Before we announce the winners of the 2016 MyTheatre Awards, we’re proud to present our annual Nominee Interview Series.

 

Anders Yates is one of my favourite improvisers in the city (or anywhere, really), so he’s predictably nominated for Outstanding Sketch/Improv Performance for his work with Bad Dog Theatre on the beautiful new show La Grande Jatte. But he’s also nominated for his non-improv work this year (well, improv-adjacent, maybe) as one of the creators of the Outstanding New Work & Outstanding Production– nominated Slip, produced by Circlesnake Productions and being remounted now through April 2nd in the Tarragon Workspace.

 

Do you remember your first experience with theatre?
That’s a good question. Yeah, probably! I mean, I remember when theatre companies would come to my elementary school and put on a little show that might have been educational, or it might not have been. My first big attraction to performance was I watched some magic tricks. That was my big thing. I liked putting on little magic shows and I even once or twice performed at the birthday parties of kids just a little bit younger than me.

 

Can you still do magic?
Not really. I mean sort of, I guess, but – I never trained myself at the art of sleight of hand, so I never developed the manual dexterity with cards or coins or anything like that, and it didn’t go beyond the level of store-bought kit magic so I needed the stuff. There’s actually one trick that I learned that you could do entirely with just practical props and that is the only trick that I’ve tried to recreate in adulthood. I did it once in adulthood and it worked out nicely, and another time I tried doing it and it failed but the people that were watching the trick thought that I was pretending that it was failing and it was just more buildup toward the actual good big reveal, and that made it that much more painful when I had to say “no, I’m sorry, it’s just not working, I’m sorry, it really actually isn’t, let’s talk about something else, let’s move on”. And it was so awkward at the time, you know. So, if you were about to ask me to do a magic trick, I’m not going to.

 

So what about improv? When did that come into your life and how did you develop your skills?
I first understood what improv was when YTV started broadcasting the original British version of Whose Line is it Anyway?. That was like very important viewing for me at the time. That was kind of my only real involvement with improv for several years, and it wasn’t until I was in CEGEP (which is the Quebec in between high school and university thing) where I saw a notice for an improv club and I signed up for it. At that club I met and started working with several of the people who I still work with to this day, specifically the people in Uncalled For. It just sort of clicked. It was scary but exciting and fun. It felt exciting. I don’t know, I felt like such a dweeb throughout so much of my adolescence but this was something where I could… I was able to make a different kind of magic happen. [laughs]

 

How long have you been planning that joke?
No! I wasn’t! In fact, I wish that we hadn’t been talking about magic tricks before so that didn’t sound so cheesy. But it’s true! Really. People who do [improv] are trying to get a reaction. That’s the reason why people do magic tricks, it’s the reason why people tell jokes or do comedy. You’re trying to get somebody else to laugh or react. You want to affect people and have that nice little bit of influence and succeed at it. So, yeah, that was how I got intoxicated by that.

 

When did you move to Toronto?
I moved to Toronto not that long ago; it would have to be 2011. My boyfriend at the time was going to school in London, ON and it was a way to be closer to him without having to move to London, ON. And it was just a chance to do something different. I love Montreal, I always have and it will always be my home, but I felt in so many ways like there was just a lower ceiling there and a lower bar in some ways. Like, I saw a lot of people praising stuff that I felt was only okay sometimes. And, when I would come to Toronto, here it felt like people were doing bigger bolder things and you had to do something more exciting in order for people to say that it’s great. That’s attractive to me, and [Toronto] was a better way to find out “am I actually good, am I actually able to hack it?”. I’m still trying to answer that question but I feel like I’m in a better place to answer it. 

 

How’d you get involved with Bad Dog Theatre?
One of the beautiful things about doing improv in Canada is when you’re able to travel and do improv, and I’ve been very lucky that with Uncalled For we travelled around to many different fringe festivals and other types of festivals through the years. And, luckily, I felt very well-prepared upon arrival in Toronto because I already had met so much of the community and already had made friends and connections and, in particular, with [Bad Dog Artistic Director] Julie Dumais Osborne. It happened fairly quickly after I arrived, Julie reached out to me and was interested to know if I wanted to teach a class with Bad Dog, and she asked me to give her a pitch for what my class might be. And I really had no idea. I didn’t know what specific thing in improv I could bring to the table that nobody else could. So I just decided to do something bold and was like “I’ll just come up with a great title for a thing, and I’ll call it Killing Drew Carey: How to Get Away from Whose Line is it Anyway“. The American version was more popular at that time, and I had certainly moved beyond it, but Toronto had moved far beyond it as well – like, I didn’t need to come in here and tell anybody how to give that up, so Julie wisely did not turn that into a class, but she did keep me around. She asked me to join the Bad Dog Repertory Players and we just started doing shows and I started teaching more regular classes with Bad Dog, like Foundation Series stuff. And, yeah that’s kind of how that happened. That’s before the new space got built, when it was just operating out of Comedy Bar.

