Interview
SLIFF 2015 Interview: Aaron and Adam Nee – Directors of BAND OF ROBBERS
BAND OF ROBBERS screens Monday, November 9th at 7pm at The Tivoli Theatre as part of The St. Louis International Film Festival. Ticket information can be found HERE. The film’s co-directors Adam and Aaron Nee will be in attendance. This screening is sponsored by Tenacious Eats
A modern-day retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huck Finn, the comedy BAND OF ROBBERS re-imagines the characters as adults, now grown from juvenile delinquents into small-time crooks. When Huck Finn (Kyle Gallner) is released from prison, he hopes to leave his criminal life behind, but lifelong friend and corrupt cop Tom Sawyer (co-director Adam Nee) has other plans. Not ready to give up on his childhood fantasies, Tom forms the Band of Robbers, recruiting Huck and their misfit friends Joe Harper (Matthew Gray Gubler) and Ben Rogers (Hannibal Buress) to join an elaborate scheme to rob the local pawn shop and steal a fabled treasure. But the plan soon unravels — thanks to Injun Joe (Stephen Lang of AVATAR) — taking the gang on a wild journey with dangerous consequences.
BAND OF ROBBERS was written and co-directed by Aaron and Adam Nee who took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks ahead of their film’s screening at The St. Louis International Film Festival
Interview conducted by Tom Stockman October 30th, 2015
We Are Movie Geeks: I watched BAND OF ROBBERS and enjoyed it. I won’t be reviewing it for the site since a couple of our other contributing writers were eager to review it because Melissa Benoist is in it. Apparently she’s quite the ‘It’ girl now.
Adam Nee: Yes she has this Supergirl show going on right now
WAMG: That works pretty well for you guys in terms of distributing this film. How did you find her for your movie?
Adam Nee: She just came in and auditioned. We had a great casting director named John McAlary. He has his finger on the pulse of interesting young actors. She was one who came in, and she had been in WHIPLASH but nothing else that we had seen, and she came in the room and just kind of blew us away. She had such a great girl-next-door quality. So charming and funny. Her role in WHIPLASH was kind of a small part but she made it feel big. I feel like that’s sort of her quality.
WAMG: Whose idea was it to adapt Mark Twain into a modern day crime comedy?
Aaron Nee: That stemmed from an audition that Adam had in New York a while back.
Adam Nee: When I first started out acting in New York, I auditioned for this Adventures of Huckleberry Finn movie that was very close to the source material. It had Huck and Jim on the raft, and Huck was a 13-year-old kid. I came in to audition. I was 21, too old for the role, and was sort of laughed out of that audition but it gave me the idea; what if Huck and Tom were young grownups who were saying and doing all the same things in the books. That’s really where it started and we just kind of built it from there.
WAMG: What were the biggest challenges in adapting these classic stories into a modern-day film?
Aaron Nee: Probably the biggest thing is just how much there is in those novels that’s precious to us and that we wanted to hold onto and put into a 90 minute movie. The challenge was finding that balance with pulling out the core essential things that we really valued in Mark Twain’s work and putting it together into something that stands on its own. Maintaining in a way that honors these books that we love so much and doesn’t lose that core essence that appealed to us in the first place.
WAMG: Are all the incidents in the movie from the book or are some of them from your own experiences?
Adam Nee: It’s all based on stuff from the book. As a matter of fact, about a quarter of the dialogue is verbatim from the books. All of the characters and plot points are drawn directly from the stories of Tom and Huck.
Aaron Nee: We inflated some things, like when Tom forms the band of robbers from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, they go on what Tom calls raids, and they don’t go very well and Huck Finn is a little disillusioned about that. We took that and blew it up into a larger plot point with the pawn shop robbery. We took liberties with the way we intersected plot points from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Our character Jorge is our adaptation of the character Jim but rather than he and Huck going off on their own, Huck ropes him into this adventure with Tom Sawyer.
WAMG: I enjoyed the running joke about in Injun Joe, played by Stephen Lang, not being a real Indian but claiming it’s not racist to want to be another race. Was that from the book?
Adam Nee: No, he’s a real Indian in the book, but we knew in a modern adaptation we couldn’t have the bad guy in the movie be this evil native American so we wanted to play on the racist aspects of it. One of the things that we love about Mark Twain is that he makes racial commentary by poking fun at his characters, so we wanted to do the same thing with that.
WAMG: Stephen Lang is great in your film. I’ve always liked that actor. What was he like working with?
Adam Nee: We were lucky to get him. He was great. He was so intense and focused. He’s the type of actor who stays in character the whole time. We have some behind the scenes interviews with Stephen Lang where he’s doing the Injun Joe voice that will be fun to watch on the DVD extra features. But he was great, very generous and very prepared. There were elements of his character that he brought to it that we didn’t even ask him to do. In the original description, it said he had a flat, broad nose so he took toilet paper and shoved it up his nostrils to live the character. It was tremendous commitment on his part.
