Written by Mark H. RapaportDuring the dog days of COVID, Kimball Farley (who plays the title character) and myself would meet on Zoom from coast-to-coast to write the script for what would become the monochromatic, tragicomic tale known as Hippo.When we wrote the film, the guidelines we gave ourselves were straightforward: let’s write something we can make right now, with the actors we know, with the money we can get, and for the locations we have easy access to. Oh, and also let’s write something we both feel is an entertaining manifestation of our deepest childhood traumas, without pulling punches or succumbing to the usual formulas or archetypes of mainstream movies. In short, we set out to make something that felt completely unique to our tastes and as a viewer we would love every second of.The first half of those guidelines are hard enough to follow. We tried our hand twice at this prior to writing Hippo, but we wound up with screenplays that were financially and logistically out of reach for the Duplass Brothers’ ‘make what you can make’ credo which we both subscribed to fiercely.But the third time was a charm (as they say). Kimball and I got to work late nights under the glowing moonlight of our MacBooks, like millennial Beethovens, and finally churned out our version of a Sonata: an ultra-low-budget chamber piece written for the one place I knew I would not need a permit for—my grandma’s humble house in State College, PN. Kimball with...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Monday, 11 November