Brandon Daley is a Chicago-based filmmaker who, after building an impressive catalog of under-the-radar sketches and shorts for the better part of twenty years, has now made his feature directorial debut with $Positions.
$Positions belongs to an exclusive class of films. I’m struggling to think of another movie that contains piss-drinking that has also moved me to tears. Of course, the juxtaposition is no mistake. Chief among Daley’s influences are what he’s called the “dumb guy and girl comedies” of the 90s and 2000s. One of his goals in making the film was to take that absurd DNA and create something even more dramatically grounded, so that you’re still invested in the story by the time the third act rolls around.
At its best, $Positions approaches great American novel territory. Among the laughs (and they are consistent throughout, I’d place it among the funniest films of the decade so far), Daley carefully observes a number of topics, including the broken healthcare system, various forms of addiction, 21st-century escapism, and Midwest despair.
$Positions is currently available for rent and purchase on all major digital platforms, as well as on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome. I met up with Brandon over Zoom to discuss $Positions, his upcoming appearance in Joe Swanberg’s The Sun Never Sets, his time at Northwestern University, and a lot more.
junkiesRpeople: If you were going to cast a rapper in one of your films, who would it be?
Brandon Daley: I tried to reach out to Paul Wall and a handful of people to play the Travis character, and I couldn't get ahold of him. I thought it'd be cool to get a white rapper who's aged a little bit, who was maybe cool 10 or 20 years ago, to play the cousin character.
I love Trevor [Dawkins] to death. It's hard to imagine anyone else playing Travis, because that roll requires real dramatic chops. I don't think you could just drop a non-actor into it.
I love working with non-actors though. I also tried to hit up, oh God, what's his name? He paints, and he's real tall. I think he's from Michigan. Zelooperz! I thought he would be cool as a potential Lorenzo casting, so I was trying to hit him up to see if he would come out to do it, but I couldn't get ahold of him either. You say you're making a movie and you've never made one before, people don't really pay much attention to you… I think now I would have more luck getting connected to people.
JRP: Sean Baker did an interview around the time Red Rocket came out where he spoke about his process of casting non-actors. He told a story about spotting a woman [Brittney Rodriguez] walking her dog one night and having to creepily approach her and pitch the movie. I know you’ve spoken about Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank as an influence and [lead actress] Katie Jarvis was discovered in a similar way. What was your process like for finding the non-actors in your film?
BD: I was very similar where, especially in the months leading up to production, I was just going up to people on the street and just being like, “Yo, I like your look. Do you want to be in a movie?” And, I mean, I still do that. I saw this kid at this bar the other day, I really liked his look. He was like 12 years old, and he had a mohawk mullet, and his mom was there, so I said, “Dude, I’m not trying to be creepy, but would your kid want to act in movies or anything?” I try to just do it as I see people now, so I can kind of collect a Rolodex as I’m writing and as I’m doing stuff, so you’re not trying to shoehorn it in the last month leading up to production.
A lot of our non-actors were people that I met on location scouts. The Aunt Barb character and the dad character, both of those are just people whose houses we location scouted, and I liked their vibes. I asked, “Would you want to come be yourself in this movie, and say these lines, and just embody who you are as a person? You don’t have to be a character, we’re just gonna film you.” It’s crazy how good Guido [Z Cameli], the dad character, turned out to be… He actually has acting chops.
JRP: His performance was moving.
BD: I just try to keep my eyes open, and I think as I get closer to production, I get really out there with going up to people and talking to strangers and giving them my number, my Instagram, and seeing if they're interested.
JRP: When you're writing characters based on people from your real life, do you ever find yourself having to hold back to protect feelings? I would imagine it's difficult to toe the line between an authentic portrayal and Caveh Zahedi-type honesty.
BD: For sure. I think you can hide behind the fact that it's ultimately fiction. There are so many stories borrowed from real life, but there's also so much off-the-wall shit that it's really hard for an audience to actually determine if this is based on my actual cousin, or aunt, or dad, or whatever.
It is something that weighs heavily on me, because I think as a writer of anything, you need to be really vulnerable and honest, whether it's a rap mixtape or a movie. At the same time, you're volunteering your own life, and other people are involved in that, and they don't necessarily want their shit blown up. So it's always on my mind, but I talked to my family that the movie was about. Originally, I wanted to cast my actual family, before I was able to raise money for the film. I wanted my family to play themselves, and I'd play the lead, and we'd make this for no money. That started the conversation, so the movie wasn't just released out of nowhere. I am self-conscious about the decision to tell personal family stories on a big screen like this, but I also think this is how you make good movies.
JRP: Right. Honesty.
BD: Yeah, and to write characters you know. I think it's really hard to come up with characters out of nothing. I need some sort of archetype from my personal life for the character to feel real and lived in. I think you can really tell the difference in all of my screenplays, the characters that are based on real people and the ones that I just came up with, because the ones that I just came up with are really one-dimensional.
