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Interview: Patton Oswalt on I Love My Dad and Cinema As Memory

Patton Oswalt discusses his working relationship with Rachel Dratch, the timeless quality of movies, and more.

Patton Oswalt on I Love My Dad and Cinema As Memory
Photo: Magnolia Pictures

It’s chaos. Be kind.” Whatever else Patton Oswalt accomplishes, it’s likely those are the words—his late wife Michelle McNamara’s healing mantra, as revealed to audiences in his 2017 comedy special Annihilation—that he’ll be most remembered for. Sifting through the wreckage of personal tragedy is hard enough, let alone in the context of comedy intended for mass consumption, but following McNamara’s death in April 2016, the actor, comedian, father, and devoted cinephile rose to the occasion (both on stage and off) and set an example that’s acted as a lighthouse in a hurricane for others.

In I Love My Dad, Oswalt lends his talents to the on-screen realization of the lived experience of writer-director-actor James Morosini, who was catfished by his own father (played in the film by Oswalt) in a desperate ploy for emotional connection that suggests Mrs. Doubtfire in freefall. Winner of the top feature prize at this year’s SXSW, Morosini’s sophomore feature shows a steady hand for navigating dire straits and pain, wringing comedic awkwardness from the material that would make Larry David proud but never disregarding the substantial and long-term effects it had on himself and others within the vicinity of his father’s toxicity.

Oswalt’s mix of dogged likability and pointed self-laceration finds the humanity in the unspeakable actions of his character, yielding another performance that points to Roger Ebert’s observation that he’s a “very particular actor, who is indispensable in the right role.” Ebert, in fact, was an integral part of my interview with Oswalt last week prior to the theatrical release of I Love My Dad. Other topics of conversation included Oswalt’s working relationship with Rachel Dratch, the timeless quality of movies, and more.

Your movie gets to the heart of how these things both hinder and help with our relationships, and it was very clearly a deeply personal movie for James Morosini.

Yeah, I mean, it happened to him for God’s sake. He’s trying to, I guess, self-care through cinema, which I absolutely believe in.

A lot of us do that, and your book about that, Silver Screen Field, was rather life-affirming. I actually work as a 35mm projectionist now.

At what theater?

The Mahoning Drive-In.

Wow.

I thought you’d like to see this: I found a 35mm trailer for Down Periscope.

Oh, wow. That’s awesome!

With your many stories in Silver Screen Fiend, I think you would agree that movies often have a serendipitous timing in our lives…

Yeah.

This was what really jumped out at me about I Love My Dad. My best friend was just in the hospital because she was told by her mother to kill herself.

Good God!

I took her to the emergency room after she was so deeply triggered, because she didn’t feel safe being alone, so those opening scenes were quite the mirror to my life in the last few weeks. The relationship between your character and James’s character isn’t dissimilar in its toxicity, and I’m really glad I got to see the film when I did.

Wow, thank you. I’m glad you saw it.

What interested you in I Love My Dad?

A lot of the movies that I choose to be in, I do so because I’m such a film buff, and I wanna see how filmmakers are gonna pull them off, and this especially is one of those scripts where I just thought, “How are they going to do this? This is either going to work amazingly, or it’ll be a fiasco, there’ll be no in between.” Rolling those kind of dice to me is so energizing and exciting. I guess people on the outside would look at it as a risky project. I didn’t think it was risky at all. I thought it was so fun and I was so excited to get to do it.

You tend to put yourself out there in these projects that, from a very practical or conservative standpoint, might seem risky. Case in point, a lot of people thought Pixar was being foolish putting a rat as the lead of a movie.

Yeah, that’s true. But that’s also Brad Bird. Brad Bird is always worth the risk.

I agree. I’m still mad that I didn’t get to see The Iron Giant in theaters because it came and went so quickly. Where I grew up, we didn’t have the accessibility, like in Sterling, Virginia, I imagine.

Same thing, no accessibility!

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Thankfully you had those motivating forces, Roger Ebert being one of the people I think you described as a guiding light.

Oh, man. He was so helpful in teaching you how to watch a movie—that sometimes after you watch a movie, you won’t remember the whole thing, but there are certain moments that will stay with you forever, that will take on a meaning bigger than the movie itself. I remember how in his review of Bonnie and Clyde he was just literally picking moments out of his memory, and you almost felt like, “I know what it was like to be Roger Ebert watching this movie,” where he wasn’t even listing the plot, he was like “the shadow of the clouds in the fields, C.W. Moss parallel parking the car during the robbery, the woman running with the frying pan.” Films are images, they don’t necessarily need to tell an overall story in your memory, they need to tell a story in the time, but a lot of times you’ll just remember the images.