WAMG: What are the challenges of working as brothers and co-directing a film as brothers?
Aaron Nee: I think they’re the same challenges as co-directing at all, and perhaps being brothers makes it a little easier. It’s harder for me to talk about the challenges that it is to talk about the things that make it easier. As brothers we’ve developed an understanding and a shorthand over the years, having made films together since we were little kids and got our hands on a VHS camera for the first time. There are a lot of things that we don’t have to explain to each other. We can be in different places on set and someone doesn’t have to worry about getting with both of us to see what each person has to say about something because we’re both already on the same page.
Adam Nee: There’s such a focus on prep with us. We try to work out any differences before we start shooting the movie so on set you can go to either person and get the same answer. At the end of the day, what makes it easy is that Aaron and I have the same kind of taste and desire and visual plan. There usually aren’t too many disagreements.
WAMG: BAND OF ROBBERS looks great. Where was it filmed?
Adam Nee: Actually around Los Angeles, believe it or not. We tried to find locations that didn’t look like Los Angeles, that felt like suburban outside anywhere all-America.
WAMG: You’ve got that one great colorful house where the widow lives in the film.
Aaron Nee: Yes, that’s actually on a lot that’s something of a museum that rescues and restores vintage houses around Los Angeles. They’re all in Highland Park on this one lot together.
WAMG: Have you guys been to St. Louis before?
Adam Nee: Yes, we have some family there. We grew up visiting St. Louis every summer. I remember visiting the Arch when I was eight years old and being traumatized by those little elevators that took you to the top.
WAMG: Right, we just celebrated 50 years of the Arch and those clunky little elevators haven’t been updated at all. Have you ever been to Hannibal?
Adam Nee: No I have not.
WAMG: You should go when you’re in St. Louis next week. It’s just a couple hours’ drive. They have a lot of Mark Twain-related sites to see.
Adam Nee: We should definitely do that.
WAMG: Back to BAND OF ROBBERS, how much did the film cost to produce?
Adam Nee: We are not saying the budget right now, but it was definitely a low-budget film. It was enough money to make a movie but not enough money to make a movie on this scale. Aaron and I did not even take fees on this movie to help to make it happen.
WAMG: What do you think Mark Twain would think of your film?
Adam Nee: I think he’d like it
Aaron Nee: I think he probably be pretty confused not being familiar with these automobiles and cell phones but I think he’d appreciate the way we’ve brought his stories into the 21st-century.
Adam Nee: I feel that if Mark Twain watched all of the adaptations of his stories over the years and landed on ours, he would appreciate our attempt to capture his humor and his tone.
WAMG: What are your plans for BAND OF ROBBERS and how it has it been received so far?
Adam Nee: It’s been great. We’ve received nothing but positive reviews so far. I would love for that to continue as it’s very encouraging. The film festival experiences have been great and we’ve been really lucky to get this distribution deal through a company called Gravitas Ventures. The movie is going to come out in theaters and on-demand January 15 of next year.
Aaron Nee: Yes, so we’re really excited to get that out to the wider public and see what happens with it.
WMAG: Where did you two grow up?
Aaron Nee: We grew up in Florida.
WAMG: Have you guys always been movie buffs?
Adam Nee: We’ve always been movie fanatics. We just devoured movies and our parents were good about showing us great movies. We grew up on silent movies like THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD and we grew up on Spielberg stuff.
WAMG: Who are some of your favorite filmmakers?
Adam Nee: For me I would say that P.T. Anderson is my favorite contemporary filmmaker but we love Spielberg and Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers. Terrence Malick – all of those guys are big influences.
WAMG: Which one of you does your mom like the most?
Aaron Nee: Probably Adam because he calls her more often.
Adam Nee: I think I’m better at keeping in touch with her but she probably likes Aaron better because he’s the one playing hard to get, but she at least gets to talk to me more.
WAMG: What’s next for the Nee brothers?
Aaron Nee: We have some projects in development now but BAND OF ROBBERS is taking a lot of our time. We’ll be heavily invested in this film for a while, but we are laying the groundwork and exploring a new film and some long term television development opportunities.
WAMG: I think your film will be well-received at the St. Louis International Film Festival and I’m glad you guys are going to be here.
Adam Nee: It’s going to be great. We love getting to meet and interact with audiences. When you make a movie, you spend so much time in a bubble hoping that people will like it, and then you get few opportunities to sit and watch it with the people that you are making it for, and that can be a very magical experience.
WAMG: Best of luck with BAND OF ROBBERS and we’ll see you in St. Louis soon.
Aaron Nee: Thank you
Adam Nee: I look forward to it
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