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Writer/director duo tap back into their 'Napolean Dynamite' roots with new film 'Gentlemen Broncos'
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Fox Searchlight Pictures
There’s nothing funnier to Jared and Jerusha Hess than their own lives.
The director/writer couple behind such hits as Napolean Dynamite and Nacho Libre is back with their newest film Gentlemen Broncos, which feels like a cousin to their breakout hit but totally in the vein of their Utah roots and apparently their own upbringing.
“There’s lots of directors from New York, lots of directors from LA that are representing those parts of the world and we’ve got a corner on Utah right now,” Jerusha Hess--who has written every project her husband Jared has directed--said in an interview earlier this month. “You know, this is our land, we’re representing it.”
That includes highlighting quirky characters and experiences they themselves encountered growing up in the inner-mountain culture, as they put it.
“I grew up in Idaho, and I think that the inner-mountain west culture influences a lot of what we do,” Jared said. “Initially, like with ‘Napolean,’ when people saw it for the first time, there were definitely groups of people who were like, ‘Gosh, they’re really condescending to these people,’ and then there were people in Idaho who saw it and were like ‘this is a documentary of our lives.’ There’s just different layers of understanding people have, depending on where they’re from.”
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Photo: Seth Smoot/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Like the protagonist in Napolean, Gentlemen Broncos centers around another loveable underdog, Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano), whose passion for writing science-fiction novels is turned upside down when his idol, the celebrated fantasy author Dr. Ronald Chevalier (a hilarious Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords fame), steals his story, “Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years” at a writers camp. If that’s not bad enough, Benjamin finds himself screwed by a couple of amateur filmmakers (Halley Feiffer and Nacho Libre’s Hector Jimenez) who buy his work and churn out a terrible movie version of it.
The film also co-stars Jennifer Coolidge as Benjamin’s mother and Mike White (Year of the Dog) as his eccentric “big brother” type. Sam Rockwell also shows up in “Yeast Lords” sequences that feel like a cross between a kid’s hand-drawn fever dream you might find mapped out in their Trapper Keeper and schlocky B sci-fi movies of the 1970s.
And that’s exactly what the Hesses were going for.
“I was a budding writer (as a kid),” Jerusha said. “I was writing the romances, that was what I was interested in. I grew up with seven brothers, so I needed something a little for me.”
One of Jerusha’s stories she wrote as a 10-year-old is actually read in the new movie.
“When Ronald Chevalier is in his hotel room, ‘Let me read you something I’m reading now, ‘Pierre used to be a jockey in college, he loves rice pudding with his tea, he loves solving animal matters,’ that’s all her story,” Jared said. “He’s literally holding the book and just reading it straight out of her book verbatim. It’s hilarious.”
Photo: Seth Smoot/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Jared brought his childhood love of sci-fi to the project.
“I spent a lot of time drawing creatures and fighter jets and whatever came to mind,” the 30-year-old said. “As a kid, my goal was that I wanted to work for like Industrial Light and Magic. That was like my fantasy, so I was always getting the special effects books and stuff like that. So a lot of my early film experiments were like really lame, large salt shakers that I spray-painted to look like futuristic cityscapes, and mat paintings and stuff like that.”
So it’s no surprise that Gentlemen Broncos plays out like the couple’s childhood fantasies come true, complete with flying mechanical deer that shoot lasers and plenty of crude vomit and poop jokes. Whether that translates to entertainment for the masses is a tough call (critics don’t think so, and I found it borderline funny at times), but it’s clear the Hesses put a lot of themselves into the project, which in itself is kind of hilarious.
“A lot of it is very autobiographical,” Jared said. “The characters in our films we feel are like a part of us in some way, and a lot of the more stranger aspects of the characters we draw from immediate family.”
“I think also we love having the underdog that makes it, and that’s definitely a theme in all of our movies,” Jerusha said. “And these kids are all underdogs.”
Gentlemen Broncos is out today in select Bay Area theaters.
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