JRP: I think the Safdie Brothers comparisons have been a bit of a crutch in some of the reviews for $Positions, but to bring that and the Jennifer Venditti influence on the film full circle, Johnny Ryan [who did the artwork for the Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray] was also behind the art in Owen Kline’s Safdie-bros-produced, Venditti-cast Funny Pages. I thought that was interesting.
BD: Yeah, I've wanted to see it. I think there's probably some similar autobiographical stuff going on, but yeah, he's the only one who's ever said that. I think people always love to compare it to the Safdie Bros, but I would like to imagine that I would have made a similar-toned movie, with or without the existence of those guys.
JRP: I was gonna say, your short film High All Day, it almost feels like a proto-$Positions in a way.
BD: Wow, you went so deep. High All Day is this anxiety-inducing odyssey, where you're changing locations all the time…
JRP: And about addiction.
BD: Yes! Yeah, I like stuff about addiction, I like characters that are addicts. I just think that there's a real humanness to that struggle of knowing something's bad for you, and you do it anyway. I love the dramatic stakes of that, and it's just something that I deal with, and my family deals with, and something I've kind of grown up around and heard about a lot… Man, I can't believe you saw High All Day.
JRP: Dude, I even watched your movie Forced Romance. I went deep.
BD: Whoa, I didn't even know that was still on YouTube!
JRP: Yeah, and I was gonna ask you, is there anywhere to watch Wal-Rats?
BD: Wal-Rats is only on DVD, I sold them in high school for five bucks a pop, so there's a bunch of people with DVDs out there floating around. Wal-Rats was fun. We stayed in Walmart for 24 hours and did a documentary.
JRP: I think you've always had a strong voice. Forced Romance feels like a live-action cartoon.
BD: That's so crazy. Yeah, I haven't seen that in a long time, but I've always wanted to make comedies, and I'm always really interested in doing pastiche-style movies, where you're referencing 90s and early-aughts comedy, but then elevating it or making it feel new or fresher in some way. I was definitely trying to do that even back in the Forced Romance days.
JRP: It comes across.
BD: I get excited about projects that allow you to do these classic 90s tropes, but elevated in this new, unexplored way. Similar to The Napa Boys, who you talked to. I think they're also very interested in this space, but doing it in a different direction with that movie, where it's a little more irony-soaked.
JRP: Was there a movie that made you, as a kid, want to initially pick up a camera and start making movies?
BD: My dad had a camera when I was real little, and I would put on plays and make him film me. I have always wanted to make movies. I remember Billy Madison was very integral to me. My cousin Travis had seen it, and was telling us about the line “You ain't cool unless you pee your pants” at Applebee's. We were at a family dinner, and everyone was just howling laughing at this scene from this movie. This idea of making my whole family laugh is something that's very important to me. That's always burnt in my memory, him telling us that scene, and then me going to see it. I also remember my parents took me to the theater to see Ace Ventura 2, and I had not seen the first one, went in completely blind. That was a very awakening experience for me, watching him fly out of the rhino's butt, but you don't see that and say, ‘Oh, I want to make movies.’
JRP: I read you're working on a stoner mom detective movie? Is that still happening?
BD: Yes, I'm currently writing it. The idea is that she's a mom who's experiencing marijuana-induced psychosis, and her family's worried about her. She discovers her son's list of kids he wants to kill at his school. She tries to figure out what's going on, and then she starts to believe that these kids on the list are robots, and her and her son are the only people who know that these are bad people who've been put there by evil corporations… She ends up going after the kids on the list, but you don't really know if she's just experiencing psychosis the whole time.
JRP: That sounds incredible. What films have been on the mood board while you're writing this one?
BD: My girlfriend and I just watched Sleepover. It's this very mediocre early-aughts teen girl comedy. I like this idea of the mom [in my movie] thinking she's in a movie like that. You’re tonally toeing this line of these early aughts comedies, but then breaking from it to have these moments of realism. I do have a High Mom mood board, let me pull it up. Let's see… Yeah, I have The Big Lebowski, Smiley Face, Kid Detective. Have you seen that?
JRP: No, but I noticed it recently got added to Netflix. I'm a big The O.C. guy, so I’ll check it out.
BD: It’s solid, it's a very good movie. Ingrid Goes West. Erin Brockovich. And then I have Bean, and Mean Girls, and Never Been Kissed on here. Yeah, there's a bunch of random ones.
JRP: I've seen some nice praise for your performance in Joe Swanberg's upcoming film, The Sun Never Sets. Do you have interest in taking on more acting roles, or do you just want to be in your friends’ movies?
JRP: I know you said it was the original idea for $Positions, but would you be interested in leading one of your own movies, or is that more of a fallback option?
BD: I think it would be fun, I just think there are a lot better actors than me. My benefit is that I know the tone I'm going for, so there's no communication needed for that, but it would be so hard to write and direct and star in a movie. I think it would be fun, but when you're halfway through production, and you're just beat down and tired, I can't imagine also getting in front of the camera and performing. Especially after seeing what our lead actor, Mike Kunicki, went through in this movie. There's no way I could have done that and also directed the film.
