“I want to have an impact,” Danny (Mohammad Ali Hashmi) tells his podcast listeners in “The Lion Does Not Concern Himself,” a number you suspect isn’t huge but keeps him going, just as he aims to motivate men of his age with fitness tips. He wants to be a coach in a number of ways, giving tips from the experience he has as an entry-level employee at Good Times Fitness and tackling the thorny questions that his 11 subscribers throw his way such as “Should you work out when you’re sick?” and less innocently, “Are women ruining the gym?”
A boxy frame is at first a playful touch but gradually reflects a worrisomely narrow point of view in Zarrar Khan’s deeply endearing comedy set on the edge of the manosphere where Danny, a wide-eyed innocent who just wants to do well by others starts parroting misogynistic talking points he hears on the job to appeal to those he’s surrounded by while forgetting there’s an entire other sex out there, with the fact that his own mother is dying of cancer only adding to his insularity. His bubble is burst when a new member enlists at Good Times – Jen (Naomi Eidinger), a budding screenwriter who ends up flipping the script on him when there are romantic sparks between them yet the pull on him from the other direction remains strong. When small talk leads her to learn that the last movie Danny saw was “Fight Club” (as in “last night”), you know a much bigger talk is ahead as she aims to bring her potential new beau out of his shell and enlighten him.
The film may address pressing contemporary concerns, but it has old school charms as Jen and Danny start exercising more than their quads and after last directing the Cannes-bound dramatic feature “In Flames,” the short comedy gives Khan a chance to stretch his own muscles with his longtime collaborator Ali Hashmi, who co-wrote the script for “The Lion Does Not Concern Himself” in addition to starring in it when the movie was inspired by his side hustle as a professional trainer. With its premiere this week in the pair’s native Toronto less than a mile from where it was filmed, the creative duo behind the film graciously took the time to talk about the romantic comedies they drew on for inspiration, reenvisioning exercise equipment as a way to express a love language and finding a fun way in for audiences to consider a distressing subject.
How did this come about?
Mohammad Ali Hashmi: A big chunk of this started when I [began] working on this new gym and the clientele was a bit of a group of younger men. I was really surprised by how easy it was for the casual gym conversation to go from working out to [taking] peptides to “the better sex” and Andrew Tate. I was like, “I thought we were just working out. What happened here?” It was really funny how casual it was. It wasn’t even much of a big deal. And I brought that idea to Zarrar and he had a genius idea to change it up in a new format.
Zarrar Khan: I was just coming home from a family dinner, meeting with a cousin of mine, a young man in his twenties who’s being raised by a single mom, and he was talking about trans athletes in Iran and how they’re the downfall of society. And I’m like, “What are you talking about? Where are you getting this knowledge?” I know that fundamentally he’s a really good kid. So framing [this experience that Mohammad had] as a rom-com allowed us to consider how we can bring people back in and talk about the gender divide in a way that highlights how goofy a lot of these conversations are. That’s what I love that comedy can do. It makes your audience consider the goofiness of a lot of our contemporary conversation.
It’s a great narrative device to include this podcast as an overarching part of the story where there’s this distance from who the person he really is in person. How did that enter the mix?
Zarrar Khan: A lot of that came from the fact that people are always living different versions of their identity. There is the identity that we present online, and then there’s the person we are in real life and because I’m a millennial, we’ve been wearing these various different masks and watching online personas evolve over time. With Gen Z, there is less of an understanding of the persona because they grew up with it natively versus what we’ve seen on Instagram as it’s shifted from a place of reaching out to your friends to giving a presentation of yourself and now as a creative, it feels like a creative LinkedIn. So [the film] was considering masking and identities and these different roles of our identities and that felt like a really natural fit for this young man who’s still trying to figure out what his identity is and what being a man means to him.
Mohammad Ali Hashmi: Also it’s very interesting because I feel like we spend more time investing in our digital persona more than our real-life persona. There’s a service I saw on TikTok recently where you could pay someone to go to concerts for you and send you videos as your POV and I thought you could just go to the concert yourself.
Zarrar Khan: The ticket costs the same. And part of the thought for this came from this young woman who cosplayed being a Trump supporter online and she ran a GoFundMe and then she raised $3 million off of the backs of far right groups and then showed herself to be a psych student and absolutely not aligned with the MAGA movement, but was using that identity to pay her bills. So it is talking about all these things and Internet culture and wanting to use this film as a way to show that.
Both your past collaborations have been dramas. Was it different to do a comedy?
Mohammad Ali Hashmi: I absolutely loved every second of it, and it’s really funny because anyone who’s ever met me in real life are always shocked when they see a lot of my dramatic work because I am not a serious human being. I am a goofball, so I was able to really lean into that. In some ways, it was scarier because when I’m doing those really dramatic characters, there’s a very clear separation of who I am as a person versus who is the character but leaning into a part of you that leads into the reality of yourself is really funny. But this character is so complex and nuanced because while he is a bit of a himbo, it was really fun playing those really complex layers of humor, innocence, and his ambition because he understands what he’s going for, but there is still an innocence that makes him endearing and a vulnerability there which I think is really special.