I think that gets to what I was impressed with about your new film, especially in those sequences where they literalize the digital interaction between the different characters, or what your son’s character imagines is happening, and how that’s not just what we experience in the literal sense, but how it affects us in the emotional sense.

Well, it definitely shows how we imprint our emotions and needs on social interactions, especially online ones. There’s a direct line between the way that Claudia [Sulewski], who’s so brilliant…she’s not playing Chuck talking to his son, but what Franklin hopes she’s saying to him, and that’s not that far away from that very devastating final moment in The Conversation when Gene Hackman realizes, “I put the wrong inflection on what these two people were saying to each other because of what happened in my past. I thought I was listening to two people who were worried about being murdered, but I was actually listening to two people planning a murder, and I didn’t realize that because of my own personal problems.”

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Well said. I’m sad I didn’t see The Conversation until the last few years, and that’s thanks to an acquaintance of yours, Walter Chaw.

Yes! Oh, I love Walter. God, The Conversation is such an amazing movie, it just gets better and better, and it’s so weird how it predicts the world we’re going to end up living in.

It does.

Alan Gorowitz says, “There’s not a moment between two people I cannot record.” In a way, he’s playing a protean version of the internet, of the surveillance state, but at the time he’s just a cheap huckster, but then that becomes our governing body. It’s amazing.

All these classics have this timeless quality, and that really was driven home to me in the last few years because, just staying inside so much during lockdown, watching the same movies over and over, I found a lot of comfort in things like The Thing and Night of the Living Dead, which are all about guarding yourself and infection. Even the new Invisible Man, the Leigh Whannell film, was very instructive.

Yes! Did you watch a little low budget film called Coherence?

I haven’t.

Go watch Coherence. I’ve seen it three times now. It was made for I think $50 grand over five days, and it absolutely is what we went through during the shutdown.

I will. Let’s talk about your movie.

Oh dude, I’m sorry. We started yakking about movies, like the nerds we are!

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How was working with Rachel Dratch? I’m always happy to see her.

Rachel is this legendary sketch and improv performer. You don’t understand how amazing she’s always been. If you put in her any role, she’s gonna absolutely crush it. She played my girlfriend on King of Queens, so we’ve had a lot of experience together. What’s so great is, she finds the awkwardness in her character being absolutely sincere, and my character being so full of shit and so false, and that’s what I’m butting up against, and she knew instinctively to give me that to play against, and it just makes the scene go through to roof.

I think the strength of your performance, and in a lot of your performances, is that I think you have a talent for being comfortable playing uncomfortable.

Yeah, because that to me has been my favorite moments in movies. All my favorite character actors, especially from the ’70s, Warren Oates was a master, even when he was a lead in the movie, he would allow scenes where other people would get the better of him, and that’s something that a lot of actors don’t like to play. You like to play like you’re the smartest one, and he had no problem being completely at sea and not up to the task, which to me connects me so much harder with him because it feels so human.

Now I’m thinking of Warren Beatty, especially toward the end of McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

Oh! That scene when Warren Beatty confronts Hugh Millais, the big bounty hunter, and the guy just mops the floor with him, he’s just toying with him. He’s like, “I’m going to kill you, but I don’t even need to bother to do it now, you’re such a nothing to me.” Oh, that scene is so excruciating. Warren Beatty has never gotten enough credit for allowing that, because he’s so ridiculously good-looking, but he’s like, “If I play the guy who’s on top of everything, everyone’s just gonna hate me, so it’s better if I just play, like he’s always in over his head. Parallax View, McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Do you think you’d still like to direct?

Oh, absolutely. I directed my new Netflix special, which is coming out in September, and hopefully I get to direct more stuff soon.

I hope so. It might just be the use of Eugène Lourié’s The Colossus of New York on your book cover, your work on Mystery Science Theater, but I would love to see you do something in the vein of your imagined Space Jockey movie.

Ohhh. Apparently, somebody found that script. I’m amazed. Maybe I should go find it, read it, and shoot it. I just love that the search for it came down to when they interviewed Phil Tucker for the Golden Turkey Awards about Robot Monster and his quote was, “If you think Robot Monster is a bad movie, wait till you see Space Jockey,” like he was bragging, “I know you think that I’ve made one of the worst movies ever made, you have no idea what’s out there.”

I hope that we get to see it.

Thanks, man. I loved this conversation. Seriously, thank you.

Rob Humanick

Rob Humanick is the projection manager at the Mahoning Drive-In Theater in Lehighton, Pennsylvania.

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