Patton Oswalt realized early that his movie was going to be the best. “I Love My Dad,”This involves him as a father who accidentally catfishes a son. “just be a bad movie,”It is not to be “a fiasco.”
“We’re going to shoot for something, and it’s going to either completely work or… wow,”The comedian spoke in an interview. “This movie had a script that had so many scenes in it that when I read them, I was like, how are they going to pull that [off]? This could go wrong in so many ways. I’ve never seen anything like this in a film that they’re attempting this.”
Oswalt and James Morosini were fortunate to win the top prize at SXSW Film Festival. Oswalt was able to watch the film, which was funny and witty. “people crawl out of their skin.” The film is undoubtedly polarizing, putting audiences in the awkward position of knowing what Oswalt’s character is doing is manipulative, creepy and wrong, all while making us root for Morosini’s fake romance as seen through a charming rom-com lens.
Morosini made that decision, and he directed, wrote and starred in the movie. He did this based on his story about his dad catfishing him. Morosini took pains within the staging and the editing processes to make sure that Oswalt’s scenes lined up with the fantasy scenes involving Morosini’s fake girlfriend (Claudia Sulewski), to the point that if Oswalt was crossing his arms, Sulewski’s physical mannerisms and placement in the room would be similar.
“I wanted to challenge the viewer. I think we’re trained because of all the rom-coms we’ve seen to be rooting for that primary relationship. And I wanted the audience to find themselves both catfisher and cat fished,”Morosini stated that. “I wanted to see if I could create that dynamic where we’re almost rooting for Patton to try and get back in his son’s life and for this catfishing scheme to work out, but then we’re also weirdly rooting for Franklin and his romantic experience with this amazing person.”
Oswalt praised Morosini’s sense of humor, comparing him to comics like Nathan Fielder and Eric Andre who have a sense for turning “extreme discomfort into comedy.”He also shared how Morosini, as a performer, urged him to not strain for laughs but trust that comedy would come from the juxtaposition of the high stakes of catfishing with the charm of rom-com sequences.
“[Patton] has an incredible ability to balance the light and the dark, and he’s also just such a thoughtful, sensitive and generous artist… He’d often be like, ‘Dude, how is this going to be funny?’” Morosini said. “I was often having to push him further in the direction of higher and higher and higher stakes.”
“This guy is so forthright and blinded by what he’s doing and blinkered by what he’s doing, he doesn’t oftentimes have the wider, wiser perspective,”Oswalt spoke. “So I had to go against my instinct sometimes and take a much more narrow or limited perspective as to how to solve these problems. I think this character has a much narrower emotional range. He just truly thinks that he is the hero of the story. And there’s no convincing him otherwise, which I think is part of his tragedy.”
Oswalt definitely doesn’t relate to the extreme behavior of his character in “I Love My Dad,”But he finds it fascinating to watch and to portray people. “keep their dignity under pressure.”He hopes the film will show that people can see that such behavior is still normal.
“It’s the transferring of, ‘Oh, look what the world’s doing to me,’ and they very conveniently omit that they are the thing that did that to themselves. I love that level of delusion. It’s just really, really fun to play. And I think it’s very real. I think we do it all the time,”Oswalt spoke. “I certainly hope that people could look at this very extreme character but then grudgingly go, not to this level, but I’ve done stuff like this to myself and to my friends. I’ve had this level of delusion, this level of idiocy, and I weirdly connect with this. It’s kind of amazing.”
“I Love My Dad”Magnolia opens August 5th in theatres