How did Naomi join the fun as Jen?
Zarrar Khan: We were working with this really fantastic casting director Colleen Rush, and Toronto has so much incredible talent. We did open casting [where] we saw maybe around 70 to 80 [people for that role], and when Naomi walked into the room, she has such a presence. Immediately I [thought] “This is Jen. There’s an authority in her voice and in the way that she carries herself.” She really knows herself, but it feels like there’s a vulnerability that just underneath and I was really excited to talk to her and bring her on as a collaborator and then the chemistry between her and Mohammed was fantastic.
Mohammad Ali Hashmi: It’s really fun because by the time we were shooting, I really got to know Jen and she is such a smart and giving artist. There was a dynamic with black cat or a labrador energy in our dynamic and in the way we collaborated that’s really funny and we didn’t even try to play it up. It naturally was there, which also leads to the rom-com stereotypes, but It was really cool working with her and having such a comfortable scene partner because a lot of the times when we were in scenes that required intimacy or really [diving into] each other’s insecurities, it was amazing to know that you’re safe with your scene partner and with your director. The fact that we gave each other that space and Zarrar, gave us the room to really lean into those characters, I was really lucky to have such a creative team to be working with.
Zarrar, you’re also able to get that across in the aesthetic with a lot of bright colors and energetic camerawork. What was this like to figure out?
Zarrar Khan: I was looking at all of my favorite rom-coms and “Silver Linings Playbook” was one of those where it was dealing with very serious issues of mental health, but it was also about these two people falling in love. Another was “The Big Sick,” and “Perfect,” where John Travolta was an undercover journalist who’s also going to a ‘80s gym and falling in love with Jamie Lee Curtis. That was another core reference. I [thought], “How do I bring all of these films together and tell this deeply contemporary rom-com?” It was really fantastic collaborating with my cinematographer and talking about these references and talking about wanting to create a colorful world that has these dark shadows underneath.
There’s also a shot in “Notting Hill” with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts where he’s walking down this one street in London and the seasons are changing and as he’s thinking about this woman that he lost, we’re seeing the passage of time. That’s one of my favorite rom-com montages, so I thought how can I do this in this gym with this equipment? How do we show them falling in love through fitness? I remember seeing this sled when we were doing our location scouting and I [thought], “This is it. This is the piece of gym machinery we’re going to be using. And kudos to Hashmi and Naomi because Naomi was moving that slag with Hashmi on it, so she was doing at least 180 pounds or something like that.
Mohammad Ali Hashmi: Yeah, when we were on that sled, we also had a lovely intimacy coach who also helped with movement and she really was amazing in the way that she helped the choreograph the movements and really making sure they were correct for camera. There’s a thin line there and if you really look into some of the notes that I’m giving Naomi in that sequence, those are just real notes. I’m not even pretending. It was really cool finding those moments of making it look good while keeping the form correct and it’s really funny because for a big chunk of this film, my character’s a coach and a gym trainer, so there was a lot of prep involved, but [that time] working out and discovering all those machines, it really naturally allowed us to get to that moment.
Zarrar Khan: Yeah, it was really great to have both an intimacy coordinator and a gym trainer for this movie about gym trainers.
Was there anything that happened that you may not have expected but could embrace and now really like about it?
Zarrar Khan: We were shooting that ending sequence in Queen West, which is a very busy street in Toronto. It’s full of nightclubs, and it didn’t make it into the final cut, but when he’s running after her, as he was running, there was a group of drunk girls walking by, being like, “Make sure you get her, run after her.” And it really informed his performance and it was really fun. That’s what I love about shooting this film in Toronto – we shot it at Bang Fitness, this little gym that’s on this super-crowded Toronto street, and it felt we really were capturing these young people who are messy and their lives are messy, but they’re trying to figure it out while the real young people are also just off-camera.
And now it’s premiering right down the street. What’s it like to get to this point with the film and share it with both Toronto and international audiences?
Zarrar Khan: We really made this movie for Toronto audiences, so we’re so excited to be at TIFF. I feel like it follows in the legacy of famous Toronto rom-coms like “The F-Word” and “Double Happiness,” so we’re really, really excited to share it with Toronto audiences.
Mohammad Ali Hashmi: Honestly, it is such a blessing and for me it really is about rediscovering romcoms and the messiness of what it means to be young and in love. And I think there is something really special about a film that focuses on love but also looks at the some of the problems in it. I feel like I see myself in those moments where you’re growing up and you’re discovering what it means to be yourself and what your identity is and a lot of young men are discovering what it means to be a man and what direction do they want to take it in, so I hope this film can allow them to see a version of masculinity and manhood that doesn’t need to be so toxic and stuck in a very difficult place, but can be open and vulnerable and joyous.
“The Lion Does Not Concern Himself” will screen at the Toronto Film Festival as part of the Shorts Cut 2 Programme at the Scotiabank on September 11th at 9:20 pm and September 16th at 3:30 pm.