 

What are some of your favourite shows you’ve done with Bad Dog?
A lot. I’m a huge fan of  Toronto, I Love You. I’m a sucker for romance on stage; I think it’s wonderful. I really connected with so many of the people in the cast for that show and I really like the magic that comes from the sort of musical aspect of it. I’m not a gifted musician and I get self-conscious about singing in front of people on stage, but there’s enough of a choral aspect to it that I can get away with it. And we’ve been lucky enough to do it several times and remount it several times, so that’s been wonderful.

 

I’m also a huge fan of Pushpins as a format. I had seen Julie and Bob Banks and Alex Tindal and a few other people do that format a couple times and I just straight up stole it once in Montreal, just told some people “hey, this is a cool thing that I saw, we should do it too, it’s great”. And then felt a bit guilty about that later. But now I’m glad that I’ve been able to do it here properly with the people who created it. It’s just a joke party that one. But it’s also complex and interesting enough to really be engaging. So those are probably my favourite ones.

 

La Grande Jatte

You’re nominated this year for part of the ensemble of La Grande Jatte, which is a bit more dramatic than a lot of things I’ve seen at Bad Dog. Is there a different mindset that comes with doing less jokey improv?
Yeah. That show, I don’t know, we just sort of got realer. There’s something about just deciding “okay, but let’s actually talk about life, and what people might be going through”. It became like a dark running gag that the show kept diagnosing people with cancer. There was always a character that got cancer and we were like “okay, maybe that’s a bit too much. Maybe we should back off from that. Because life doesn’t always have to suck”. But, I don’t know, it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly you zero in on to go to that more authentic, less jokey place. And even so, that show got very silly at times as well, cause that’s just what’s going to happen. But it’s a testament to the strength of that cast. There were so many really powerful people in there who were just fantastic accomplished actors outside of the improv world that it worked beautifully as drama. I love seeing comic actors do drama. It’s really refreshing and a reminder of  “oh yeah, you don’t just have to point and laugh. We’re good sometimes”.

 

Tell us about working with Julie Dumais Osborne, who directed that show.
I love working with Julie so much. And I’ve been very very lucky to have been able to work with her on many many projects at this point. Julie always has a very good sense of what she wants to move beyond, what we need to try to reach for, and what could be really interesting that hasn’t happened. She’s the one who should have been pitching that Killing Drew Carey idea because she actually has the ideas to replace the things that she’s moving beyond. I think she’s a fantastic director and I’m gonna miss her while she’s on maternity leave, but looking forward to having her back after that. She knows how to assemble a great cast, she has a great eye for solid talent, and she’s really good at always bringing in new people. She could just cast solid improv vets in every single thing, because people like working with her, but she’s really good at fostering and developing talent as well. So she always makes sure to bring on some more emerging talents; she’s just ready to bring people into the family. I think she’s a large part of the reason why Bad Dog feels like such a family and such a welcoming environment.

 

Tell us about the internal direction device in La Grande Jatte that allowed you to zoom in or speed up scenes using hand gestures. How did that affect the process and the product?
It was a fantastic rehearsal process. It’s so rare in improv but we got a grant to do this show so that meant that we were able to pay people to show up to rehearsals, so that meant that people actually showed up to rehearsals. I’ve done lots of other improv shows with rehearsal processes before but, you know, you get maybe a bit more of a patchwork attendance from people sometimes.