JRP: Dakota Fanning and Jake Johnson seem like two of the most grounded people in Hollywood, two of America's sweethearts. How was it working with them on The Sun Never Sets?
BD: Dakota is so down-to-earth, and so giving with her time. I love both of them. I also really love Debby Ryan. Debby is in the movie, and she was incredibly sweet to me. She hosted a $Positions screening in Ohio, which was very nice of her, and she did the Q&A.
JRP: When you look at your peers and collaborators from Northwestern—people like Sarah Sherman, Alex Phillips, Daniel Johnson, Sam Fishell, Harrison Atkins—your stocks are all consistently on the rise, and it sort of feels like you’ve all been quietly weaving yourselves into the fabric of modern comedy and indie filmmaking. What do you think it was about that environment that allowed so many unique voices from the same circle to shine?
BD: Man, you've done your research. I don't know if that's just always how it is at Northwestern, or if we had a really good class. But we were together on a thing called NSTV—Northwestern Sketch Television. It was this very competitive sketch writing and directing group, you would go up against a hundred kids who would apply to write every year, and they would pick just five or six writers. So I got on that my sophomore year with Sam Fishell, Daniel Johnson and Harrison Atkins. Lawrence Dye is also a TV writer from our class who's very talented. Amy Reid is another successful person out of Northwestern at that time. I think it was the perfect combination of competitiveness and a true joy and love of comedy. We all got to grow that skill together as a group, and then have gone off into our own directions and are doing our own things, but we're all still in touch.
JRP: Yeah, I was impressed to see just how much talent came out of that class. I don't know if you all graduated at the same time, but…
BD: In like a four-year range, I think Sarah [Sherman] was two years younger than me, and Harrison [Atkins] was a year above me. David Brown, from High All Day, was around then. He's in Jury Duty. He's the breakout star of season one, in my opinion. He's doing a lot of cool stuff. He's in Harrison's new movie, Sour Minnows, which is an absolutely incredible comedy.
JRP: Can you tell me about your time in Uganda, how that came about? I don't mean to Nardwuar you.
BD: Uganda was crazy. We played Savasana at Slamdance the year before, and I met this producer named Harry Cherniak, who was starting a charity. His brother does a Doctors Without Borders type of thing in Uganda. Harry started a co-charity where we get put up with the doctors and students that are traveling, but we're there to teach film, and give DSLRs to these small communities. It was my first time leaving the country, and it was to go to Uganda. It was a jumping-in-the-deep-end travel experience. It was so awesome, though. I would love to go back. Rob Savage was another guy that I went there with, he's an insanely successful horror director. He's doing Other Mommy that's coming out, and then he did the movies Host and The Boogeyman. So he's blown the hell up, but he's awesome as well. It was a crazy experience, just getting to go to Uganda and teach kids about making movies. It was so surreal. We watched my short Chicken Tuesdays and they loved it there because they all have pet chickens.
JRP: I imagine the whole thing must have been pretty humbling.
BD: It was so humbling, I think about that trip often. I would love to go back and make a movie there with the community. It'd be so awesome to go do a no-budget movie in Uganda. Just me and my cameraman and a couple actors going out there and going rogue and making something. I would love to do that.
JRP: I would love to see that. And, I just have to say, speaking of Chicken Tuesdays, the Joey Purp needle drop, that's an all-timer.
BD: For sure, I love Joey Purp. Joey is another guy I tried to get to play Lorenzo in $Positions. I've met him a few times, and I'm friends with one of his producers. I had some connections to him, but I was unable to get him. I love his music.
JRP: I saw you met RZA. How was that?
BD: That was cool! He was here showing his movie at the Music Box, and I was at the open bar event there, and he just walked in. I was like, holy hell, that's the RZA. I got to talk to him for a couple minutes, I introduced myself and said, “Man, it's hard to make these independent films, isn't it? Do you ever feel like you're playing chess and you're down a rook?” He said something wise, I don't remember exactly how he responded, but it was more for me than anybody. He didn't need to talk to me, but he was very nice.
JRP: One more thing, I wanted to ask you about End of History director Jacob Gregor. How did you guys meet?
BD: I met him at the Florida Film Festival. I think he was living in Cleveland at that time, and he made this bizarre-ass movie called Chicken Wraps and Condoms, which is about these dudes making really mediocre rap about chicken wraps and condoms. He said they got so drunk the whole time shooting it. I liked him a lot, this dude making weird-ass stuff. Then a year or two later, he hit me up and said he was gonna move to Chicago. Now he's out here just pumping out these movies. I don't really collaborate with him that closely on his creative side, but he'll hit me up every once in a while to act. He's also in $Positions, he's one of the guys that pisses off the roof. He's one of the co-workers. I think he's on the back of the DVD. The movie had so many people in it, I had to beg people to come out to play all these different side roles, but I was happy to have Jacob in it.
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junkiesRpeople is a film and music writer who currently resides in Providence, RI. He first rose to prominence as the key grip on John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945).