Owen Kline on Funny Pages

During his brief career as a child actor, Owen Kline delivered one of modern cinema's great opening lines. It was in 2006's The Squid and the Whale, where Kline played Frank, a sensitive 12-year-old with self-pleasuring issues. “It’s Mom and me versus you and Dad,” Frank says to his older brother, Walt (played by Jesse Eisenberg). Frank is referring to the tennis match they’re about to play, but he’s also foreshadowing the dynamic of Noah Baumbach’s caustic drama in which an acrimonious divorce splits a family in two.

Kline seems to have borrowed from Baumbach’s playbook for his debut feature Funny Pages. The very first line is “always subvert expectations”, and that’s exactly what this young filmmaker does in this scuzzy black comedy celebrating the world of underground comics.

It was on the set of The Squid and the Whale that Kline realised he’d prefer to be behind the camera than in front of it. He was no stranger to movie sets growing up, given his parents are Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline. "My mom retired from acting to raise us, but my dad would still go and do movies, and those seem so gigantic that they just felt like they were made by giant machines.”

Baumbach's film felt different. “That was this small personal movie shot in Park Slope on 16mm. Jesse and I were helping pick out the pins that would go on our characters’ backpacks. It just felt like we were doing something very specific and personal, and that's when movies started to really make sense to me. I knew, at some point, the ultimate dream was to make a film independently, and use that as an excuse to do something different.”

He’s certainly made something different with Funny Pages. At first glance, this story of Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), a rebellious 17-year-old from middle-class suburbia who wants to defy his uptight parents by bypassing college for a life as a struggling comic book artist, looks to be straight out of indie coming-of-age film 101. Funny Pages is a much spikier proposition, however.

There’s nothing romantic about Robert’s journey of artistic discovery. When Robert moves out of home, for example, he doesn’t rent a suspiciously cheap New York loft with glamorous roommates. His digs instead are a sweaty basement with two middle-aged creeps with an appreciation of pornographic comics. And when he meets a possible mentor, a former colourist for a legendary imprint, his reluctance to train the lad is not because he’s some JD Salinger-like recluse; rather he’s a deeply disturbed man with anger issues and an unjustified vendetta against his local chemist.

“When I wrote this movie, I wasn't thinking in the terms of it being a coming-of-age movie,” Kline says. “I suppose I was just trying to do something absurdist.” This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has sought out Kline’s funky short films, like Fowl Play, about three small-time crooks trying to find a chicken to cockfight, or Jazzy for Joe, in which chat show legend Joe Franklin discovers a baby abandoned on his doorstep. “I guess those were all odd movies, but I like to make films about maverick New Yorkers, stories about the odd characters that I meet.”

While Kline was in his senior year of high school, a teacher pointed out that something was missing from these gonzo shorts. “He asked, ‘Where are you in all this?’” Kline instantly recognised that his teacher was onto something. “I realised that by putting a subject in among all these misfit characters who was impressionable, and was like a weird little sponge, if you put someone like that in a scenario with all these people, it would give it an interesting cultural clash. And with [Funny Pages], I was just trying to hit those rocks together.”

If Kline sees himself as Robert, it's quite an admission, as it’s not a flattering portrait. The boy is talented, for sure, but he’s also selfish and petty and a bit of a snob. “Well, I did want to be a cartoonist as a kid,” Kline confesses. “And, you know, I thrashed a little bit at 15 and 16. I threatened my parents that I wouldn’t graduate high school. I blame hormones for those shitty two years. But I never did drugs or anything – I was just a weird kid, interested in the stuff I was interested in.”

It was around this time that Kline found some older weird kids to pal around with. When he was 15, Kline invited Josh Safdie, one half of the Safdie Brothers (Good Time, Uncut Gems), out for coffee and ended up joining their crew. “I was running around with them in New York and, you know, getting in trouble for shooting in places we weren't supposed to shoot. I acted in a short for them too, called John’s Gone, which was pretty run-and-gun as well." When we ask what Kline learned from the Safdies, he doesn't miss a beat. "I learned from them that you don't have to ask permission, and that’s the only reason this movie exists.”

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Funny Pages is released 16 Sep by Curzon