 

There was an earlier iteration of this show that was tested out in Vancouver at the Vancouver Improv Festival that I was not part of. And also a version of it that happened at the Rhubarb Festival, which I was going to be part of and then I had to miss due to a death in the family, unfortunately. But those previous versions had involved a lot more just rotating the action- there was just this one move, and it was “let’s go 45 degrees this way, or 180 degrees that way”. And that seemed to feel frustrating and limiting, so we spent so much of the rehearsal period coming up with our own internal sign language and playing through scenes. The challenge that we issued to ourselves was “how much can we direct without speaking? How clearly can you get across what you want the improvisers to do just with eye contact and hands?” We got to practice it a lot and try things that we hadn’t talked about and see if they’re intuitive so sometimes in shows there would be a move or a way of communicating something that we had never discussed or rehearsed but people had an idea of what could work, what would communicate effectively and what wouldn’t. But, mostly, we just sort of developed this little language and Jess Bryson, who actually does know American Sign Language, would sometimes throw real signs into things when they are ones that are intuitive enough for non-signers to get.

 

There was something really nice about the fact that we knew that, even though we weren’t going to vocalize the direction, we also weren’t going to hide the fact that we were directing. We wanted that to be something that the audience could share in. We’re not being discreet– it’s part of the fun to see how this director can come in and change things around. This is a show with a director, so it could’ve just always and only ever been Julie doing that, the whole time, but Julie’s just too giving. So it was really nice to open it up to all of us and all of our instincts, to internally direct during the show like that. 

 

Do you remember any particularly interesting stories that you got to tell in that show?
One of my favourites just ended up being a story that I told. I was playing an old janitor, I think at Pearson Airport. We create this tableau at the beginning of the show and, in the tableau, I’m just sweeping. When we finally saw a moment from that guy’s life, he’s talking to his granddaughter about the old country, and about how important music was to him. I can’t remember how he got on to music- I think the granddaughter wanted to become a musician or he’d given her a guitar- and he talked about how, back when him and the grandmother had fled from Poland, music was the only thing that they had. And then we had this wonderful flashback to when he and the grandmother first met and fell in love, and they got to dance together. Then, when we went back to the tableau of him sweeping, ever-so-slightly now I got to let him just sort of dance with that broom as if he’s with his wife again, and it just felt so sweet and tender.

 

How’d you get involved with Slip?
I had been bugging Alec [Toller] for a long time, just basically saying “put me in a show, put me in a show!” because I’d been a fan of the stuff that he’d done before. I thought Special Constables was amazing, I thought Dark Matter was amazing, so I auditioned to do [Drunk Enough to Say I Love You by Caryl Churchill as part of the 2014 Playwrights Project] with him, and did not get the part. In the end it was probably great because, when I watched it, I just kept thinking “man, this is challenging”. But I got a message from either Alec or Mikaela [Dyke], saying that they were throwing some names around and I’m a name that got thrown around, and would I be free and interested in being part of this. And I said “yeah, okay, sure!” The idea for what the show would be already existed to a certain extent. I was given bullet points about what it would be, but I didn’t really have to audition; there wasn’t a text to audition from. I just got asked as a reward for years of relentless bugging.

 

Tell us a little bit about the collective creation process and how your perspective helped to shape the piece.
It was a really interesting process. We would go over to Alec’s apartment or Mikaela’s apartment and talk a lot about the characters in this mystery that we were trying to create, and then we would just improvise a scene, and see how that felt. We talked about who we wanted the characters to be and, at that point – and very much still, actually – I was like, “I like playing gay characters. I want to play gay characters. I want more gayness”. For a long time I think I’d put so much emphasis on making sure I could play characters who pass. I mean, I still think it’s valuable and, sadly, for the majority of parts that are out there, that’s gonna benefit me more if I can play straight. But there’s just something more exciting to me about creating a gay character. So, almost on a lark, almost to test how silly I could get away with being in this very dramatic story, I was like “I’m gonna play the sassiest coroner” and Alec didn’t stop me. So I just went with it, and it felt right. Alex [Paxton-Beesley] and Danny [Pagett]’s characters had such a chummy, relaxed, sort of bantery dynamic, so that vibe was already in the air and I could slip right into that – oh God, I used the name of the play!

 

Then, for the other character that I got to play, for Mikaela’s character’s brother, I guess I did get to be more dark and serious. I’ve been playing more and more evil, ominous roles and I kind of like that too. There’s something nice about being a little bit veiled and having something that you can hide, as the polar opposite of this just flamey, out there, whatever guy, to have this dark, powerful exterior is kind of nice. Though, in a way, that brother wasn’t even so much dark and powerful as he was just angry and frustrated. One of my favourite things that Alec got us to do was write diary entries as our characters and I wrote a bunch of stuff that never really had any textual bearing on the show, but that was just very useful for me anchoring into that character and how he felt about his situation and where his guilt was versus trying to hide from his own guilt. 

