Interview (Part 1): Rob Meyer and Luke Matheny
When I saw the trailer for the movie A Birder’s Guide to Everything, I immediately sought out its filmmakers: Writer-director Rob Meyer and writer Luke Matheny. It’s a wonderful story starring some terrific young talent as well as Oscar winning actor Sir Ben Kingsley. The movie comes out in theaters and on VOD this Friday, March 21.
In Part 1, Rob and Luke talk about their background and the origination of the movie A Birder’s Guide to Everything:
Scott: Luke, let’s start with you. Growing up, were you a movie fan?
Luke Matheny: I was always a big movie fan. I really liked classic Hollywood movies. I watched AMC back when it actually stood for “American Movie Classics” and that’s exactly what they showed. I really loved all those Golden Age films — comedies, film noir, musicals, and stuff like that, and I really watched a lot of them. I’d also ride my bike across town to the video store to rent old movies. But it wasn’t until I went to grad school at NYU that I overlapped with that world at all, really.
Rob Meyer: He can also name the Oscar winner for Best Picture of any year since the beginning of the Oscars.
Luke: That’s true.
Scott: Wow, so you’re a real fan. Rob, meanwhile you’re from Newton, Massachusetts. Is that right?
Rob: Yup.
Scott: I read when you were younger, you were interested in movies, but more into wildlife filmmaking?
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely into wildlife, and I loved watching “National Geographic.” That was probably my first aspiration — to be a wildlife filmmaker or maybe an animal behaviorist. I just love nature. I was very into aquarium fish. I was a member of the Boston Aquarium Society. So I’ve always been into all things natural world. I didn’t have a film background at all growing up. I guess my film background was my dad’s Hi8 movie camera that I would borrow and make silly films with my friends in our basements.
Scott: Where did you end up going to college?
Rob: I went to Yale undergrad, and then I went to NYU for film school, which is where I met Luke.
Scott: And Luke, you went to Northwestern for undergrad?
Luke: Yeah, as a journalism major.
Scott: Didn’t both of you spend several years between college doing other things before you ended up going to NYU?
Luke: Yeah, both of us. I was sort of an undistinguished journalist for a couple of years in Chicago at different trade magazines, mainly as a copy editor and an editorial assistant.
Rob: I went back to Boston after college and worked for my local PBS affiliate. It was WGBH, which happens to also to be the biggest content provider for PBS. I worked at NOVA, the science documentary series, first as a production assistant and then as an associate producer. I was sort of actually following my childhood dream of making travel, nature, and wildlife documentaries.
Scott: Then NYU where you met each other.
Rob: I was a couple of years ahead of Luke. He made a wonderful short film called Earano as his second-year film, and my thesis film was Aquarium, which was the original inspiration for A Birder’s Guide to Everything. Those two films played together at NYU’s big festival, the First Run Film Festival, and they were both nominated for awards, so NYU flew us out to L.A. to screen at the Directors Guild, and that’s when we met.
Both films sort of had a similar big-hearted, sweet, funny tone, and so I think we both gravitated towards each other as potential collaborators. We were probably in the minority of people at NYU who wanted to make movies in the “heartfelt comedy” school of filmmaking, rather than more serious, intense films.
Scott: Luke, God of Love, was that a project that started at NYU or was that later?
Luke: Earano, the film that Rob’s talking about, was my second-year film. God of Love was my thesis film, so that came next. I actually did God of Love after we wrote A Birder’s Guide.
Scott: God of Love has an interesting jazz vibe. Are you a big jazz fan?
Luke: Yeah, I’m a very big jazz fan. Actually, I have a jazz piano lesson today at 1 pm.
Scott: Let’s talk about the film Aquarium. If it was the inspiration for A Birder’s Guide to Everything, what was the inspiration for Aquarium?
Rob: That was based on me and my friends in middle school and high school who were huge aquarium-fish enthusiasts. We would attend these meetings at the Boston Aquarium Society, and I think the atmosphere, the characters that I met there, and these people who are passionate about something that is just misunderstood just stuck with me as a good context for a film.
The part about the kid drowning his dog — not to spoil the beginning on that — that was entirely fictional. I like to point out that. That wasn’t based on my childhood, but it was certainly a way for me to bring in the theme of coping with loss and being an adolescent and facing death for the first time, and these existential motives that I think will probably always have a role in the films that I make.
So it was a combination of a young teen angst movie about death, and a quirky comedy about aquarium fish. It was clearly the foundation of Birder’s, and what I wanted to achieve with Luke on that script.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKR_qI_Gdro
Scott: A Birder’s Guide to Everything is a wonderful movie. To me, it hearkens back to those strong, character-driven, coming-of-age films like Stand by Me, Lucas, and Searching for Bobby Fischer,” which also starred Ben Kingsley who has a key role in Birder’s. Here’s a plot summary of your movie: “After spotting what he thinks is an extinct duck, high school sophomore and bird enthusiast David Portnoy persuades his two dorky friends and the “new girl” at school to join in a quest to locate the mysterious bird.”
Excellent cast. David is Kodi Smit-Mcphee of Let Me In and ParaNorman, and Katie Change, who is in Bling Ring, is Ellen. Then Sir Ben Kingsley, who plays Konrad, has been in everything from Gandhi to Schindler’s List to Iron Man 3. I also noticed that Peter was played by Michael Chen. He was in Children of Invention, the Tze Chun movie.
Luke: That’s right.
Scott: So Aquarium involves fish and sea life, whereas Birder’s is about birding. How did that change happen… from fish to birds?
Luke: Well, in the process of going from a short to a feature, you need to open up the world a little bit, and you could see how maybe the world of aquarium fish could be a little claustrophobic.
Rob had this idea about a quest for an extinct duck, loosely based on the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker, which had happened a couple of years earlier. We thought that was a great way to marry a fun “road-trip duck quest” plot with the great characters that he had laid out in his short, Aquarium.
Tomorrow in Part 2, Rob and Luke discuss some of the key creative choices they made for the movie A Birder’s Guide to Everything, which opens on March 21.
Here is the trailer for Luke’s movie God of Love:
Here is video of Luke accepting the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film:
Rob is repped by WME and Apostle Management.
Luke is repped by Paradigm.
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