Interview With Director Oscar Boyson (Our Hero, Balthazar)

Oscar Boyson started out in the film industry producing for filmmakers such as Noah Baumbach on hits like Mistress America and Frances Ha, along with the Safdie Brothers on Heaven Knows What and the Robert Pattinson-starring Good Time. Over the past decade, he has shifted bases to the writing and directing seat, delivering a series of short films before finally getting to fully materialise his first feature film, Our Hero, Balthazar. The Jaden Martell and Asa Butterfield-starring film follows a wealthy New York teenager (Martell) who, eager to impress his activist crush, flies out to Texas to stop someone he’s convinced is going to commit a school shooting. Over a video call, Oscar Trinick sat down with director, co-writer, and co-producer Oscar Boyson ahead of the film’s UK release to talk about its impactful transgressions.

Oscar Trinick: What was it that made you think that this had to be my feature debut, and why now, because it’s about as provocative as debuts get, in a good way?

Oscar Boyson: I want to make it clear that it wasn’t the first movie I tried to make. This is the first success after a string of failures. So all those failures are embedded in Our Hero, Baltazar and what made Our Hero, Baltazar possible because you fail and you fail better. Ricky [Camilleri] and I, after one failure in particular, which I would say is tied to Balthazar because I had Asa [Butterfield] in mind for the lead in that movie that we tried to make before. And that movie, I put more work into than I have into Our Hero, Balthazar, I swear. I had mapped the whole thing out. I had all the locations, animatics, and a 60-page special-effects makeup document for that movie. And it was heartbreaking to realise, oh shit, this isn’t going to happen.

And so part of what went into the concept of Our Hero, Baltazar, was let’s try to come up with something that isn’t gonna break our hearts again, something that we can make with a small team. If we have two really good actors, young guys, not people who, no offence to more established actors, but people who have families, you start making decisions for different reasons. So, I was thinking of like Rob [Pattinson] in Good Time or Caleb Landry Jones in Heaven Knows What as young guys who just want to work, right? Or even when we made Frances Ha, if we can make a movie like that, then I know that we can just make it with whatever money we have.

We started writing when Uvalde had just happened, and the pandemic was very fresh in our minds. Ricky had been reading this bit in the FBI coverage of the Uvalde shooting, where I’ve told this story a few times at this point, but this girl in Germany had been messaging with the shooter on that day. A lot of people would message with this guy, the Uvalde shooter, and he was a troll. He’d just send random things, try to get people to talk to him. And on that day, he had said, “I just shot my grandma in the face. Now I’m going to shoot up my elementary school.” She responded, “Cool.”

When people discovered this, she got dragged by news commentators and by people on the internet, oh, you could have done something, right? And something about that was just like, God, this feels like a microcosm of what it’s like to be on the internet today, especially for a young person to be exposed to all this hideous and sadistic and dangerous stuff, and then it’s on you to like call the cops, right? So we were talking about who would actually get that message and do something about it, and that was sort of what Baltazar was born out of: that question.

OT: I was really fascinated by the way you subvert our own expectations of actors, because Asa Butterfield is the last person I’d expect to play the role of someone like Solomon. Was this always the plan, to have a typically reserved actor play such a vocal character?

OB: Yeah, I love performances, and I love actors, and I think of myself from the actor’s position, and when you make short films, or you make commercials, you always get asked to do the thing that you’ve already done, right? It’s the same thing with actors. They get asked to do the thing that they already have done because everyone feels like that’s safe. And so if anybody can ask Asa to do the stuff that he’s already done, he probably will get paid a lot more to do that.

I just think of myself; I think from his perspective, or I think from any of the actors’ perspectives, if I’m going to go do a low-budget movie, I want to show that I can do other things. You don’t do three or four seasons of a show like Sex Education if you can’t; he’s an extremely capable actor. So I knew that, that he could do something else.

I also knew that there are certain things about different actors’ physicality that say a lot. He has a tender surface. He doesn’t look threatening. He looks like a guy who you want to give a hug to, or he looks like a teddy bear, right? And so that was our conversation.  We’re inclined to like you, in part because of, you know, the stuff that you’ve already done; we can subvert that. He was so excited about that. Even while we were shooting, we’d have to pull him back because he was taking it even further, which is always the best as a director to be pulling someone back instead of, like, come on, you know, go there.