 

That character largely existed as the audience perceived him, through the detectives’ theories of what really happened. How did you approach playing this character that you had thoroughly developed and written diary entries about but all you could show us were skewed theories about him?
Yeah, that was the hardest part of the show for sure. It felt dishonest in a way. Though it was necessary for the plot and it made sense to do it that way. I guess I thought of it as a new separate character. So now I’m no longer playing this guy, I’m playing this other version who might as well even have a different name. I tried to take a lot of the same inputs of who I am and what I’ve lived through and what I feel about the person who’s in front of me, but just come to different conclusions from that. So, instead of feeling guilty, I’m gonna feel like revenge. But I definitely had a lot of anxiety about whether or not that approach was working at all. I’ve never developed a mystery before so I just had so many questions that could only be answered by an audience about does it work? Was it too obvious, was it not obvious enough? Did you like it? What? I don’t know. So it involved a lot of relying on instinct, I guess, and relying on Alec as the director to guide and refocus things. Though he tended to let me do what I was gonna do.

 

What are you most excited to explore in the remount?
Definitely different angles of this same brother character and finding ways to show the real version and the imagined version and have them plausibly be the same person, but approach them from different ways. As excited as I am to get to be a flamey coroner again, I spend enough time doing silly comedic stuff on a regular basis, so going deeper and showing many different sides of this one character is a really really exciting thing to revisit.

 

Do you have a favourite moment in the production?
I think my scenes with Mikaela. I’ve known Mikaela for a long time, I really like working with her, and those were the most intense, dramatic parts of the show for me. There was one fun detail where, as a practical use of the space, she decided to make tea and turned on the kettle. When it was going just right, it took the exact right amount of time for the kettle to click off, for it to happen at a perfect moment in the scene, and we worked it in every night when we could. That was just very satisfying, it felt like a little bit of stage magic. 

 

You also reunited with your sketch troupe Uncalled For this year for your first full-scale production at Theatre Passe Muraille. What stands out to you about that experience?
Producing’s hard. The biggest thing about that was the challenge of it. We’ve been working on that show for a ridiculously long amount of time, and it had gone through many iterations and many different forms, and when we did it in Montreal at the Wildside Festival at the Centaur, it was just such a big hit that we knew that couldn’t possibly be the end of the road for it. We were so excited, and it just worked so well, so we knew we wanted more for it. In retrospect, this wasn’t the right way to go about it, because we just didn’t connect with audiences in the same way this time around. We were in a very big theatre and it didn’t have the kind of massive turnout that we had the first time around. It was just a very long and draining process.

 

But the thing that was great about it was just that I’d been working with these people for most of my life, and we click so well together. So many of the best moments of that show were either in rehearsals when we broke out of the script entirely, or on stage when we just decided to mess with each other, and remembered that we could, that it’s our show and nobody else is gonna tell us that we can’t. Like, on closing night, I just started speaking in a southern accent in a scene, just because- which sounds so juvenile and irresponsible, it sounds like a theatre school thing to do, but really it was just us having fun. I guess being able to be playful with each other in the face of the nightmare of producing was the stand-out moment.

 

Which of the childhood games in the show was your favourite? It has to be Fashion Princess, right?
Fashion Princess, yeah! It’s amazing, that sketch really connected with people and consistently gets called out by people who see the show as one of their favourites, which feels really nice. I wrote that sketch so obviously it’s gonna be my favourite, but I wrote it in part because, as we were developing this show, originally the cast was just boys and we were like “there’s too many boy games”. Guns, and there was a cowboy scene that didn’t make it into this version, and astronauts- all of these are things that can be girl games as well, but they have this boyish energy about them, so I challenged myself to write something with a more feminine vibe to it. I’m like “how can I just mash together two of the most feminine things I can think of but still have a boy do it?” and hence fashion princess was born!

 

I think about how- although, like Kids in the Hall, we’re a group with a bunch of straight guys and one gay guy- we’re very much not like Kids in the Hall in that I have not carved out this very gay persona or avenue within our sketches. And the more I revisit old Kids in the Hall stuff, the more I’m impressed with how, in the late 80s and early 90s, Scott Thompson was able to just be so unabashedly out and create comedy with his straight friends and have it really work, and really work well. So that was also, I guess, inspiration for me to not hold back in that department.

