When Kill The Baby got a staff pick, a young producer reached out to us and asked for a meeting. We got together and he asked us if we had any features we wanted to make. We told him we'd think about it. We went to a nearby Chinese restaurant and discussed possibilities. Ultimately, we landed on adapting our Channel 101 pilot "On The Rocks" into a feature. We had the actors in place, it’d be easy and cheap enough to produce, and it was the most fertile ground for a feature.

We went back and told him, and he told us to write it and he'd see if he can help find us some financing for it. So we spent about a month writing it. No script, just a treatment of all the story beats with key lines of dialogue. I remember the night we decided on the ending, and I knew we had a movie there.

Basically it's about a guy who loses his father and he’s just trying to get along in life but he's endlessly bombarded by the nightmare that is everyone surrounding him until it breaks him.

The initial idea was an exercise to see how stressful we could make each scene, how many elements we could stack on top of each other, how much tension we could build-- basically a feature length anxiety attack, but all within a relatively mundane and grounded world. Pretty much how life feels to me. 

(Whenever I pitch it to people, I usually say it's amped up mumblecore. Like mumblecore, but really fast and stressful to watch. The truth is, I’m not super familiar with the mumblecore movement. I mean I very deeply wanted to make a Cassavetes movie, but I think we were more influenced by like Punch Drunk Love and David O. Russell movies.)

From there, it was figuring out how to sustain that tone for a whole movie, and adding some dimensionality to the characters.

Ultimately, it's a pretty personal film, I see a lot of elements of our lives at the time in there. Alcoholism and addiction had a significant role in the story, so I was drawing from my parents’ relationship as much as some of our own relationships.

Anyway, we finished the treatment and went back and he said, “great I'll put you in touch with a guy who has a little bit of money.”

We had that meeting and it was decided we'd need to start shooting in two weeks. 

From that point until the end of editing was the most intense period of my life. The first day of shooting I thought I was having a heart attack.

The night we finally finished the edit, I collapsed from a severe anxiety attack and I lost control of my body. I thought I was having a stroke. Turns out maybe I wasn’t ready yet for the toll that this movie would take on me.

I think the movie itself turned out pretty well all things considered. At least for a movie made by a couple of dumb 25 year olds with no money behind it. I'm shocked that it isn't embarrassing to be honest. I’m proud of every sequence in it, every scene has something I love about it. We screened the movie for a week at The Music Hall, and it was a real crowd pleaser each night.

Chase is fantastic in it and carries the movie. The ensemble is filled with a bunch of talented buddies we had met over the years. There's like 30 actors in this and they all have their moments. Each one of them brought something to their performances that makes me smile. 

Ultimately, what I feel we had going for us more than anything else was the chemistry. We just had a lot of great chemistry all around, between us as filmmakers, between the cast and crew. It was a real handmade product of love made by people who all loved & trusted each other very much at that time.