So I think even sometimes even better than seeing a new star break is to see somebody who you think you know, and then they surprise you with the performance. Whenever the opportunity is there to do that, I’m always interested and excited, both as a moviegoer and in my own work. But with Asa, I could never have expected how much he gave to it. It was really not just for the Solomon character, but also when someone is bringing that kind of performance, he makes everybody better. 

OT: You’ve worked on a number of New York movies in your time as a producer, and one of the many heavy-handed aspects of the film is the criticisms of the wealthy family living in a crazy apartment in New York; what has being a part of the city, both in your film career and life, given you in terms of viewpoint toward this?

OB: Well, I didn’t grow up in New York; I’ve lived here almost 20 years now, and I still feel like an outsider. There’s just something different about growing up in the city and going to school here. I’m from a small town. I will always sort of feel like that with respect to New York. I think that’s a big part of why I didn’t want to make a movie that just takes place in New York. I feel much closer to where Solomon grew up, even if I grew up on the East Coast, in terms of being closer to the way that most Americans live, whereas Manhattan’s pretty rarefied, you know, it is kind of its own country. It’s its own state of mind; it’s so expensive.

So I think the perspective of both living here but growing up somewhere very different informed that perspective. I think the amount of wealth in Manhattan is just obscene. You definitely meet people who are insulated by their wealth and insulated from the repercussions of their actions; they don’t have to deal with them, they don’t have to think about them, they don’t have to process those feelings, and I didn’t really know what that kind of person was like until I went to university; how do all Manhattan private school kids know each other? You realise that there are so many of these people who are friends. I’m just saying that it is very, very, very different from the way that most Americans grow up and relate to the media, relate to their place in the world.

I didn’t want to make a one-location movie. And the thing about setting part of it in Manhattan and part of it in a trailer park in North Texas is I think that’s the magic of movies is like suddenly everything in between is kind of there, you know, even if it’s off, even if it’s in the cut, even if it’s off-screen. You’re creating a much bigger world because you’re asking the viewer to kind of fill in the space in between. Whereas a lot of movies just take place in Manhattan, you know, or just take place in New York. It can feel like a very, very small sliver of the world, so I wanted it to have that scope.

OT: This film is about a lot of things; it’s about America ultimately, but one of the most unique aspects of the film is its hypermediated approach to the gun violence; in other films that tackle this subject matter, it often feels incredibly general with no regard to its specific time and place, but this feels very much of now, in a vast number of ways, what was it that drew you to talk about the state of America particularly in this digital and intangible age?

OB: I had no interest in actually showing a school shooting in a movie. I think part of what is and had a lot of issues early on because yes, school shooting is in the synopsis but the movie is not about a school shooting, right? It’s much more about isolation and loneliness and these two boys who feel like they have to pretend to be something else online. So I think that what is really perplexing about school shootings and gun violence as they pertain to the online experience right now is they’ve almost become a performance. You can see it with the guy who shot Charlie Kirk and the guy who shot at Trump; increasingly these shootings are like memified violence.

So I felt like the movie where both of these boys are sort of performing something that they’re not, in order to find their way in this online world, which is also their coming of age itself. Where do they exist in this performance that is a school shooting? It’s not one-to-one, but there is something almost like the way that girls who were my age when they when we were growing up would be like, “Who are you in Sex and the City? Are you like a Samantha or a Miranda?” I think for Solomon and Balthazar, are you a victim or are you a shooter? You know, are you a big, bad, scary guy or are you a hero who’s going to stop this? Are you an activist?

I wanted to make a movie where you’re forced to kind of confront: why are these two boys doing this? Why is one pretending to do this and one pretending to do that? And I think it’s because gun violence gets the most attention. There are all these dark holes on the internet, whether that’s in the media or in these dark corners of the online world, that just tend to be the performance that people who are spending a lot of time by themselves online are drawn to finding an identity through.

OT: When I watched this, there were moments where I was saying to myself, should I be laughing? How was it that you and co-writer Ricky went about trying to find a balance between this humour and such poignancy, especially considering the tightrope of its subject matter?

OB: I think that occasionally there would probably be a joke or an idea that that we were excited about but then you get a little further you know especially once you cast and you rewrite and you rewrite and you act it out and you do table reads and you rehearse and you’re like it gets really easy to tell this is what the movie is and what it isn’t, so there were a few things that just fall away as you zero in on what it is and what it isn’t. I think we both love movies like The Sopranos or Goodfellas where there’s very dark stuff, but also always going for the joke when it’s there. So I think we knew that because we bounce everything back off each other; we knew our hearts were in the right place and there was never really any fear of offending anyone.

