Ben Jacobson Learns What It Means to Make Movies with Your Friends

By: Ellie Powers

Ben Jacobson has always been obsessed with movies. This year, he finally made his own.

Here’s the severity of his addiction, in his own words: “I'll go to a movie and then I'll come home and put on another movie. And then when that movie's over, I'll try to squeeze in another one.”

We meet at Harbor’s New York studio in SoHo on a cold February afternoon. Ben carries himself with a mix of humility and evidence-based assuredness, at least when it comes to discussing film. He’s an expert in cinematic history but not a scholar. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the medium with no interest in theory or over-analyzing metaphor. He’s preoccupied with story.

Story is central to how he approached Bunny, his directorial debut which premiered at SXSW this March. He describes the film as, “a day in the life story, not a kingpin comedy,” adding, “there are gentle laughs, and that's more of what I'm interested in. It’s about friendship.” This particular “day in the life” story follows a husband and wife, their Airbnb guest, their neighbors, and an estranged father who must all deal with a dead guy (or two). Bunny takes place in a pre-war tenement building in the East Village and on the sidewalk just outside.

Much of the cast and the location are intimately familiar to Ben. He tapped his friends to act in the film, including Mo Stark, co-writer, who play Bunny, Mo’s wife, Liza Colby who plays Bobbie, and co-writer Stefan Marolachakis’ wife, Genevieve Hudson-Price, who plays Happy Chana. Many of the tenants, including the landlord, Linda, played by Linda Rong Mei Chen, are real residents of the building. In fact, Bunny and Bobbie’s apartment is Mo and Liza’s in real life.

Two months before principal shooting began on Bunny, Ben was still bartending in that neighborhood, where he had worked for fifteen years. His love of New York, his extensive film knowledge, and the idiosyncrasies of his friends all found their way into Bunny.

When he described his process, I imagined ghosts of directors past and present guiding him while film references flashed in his mind. That might sound pretentious, but Ben is the opposite. I like to think of it as the subconscious manifestation of cramming thousands of films into his head over the years until they coalesce onto the screen.

Ben describes directing Linda, the landlord, using a technique he learned from Sean Baker on Red Rocket via actor Simon Rex. Ben recalls that “the woman who played his mother-in-law [in Red Rocket] was not an actor, so Sean Baker's wife [producer Samantha Quan] would poke her under the table to cue her to say her line.” Ben adapted that directorial note for working with non-professional actors in Bunny.

Speaking of Sean Baker, Ben’s cinematic origin story would not be complete without mentioning the premiere of Tangerine at Sundance in 2015. Thanks to his “homie from 1st Street,” actor James Ransone, he attended the screening where he was introduced to the cast, Sean, and the producers. Years later, he gained firsthand filmmaking experience while working as Zoë Kravitz’s assistant on the set of Blink Twice. Ben recalls being blown away by her directorial decision-making and how she infused meaning into every frame.

Bunny started as a story about a father reconnecting with his daughter after a cancer diagnosis. Ben felt that concept was “a little hokey.” Co-writer Mo Stark then suggested shifting the story to a day in the life of a male hustler. That led Ben, Mo, and co-writer Stefan Marolachakis to wonder, “What happens if he had to deal with a dead body? Why is there a dead body? What if there were more than one dead body?”

The look of Bunny draws inspiration from two films in particular: Nick Gomez’s Laws of Gravity and Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives. From Laws of Gravity, which Ben describes as “a real running gun day in the life of hood white dudes from Williamsburg in 1992,” he wanted to emulate the camera placement and movement. He told his Director of Photography, Jackson Hunt, that he didn’t want the film to feel like a documentary but wanted a similarly raw aesthetic.

From Husbands and Wives, he was influenced by the way the camera pans to capture reactions mid-conversation. “That’s kind of the feeling of the whole movie,” he says. While both films are more serious than Bunny, Ben acknowledges they both find a way to infuse humor. “Sometimes, we have to laugh at our situation,” he says.

Bringing Bunny to life also meant enlisting the help of Harbor Senior Colorist Roman Hankewycz and Co-Supervising Sound Editor and Re-Recording Mixers Kevin Peters and Lucas Feuser. When asked about the mix and grade, Ben put it simply: “They are experts. So, if you say, ‘I want this.” There are twenty different versions of exactly that which was fascinating.” Ben felt similarly about working with his editor, James LeSage. “I would not be anywhere without him. I'd be floundering. In a pool of my own vomit.”

Kevin Peters explained the challenge of balancing the film’s comedic dialogue with its bustling NYC setting: “The challenge of this film was to make every single hilarious line of dialog heard, whether it’s two people speaking or six people all shouting at once, all the while keeping the hustle and bustle of the Lower East Side authentically present. Ben gave us free rein to experiment and explore where we wanted to while also keeping us tuned into the various subtleties of each scene.”

Roman Hankewycz immediately had a vision for the film’s look. “The movie is raw and real but also very lighthearted. I got a strong 90s vibe from it despite it being contemporary. I played with the idea of deconstructing the image into separate color channels and adding different levels of funk to them, then ‘fixing’ the reconstructed image. This approach created a feeling of imperfection, something a little handmade, authentic.” He recalls working with Jackson and Ben as “riddled with laughter and movie quotes, like three friends making a movie together.”

Editor James LeSage remarks that he approached the edit “like a record producer recording their album. I wanted it to be uniquely them and capture ‘their sound.’ It helped that I lived in that same Manhattan neighborhood for years and in buildings like the one in the film. "Ben and Mo aimed to affectionately capture a New York City block, their extended New York family, and their world as a single story within a city of millions. They wanted the characters to reflect reality, and the comedy arises from the authentic way they think and speak when confronted with this unusual scenario."

Through the process, James notes, they really became like a band: “Ideas would move around the room, and we weren't finished until we all agreed. Ben was the tie breaker, but he gives so much creative power to everyone he’s working with. We did a lot of splicing scenes into smaller parts and intercutting between the floors of the building much more than what was in the script. We did some wild things with music cutting between score and diegetic songs in some of the apartments and back and forth multiple times in a single sequence.”

When it comes to discussing filmmaking, there are two types of name drops: those meant to flex and those meant to give due credit. Ben dropped a lot of names in our nearly two-hour conversation, but only in the latter sense. He’s in his “pinch me” moment, grateful for the collaborators who helped bring Bunny to life. “Never in my life have I gone to work and done something like this. I think Soderbergh said that the worst thing about making movies is not making a movie. And I couldn't agree more.”

From bartending and obsessive movie consumption to directing a SXSW official selection, Ben Jacobson is just getting started. His parting words from our interview? “Man, I love movies.”