 

You direct a monthly show at Bad Dog called Kinsey Fail specifically about LGBTQ+ stories. Tell us about how that came about and some of the best moments to come from it so far. 
That show is so nice, I’m in a very good mood about it. I had been thinking for a long time about how to explore the one community niche that I get to be part of, because I’m still, you know, a white man in the city. I’d been wanting to do something queer but I just didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t know who the people were that I could do it with. Then Tom Hearn came along, and he separately expressed this same interest in wanting to do some kind of queer show, to Julie, and Julie just sort of connected the dots and was like “you should talk to this guy!” We had a meeting with the three of us and we just talked and brainstormed about who we’d want to work with. [Laughs] There were moments when we started having to guess, and were like “I think this performer is bi, but I’m not sure”– it was a very awkward, strange thing to try to ferret out who in the community is queer, and who isn’t. It’s funny, before this, I really did feel surprisingly disconnected from other gay improvisers. It felt for a longer time than is realistic, like “well, I’m the only one, it’s just me”, which obviously is not true. I think I made that joke the first time that I met Scott Thompson; I pretended like him and me were the only two gay people who did sketch comedy, which obviously is not true, I just really wasn’t connected to them. And I felt like, within the gay community, when I was hanging out with my gay friends, the fact that I did improv and sketch comedy felt like something so outside of their world. It didn’t feel cool; it felt nerdy. Which is fine, I acknowledge that I’m a nerd, but I was not sure how to make an improv night attractive to the gay community. I wasn’t sure how to do it, so really what needed to happen was this connection needed to be formed where Tom had to also have this idea that he wanted to do this, and Julie had to be on board with it and encourage it, and I had to also be there and also want to do this.

 

So, between the three of us, we found people we wanted to work with. At first, the show was just a jam, because literally we were throwing people together who only had one thing in common, and who hadn’t necessarily performed together at all, so they didn’t necessarily have any chemistry to speak of. So the first couple shows were just figuring out what we like to do and how we’re connected. Then it eventually became more of an Armando style of improv, which just means that the scenes are inspired by people telling true stories. There would be a true story off the top, then some scenes, then another story that could be inspired by the events in the scenes, and then more scenes inspired by that, and back and forth and back and forth. That felt like a good way to give people a chance to talk about their experiences as gay people in the world and what they’ve gone through. It’s resulted in a lot of people telling how they came out, but also a lot of other weird random things- moments of light bashing, nothing too tragic, mild enough that we can all laugh about it afterward- and I really like that. I’ve told a couple stories off the top but, other than that, I stay out of the performance of the show; it’s nice to just sort of watch it cook. 

 

LGBTQ, not to mention the plus, is a lot of letters to represent. Have you felt much pressure to make sure everyone is represented?
Absolutely. And, in fact, I resisted referring to Kinsey Fail as an LGBT show, because it’s not accurate. There are no trans people in this cast; why would you say that this is a lesbian gay bisexual and trans cast, if it’s not? So, I’ve been trending toward, when writing about it, calling it a queer show- I just love that word, and the reclamation of it, it’s just vague enough that it works. This show came about simultaneously with a workshop series that happens before it, so the workshops are billed as an LGBTQ open and welcoming environment so, in that sense, the idea we’re trying to say is “yeah, all of those letters can come by! You’re all welcome here and hopefully we’re all gonna be cool with each other”. Then, when I talk about Kinsey Fail, I try to refer to it as a queer show.

 

But I would like to be more inclusive. I know I can’t just sort of wait for a trans improviser to come by and tap me on the shoulder and say “let me join”. I should be out there looking harder. It was definitely a weird enough challenge assembling the cast as it was. One of the stated goals of this workshop is we wanted there to be more LGBT people who are good at improv to begin with. If there’s a class that will bring that community into our community, then we won’t have to search as hard to build an ensemble that is truly representative. The ensemble is pretty white as well, and I would like for it to not be; it’s not exclusively white, but it’s pretty white. So that’s another aspect of representation that would be really nice to improve upon. One thing that we’re adjusting is I’ve been teaching the workshops that come before but, moving forward, that’s a role that I’m gonna share with different people so that it’s not just a white gay dude always as the access point for this queer-friendly improv space where you can actually get other people who represent other parts of that acronym. So yeah, it is very important to me, but it’s an ongoing process that hopefully we’re not moving too slowly with.

