another take. Let’s talk about this and go into it.” So it was cool to have this process change. I’m thinking about, “Okay, we’re just going to film a documentary conversation in a wide [shot] and go to a close up the way you would shoot a scene in a cinema verite film,” but it was just fun to switch it up and try different things.
Originally, [this] was supposed to be a documentary, but because of the pregnancy and the timeline, we didn’t have enough time to let these scenes unfold naturally as they would, so we had to write the moments and then create a schedule that’s similar to a fiction schedule, so it became a fiction film. But I don’t think there’s a steadfast meaning behind [the term] documentary, or it’s very complicated. There’s several different modes, and there’s all these ways that you can go about it, so in my head, “Serious People” still is a documentary — there isn’t necessarily a [division between] fiction and non-fiction. It’s just a film and we can open that conversation.
Pasqual, when you sign up for a film like this, you’re basically signing up your whole family. Did everyone think this was a fun idea?
Pasqual Gutierrez: Everybody thought it was a really fun idea at first. And I do think there was a little bit of fatigue, probably 50-75 percent of the way through with the film, but we were also like, “Hey, this train is moving and we got to finish this film.” That was a very interesting thing for me personally to navigate because it’s what my character in the film is also struggling with – this balance of time and this deadline that’s approaching [of] impending fatherhood and how do you use that time? That was happening to me in my real life and I do think that affected my character in the film subsequently because I am playing myself, so to speak. So it was a very interesting meta process.
The film is so visually dynamic. It must be interesting to take all these familiar places and find what’s interesting about them. What was it like to figure out a visual style for this?
Ben Mullinkosson: First and foremost, we were inspired by Roy Andersson’s “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence” and some of his commercial work and we were thinking about how can we compose the documentary about Los Angeles in the same type of framing where it’s wide and you’re seeing everything and you’re looking at the frame. The baby shower is a great example of this where you’re hearing Pasqual have a conversation with Spencer, but you don’t know where they are in the frame and you have to find them, so it becomes like a “Where’s Waldo” experience where you’re just looking around. What’s cool about that is there’s so much going on at the same time and I think there’s there’s something really fun about that style of framing.
The more we went [along], we kept changing our visual language. We kept referencing “The Zone of Interest” and how it is this house, but there’s cameras all over and it’s almost like Big Brother, so as we kept going, we’re like “Let’s get more cameras, but let’s not interrupt the flow,” so we’d have a camera over here and then a camera over here shooting a close-up at the same time and we never wanted to cut this with coverage. Coverage is such a conventional language where it’s like [over-the-shoulder] to [over-the-shoulder] and we’re trying to do something a little bit different and push ourselves because this is our this is our film where we don’t have a lot of investors and we have the freedom to experiment. Shooting in 4:3 [aspect ratio] was something that was really fun for us and framing this in a unique way, so we got to play with it.
If you have that kind of freedom generally, was there any direction this took you could get excited about that you may not have anticipated as the shoot was unfolding and you could embrace it?
Pasqual Gutierrez: Yeah, Ben and I wrote the story together and it was pretty much a live document because a lot of the things that Ben’s talking about [regarding] the timeline, it was so truncated, [so the script] was very unconventional compared to what you would normally deal with on a proper traditional fiction film and it was never fully finalized, even as we went into shooting. So things were presenting themselves and we were experimenting. That was what was so fun about it. Many of the crew and the entire cast, they’re all are good personal friends, so there was this youthful energy around the entire process and we invited our producers in and our sound guy was played a very big creative role in the film — he made this song. It was just amazing. It was like film school all over again. We would shoot and then at the end of the day, we’d all get together and we’d have dinner and we’d say, “What do we think about that? Or maybe we should change this?” And people would have ideas, like Christine would say, “Oh, maybe my character doesn’t do this. Maybe she does this instead.” It was like that every day.
If your sound guy created the Drake song for the music video, it’s very impressive as a credible facsimile. What was it like to put together?
Pasqual Gutierrez: Waju [Broderick] is the sound guy and he’s one of my closest friends since childhood. He’s also a talented musician and a recording artist himself. So when the Drake of it all started coming into our story, that was a major part of the conversation. As a music video director, you’re always listening to the track. That’s part of the story and that’s part of the lore, so I went into the studio with Waju and we were listening to a lot of Drake records and Waju made this beat and he wrote all the lyrics. He even performed a version of it and then what we did after the fact was we went and found a TikTok Drake, whose voice sounds like Drake. He’s like an impersonator, but we got him involved to record over the track. And you got to credit Waju because the writing and the cadence of the song was so well done that it really does sound like something [Drake] could have made.
Could’ve fooled me. What’s it like now having this on your hands?
Ben Mullinkosson: At the beginning of the process, I remember Pasqual and Christine said, as a worst case scenario, at least we have this period of our life documented. That was what our initial expectation was. We have this idea, but we don’t necessarily know if it’s going to work out. And now, two years later, that this film has been in Sundance and now we’re speaking to you and we have a distribution deal, it’s really a dream come true. We’re all shocked to be here because the film is really simple. I feel like the beauty of the film is how personal it is and how much heart that Pasqual and Christine and Miguel have. It’s a lovely, cute film that has this crazy twist and we’re stoked. We’re very excited.
“Serious People” opens on November 14th in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Glendale.