Todd Solondz is another great inspiration in this respect, where you can be laughing, and you can be very uncomfortable, but then absolutely feeling for these characters, and I love these guys. So I think I love movies where you’re feeling one thing, or you’re laughing, you’re having a good time, and it’s like, oh, shit, you know. I talked about Boogie Nights, how you’re having such a good time, and then Bill Macy is shooting his wife and the lover and blowing his brains out, and you’re like, oh shit. Or even like History of Violence, that moment where Viggo’s [Mortensen] like, “Hey, in this house, we don’t just hit people when they say things to us” and he’s like, “oh, yeah, in this house, we shoot them,” And you’re sort of chuckling and then he slaps him and you’re like, oh, fuck. I live for those moments as a moviegoer. So whenever we’re like working through a scene, if we can get there, you know, that’s definitely the goal.

The other thing I think I have seen is that a few people are like, “oh, yeah, the first 15 minutes are really good, and then I didn’t like it.” You don’t like it because you’re uncomfortable. I wanted to kind of trick the audience into being like, oh, this is like a funny movie about this delusional rich kid, but then you get to Texas and it’s kind of like, well, I dare you to laugh at this. And I think a lot of movies that are saying that they’re satire, and they’re making fun of rich people, but that’s very comfortable for a lot of people. But then when you actually take that, and you go to a more middle-class place, which is part of what’s so great about Todd Solondz’s movies, it can be very uncomfortable because we have a tremendous wealth inequality, especially in this country. A lot of people don’t want to be confronted with that. It is uncomfortable.

OT: You unfortunately never have to look far to find the kinds of figures and brands that Solomon’s dad represents, but were there any specific real-world influences behind these incel male characters and the product they sell?

OB: Well, I used to sell knives in a multi-level marketing company when I was 18, and I was definitely better at it than Solomon, but I think his product is a lot harder to sell. Maybe I’m not right about that, but I had the experience of going to some of these sales conferences where your regional manager comes out in a boxing robe, and he’s just punching. He’s like, “We’re taking out California. We’re taking out Chicago.” I was like 18 years old, just so alienated. Like, what is this? You know, because there’s a really sad part about that too, which is that was a good job for me, but there were a lot of people who’d get tricked into buying these demo kits and spending $500 or something. You know, now you’re just supposed to go out and sell, and if you don’t have a few places to start, that could be really, really demoralising.

That contrast of that environment and that company between some people who seem to be doing really well, and then other people who are just beating themselves up, like, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this? That always stuck with me. So we couldn’t have been selling knives because it’s a gun movie. Just the ubiquity in the last 20 years of these testosterone supplements, that just felt like what it would be instead. You kind of feel for a kid, for like a guy like Solomon, right? There used to be a lot of jobs that were more, where you could actually have an upwardly mobile career, like basically swinging a hammer or, you know, doing that kind of work. Blue-collar jobs, we used to have a lot of those, and you could get a little bit better, and you could raise a family, and you could buy a house. Even if you didn’t, you know, even if all you really had to offer in terms of labour was your body. I feel like once that went away during the NATO and Clinton years, now you have a lot of these guys who, who still have that physical energy, maybe don’t have the brain to get the connections or the education, to get the white-collar job, which are also fewer and far between.

So you see this weird kind of militarisation of the sales bro that I think is really funny. There’s a video of our Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth, yesterday where he’s talking about testosterone testing for the military in the US, and you can’t make this stuff up; you have to laugh, and I like that the movie hopefully had the satirical targets feel like they’re more those characters.

OT: In line with another film that came out this year, I didn’t know if you had seen The Drama at all, because I know both films tackle a similar subject matter. Did you have any coinciding thoughts between this film and that one?

OB: Yeah, I mean, I think [Kristoffer Borgli] he’s a really great filmmaker, and I know the art production designer on that movie is a good friend. I love some of the performances. The tricky thing for me about The Drama is that there were things that I liked about it, but I feel like the implication of that movie is that to have dark ideas as a teenager is scary. The premise of Balthazar is that it’s not; it’s part of growing up, and that period in your life where you’re trying to figure out who you are, I think especially before you start to cling to a sense of future or you have the structure of a job, that’s a really hard time. I think it’s actually far more relatable to make a threat or to say you’re going to do something bad just to see what will happen. As soon as you admit that that’s a normal teenage thing to do, you know, certainly a forgivable teenage thing to do, the whole premise of The Drama falls apart. I’m not afraid of teenagers, and I think that we can do better. I didn’t like the implication that this is such a foreign thing to experience.