- Where were you last night? - I was out.
I heard you come home at five in the morning. With who?
Everybody always asks me what research I did to get into the mindspace
of a teenage boy.
I don't really have a great answer for that question.
I think that when you're writing, every character you write is just as much an extension
of your imagination and yourself, you know it doesn't so much have to do with gender.
While I was working on the script I was going through a lot of life transitions.
There was a tremendous amount of pressure on me to make money,
support the family and be successful.
I feel like I sort of transferred all of the pressure that I was feeling
in life and in my own experience into this character.
I got a lot going on right now.
I didn't mean to insult you.
Hey I'm trying to apologize.
Okay.
He's a kid that's under a lot of pressure from his environment
and from his world. He's coping with a lot of conventional expectations around him.
Inside him there's this other person trying to find their way and their voice.
That's sort of how I always approached the character.
He was maybe inarticulate and afraid of who he was or who he might be.
That sort of fear and feeling of hiding is the tension of the entire story.
Once I was able to find his core, I think, then I was able to write the script.
Hey.
You wanna take a walk on the beach?
Are you a cop?
No.
You have to tell me if you're a cop, it's the law.
That's not the law.
Prove to me you're not a cop.
Get in.
When I started making films I saw all these filmmakers representing one experience of Brooklyn.
Which is largely people who move to New York, and try and carve a life out for themselves.
There's so many films about that experience.
I was sort of thinking about the cinema of the Seventies,
like Saturday Night Fever, of these characters that are trying to escape this city that is holding them back.
I feel like that experience also still exists in the city.
Those groups of people are just pushed farther and farther
out to the water's edge.
I cast non-actors, and some of the kids that I cast were from a neighborhood in Brooklyn called
Gerritsen Beach, and kids from Gerritsen Beach are called 'beach rats'.
So the name, the slang street term that describes a certain kind of kid
stuck with me as being a good title for a film.
The kids from this particular area of Brooklyn
which is very removed geographically from the rest of the boro
and far from the subway, are all a bit rough,
rowdy, and they share similar narratives.
They're all sort of from broken homes, or fall into meth and have opiate problems,
their opportunities are quite limited, most of them end up doing,
falling into drugs, because they don't want to join a union
or don't want to go into the military, and some of them have violent criminal histories.
So I was just thinking bout those kids,
the limitations and obstacles of their world.
Simultaneously, while we were shooting 'It Felt Like Love', I noticed
that there was cruising happening along the same beaches.
So I was thinking a bit about the kind of guy that hangs out on those beaches
during the day, and the men that hang out on them at night.
I was thinking about the natural tension that occurs between these two worlds.
Harris Dickinson. He tricked us!
He submitted his audition tape, which he made at home in his mother's bedroom,
through his LA management office.
So initially it came in as an 'LA Casting Session'.
My first response was: I don't want to cast an LA actor.
I thought that the actor would be
like a New York actor, an undiscovered New York actor,
like a young Robert De Niro.
But he didn't show up at the audition.
Then when we started going back to Harris' tape and we looked him up,
we realized he was British.
I was very conflicted about casting him.
The film is so hinged on its authentic rendering
of this world, what is it going to be like to take this British kid
and drop him in?
So I had a lot of anxiety over what the process of that would look like.
Could we get him a visa? But his audition always spoke for itself,
and was incredibly compelling.
Part of what I and our producers responded to about it was that
he framed his self tape largely in close-up, sitting very tight, close to the lens
He didn't really try and amp up any of his masculine behaviour or toughness
or physicality he was just really himself,
looking sort of lost and dreamy but at the same time there was an edge
and a toughness to his voice, and an unpredictability to him
which we were all drawn to.
Let me ask you all something...
How do you all feel about getting high with a gay guy?
What the fuck do you mean, bro?
Like, sometimes I can't find anything so I go online and meet up with guys who, er...
have weed.
And then what happens?
I pretend I'm gay and I smoke their weed.
- What do you do when they try and hit on you? - They already tried to hit on him, stupid.
What do you think I do?
Yo does he got enough for everybody?
I dunno, I'll ask him.
Alright we'll come with you, then.
I don't think it's an easy narrative. I hope the film leaves an impression,
that the film pushes people to realize that there's not one coming out story to be told,
and that there are still parts of this world where people struggle to accept themselves.
I think that there can be destructive consequences for having to hide
who you are and to feel like you can't live an authentic life.