There’s only so much directing you can do when you send your lead actor, who is holding several bags of goldfish, in water, on a roller coaster with a 35 mm camera strapped to the front. You just have to trust.
“Splitsville” director and actor Michael Angelo Covino knew he could count on his friend and cowriter Kyle Marvin to deliver on the performance side for their slapstick comedy about messy relationships and messy people that opens in theaters Friday. The two also made the wildly funny friendship movie “The Climb,” which they cowrote and co-starred in with Covino directing.
“He’s like a modern-day Charlie Chaplin,” Covino said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “It’s just all intuitive slapstick. He has it in his bones.”
But there were a lot of other variables at play: Would they run out of light? Would it be as funny in execution as it was in theory? Would they regret fighting for the 35 mm camera? A lot was riding on the scene and reshoots were not in the cards. Independent films can’t just go around shutting down amusement parks and mounting expensive film cameras on roller coasters whenever they want.
“It was sort of a powder keg moment on set,” Marvin said.
The most stressful thing, however, was they wouldn’t even know for sure that they got the shot for a few days. Something had malfunctioned with the camera, and they didn’t have a digital recording. It was also the weekend, so they had to wait for the lab to process the film and send it back to them.
“I called the lab and I was like, ‘Please, please don’t (expletive) this up,” Covino said.
How and why this brilliant, absurd sequence fits into their film, a comedy about open relationships, divorce and human mistakes, in which they star opposite Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona, is probably better left for audiences to discover themselves. But it’s the kind of comedy that Covino and Marvin specialize in.
Leaning into unlikable characters
The premise for “Splitsville” arose from conversations with friends who just seemed a little too confident in their worldviews.
“Nothing is funnier than someone with a lot of confidence, because they’re generally wrong in some way, shape or form,” Marvin said. “One thing that we love is to put a character’s feet on an inevitable journey and then just make it harder and harder for them.”
“Splitsville” starts with a big moment and continues escalating from there. The film begins with Arjona’s character Ashley telling her husband Carey (Marvin) that she’s unfaithful and wants a divorce. Distraught, he continues on to his married friends’ house where he finds that Paul (Covino) and Julie (Johnson) are happily non monogamous — that is until Carey and Julie hook up.
They had noticed in French and Italian films from the 70s, from the likes of Claude Sautet and Lina Wertmüller, the characters just state “the thing,” like “I’m in love with your fiance,” right out of the gates.
“There’s a efficiency of story and character. It charges the film,” Covino said. “We just gravitate toward movies where things happen and characters do crazy things.”
This meant, in part, not being too worried about their characters being “likable” or sending them on redemptive arcs that we might expect in a more mainstream romantic comedy. They’re not out to punish the cheater. Nor are they out to make a hero out of the one who didn’t.
“There’s things not to like about all of them in some ways,” Covino said. “But that’s, to me, what makes them human. People do bad things, but if we can understand why there’s something more there. There’s humor to mine.”
Adding the movie star element
Unlike “The Climb” which featured actors who weren’t exactly household names, “Splitsville” has recognizable stars in Johnson and Arjona. In the film, there are more than a few jokes made about the “beauty gap” between the characters. They heard the same off camera too.
“There were a lot of notes about, ‘How are we gonna get people to buy that these two guys are with these two women?'” Covino said with a laugh. “We were like, ‘Hey guys, we’re right here. We are the guys.'”
They consider themselves “extremely lucky” that Johnson and Arjona wanted to make “Splitsville.” Not only did they bring the characters to life in ways that they couldn’t have imagined on the page, but their star quality adds something intangible as well.
“They hold the screen,” Covino said. “Dakota can just sit there and when you fix the camera on her face, it’s mesmerizing. When she’s on screen, it takes a lot of the pressure off of the story and all the other things because she’s so captivating. I think there’s something really beautiful about that especially given what this story is trying to do with these two idiot guys who are orbiting around these women.”
Not being afraid of dumb jokes
Covino and Marvin didn’t set out to tackle issues of relationships and marriage. If conversations emerge after the fact, that’s gravy, but ultimately they have one goal: Make an entertaining film.
Often times, that means not shying away from the dumb jokes. Their films are cinematic and they know all the auteurs to reference, but they’re also silly and slapstick. They draw as much from Blake Edwards, Elaine May and Mike Nichols as they do from “Dumb and Dumber” and “Me, Myself & Irene.” In other words, they’re making comedies for everyone, not just cinephiles.
Occasionally they doubt themselves and worry that something is just too dumb to print. But then they remember the bit with the dog’s name in “The Jerk,” a movie they find both cinematic and one of the dumbest movies ever.
“It’s a dumb joke, but there’s brilliance in it,” Covino said. “Independent film is so in flux. The more entertaining we can make these films, the like better chance all of this has.”
So, when your story gives your character bags of goldfish, sometimes you just have to put him on a roller coaster.