 

You also wrote and performed a story in the third episode of Tales from the Black that made me blush so hard that I had to turn it off and listen when I wasn’t in public. Tell us about the development of that story. 
I love that story. Colin [Munch, who hosts the podcast], who I love so much- I respect him so much and I’m so glad he’s on [The Second City] Main Stage now, except for the fact that it doesn’t feel right that only one project should suck up all of his time, because he’s so good at working on multiple different things that I wish he could continue to just be spread throughout all those different things- we were talking and he said “you should do a story for this”.

 

I was at a friend’s apartment. He definitely had nicer things than me, and I started to think about the relationship that a person has to their stuff, and the way that the stuff in their home connects to the people who enter into their home, the impression that you have of a person by way of what they’ve chosen to surround themselves with. Like, I’m broke, so I just am surrounded by what was available. I’ve mostly lived in apartments that have hand-me-down furniture or, you know, somebody says on Facebook that they’re getting rid of something and I’m like “I’ll take it!” but it’s not chosen or curated in the same way necessarily. So I was very interested in exploring how people can create who they are through materialism and through this curation of objects. I tried to think of how that can turn into something Twilight Zone-y and weird. Again, I’ve been trying to push myself to tell more gay stories, because for so long I have felt shy about that- I hang out with so many straight people, and I just feel like “oh, it’s not what they want to hear”. But turns out being gay is fascinating!

 

So it was just a great intersection of things that I’m thinking about and are very current right now. Grindr is such a big shift in the way that the gay community connects to each other. People have connected through phone lines and classifieds and stuff for ages, but you’re able to access it so quickly now that Grindr is closer to being a drug in and of itself. And, like all drugs, it can be lots of fun, but it can also have this dark side. I felt like there was a perfect opportunity to have this situation created where somebody connects so much better with a person’s materially created persona that that’s what they would rather fuck. They want to have sex with the persona, and they don’t care about the actual person anymore. It was like “okay, why not just make that literal?” With Facebook as well, I’m so guilty of it, I will create my curated persona. I can’t afford to curate my furniture in my apartment, so I curate the photos that people can see, and the experiences that they can know about. So, if I develop a crush on somebody just through social media, am I really interested in them, or do I just idealize this creation? Having that made manifest in physically being like “no, I’m going to fuck your objects” just felt like something so current and interesting and I hadn’t read anybody else writing something quite like that, so that was what I wanted to try. And I’m quite happy with it.

 

So what are you doing now/what’s your next project?
Well, you know that I’m remounting Slip. [On stage in the Tarragon Workspace until April 2nd. Get your tickets HERE].

 

I’m not 100% sure about some of the things that I want to do. I’ve been reluctant to say this, because I’ve gone back on it so many times before, but I’m feeling like I want to be doing more stand-up in my life. I’ve made this proclamation in the past and then done three stand-up shows and then not followed through beyond that, so it very well may go in that direction.

 

But, actually, the very freshest thing that I feel quite excited about is just last night I happened to watch this adult swim special called Mr. Neighbor’s House. It was just so dark and so scary, but also really funny, and I really liked it. It reminded me of the fact that comedy doesn’t always have to be funny all the way through. Which is something that I’ve always known, of course, but I think that, my approach to comedy sometimes, I’m afraid of alienation and I’m afraid of turning an audience off or making it too hard for them. But this was a reminder that, yeah, some people will be turned off but the result can be something that’s so much deeper and more fascinating for the people that do like it. There was a short script that I wrote I think a year ago that I showed to a couple friends but then ultimately decided “oh well, this is too dark, it’s not funny enough, it’s got a couple jokes in there but it’s just so sad that like nobody will appreciate this, so I guess I won’t do anything with it”. And when I watched this video last night, it just sort of reminded me that “no, screw those people that won’t like it; it could be amazing!” So I spent a lot of today doing rewrites and just revisiting it. I’m quite excited about it and I want to make a short film out of it. So, there you go, you’re the first one to know about it! Hot off the presses: I’m making a short film. I’m ready to just throw that out there and then, when I read this interview, and I’ve decided not to make the short film, I’ll be frustrated. But it’s okay, I’m pushing myself to actually do it.

 

Do you have anything you’d like to add?
Hire me! Anybody, if you’re reading this, give me work, please! Uh, no, nothing other than that. [laughs]