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Kline met him when Emanuel was an 11-year-old customer at the video shop where he worked. As Robert’s chirpy best friend, the first-time performer Miles Emanuel (“I don’t like the term ‘non-actor’,” says Kline) is winningly authentic, possibly because he is playing a version of himself. The extended gestation allowed him to build the characters with his cast members, some of whom he has known for years. Or rather: “It was nurtured like a sick baby under a rock.” That’s most people’s first movie.” His had time to mature. Then the result is undercooked because they didn’t figure out what it was. So many hack producers rush these little indies so they can shove them into Sundance. “And everyone recognised that Funny Pages didn’t need to be forced into a traditional production schedule. Along with Ronald Bronstein, who directed the clammy, squirm-inducing Frownland, they worked with Kline on the script for several years.Ĭomic capers … Daniel Zolghadri in Funny Pages “Once the Safdies got involved, people understood Funny Pages through a different lens,” he says. They share a scuzzy but humane sensibility: he helped make an animated trailer for their 2009 debut, Daddy Longlegs, and acted alongside a monkey in their 2010 short John’s Gone. Kline has known him and his brother Benny, the directors of Uncut Gems and Good Time, since he was in his mid-teens. That is, until Josh Safdie read Funny Pages and offered to produce it. I tried my connections and failed, time and time again.” They thought it was juvenile and offensive. People did not treat me or this project seriously. “You get the meeting and they say: ‘I’m so excited for this, I’m going to read it right now!’ But they’re just trying to get you out of the room. They wanted so badly for me to figure out a way to make my film.” The industry was less enthusiastic. Were his parents supportive? “ So supportive. Whatever, it’s a sucky scenario to be in.” Would you? Imagine if your friend said: ‘Hey, my kid wrote a thing.’ Ugh. No one wants to read someone’s kid’s ‘thing’. “Like, maybe if somebody knows somebody then maybe you can get a script to them. “But nobody treats you seriously!” he protests. One Twitter user, for instance, described him as “a third generation nepo baby on both sides of his family”. So when Kline tells me about the travails of getting Funny Pages made, and how it took 10 years of frustration, misery and rejection, I warn him that people will be sceptical.

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His sister is the musician Greta Kline, while his late maternal grandfather, Joseph Cates, was a US TV producer as well as the director of the sleazy 1965 thriller Who Killed Teddy Bear? starring Sal Mineo. Those parents are Kevin Kline, who won an Oscar for A Fish Called Wanda, and Phoebe Cates, the Gremlins star who retired from acting 20 years ago. It noted that he “lives with his parents uptown and hopes to be a director”. The magazine described him as one of the city’s “young moderns … tall and handsome, with big feet, a round face, and dark eyes”. A kind of indie It-boy, he was mentioned alongside the teenage Zoë Kravitz in a New Yorker piece about the East Village. “Being a child actor seemed a hellish path, and a quick way to embarrass yourself.”īy 15, he had become a familiar face at punk joints, repertory cinemas and comic-book dives.

“I never wanted to be in the industry,” he says. Kline went straight back to school after making the film in the summer holidays and ignored the scripts that flooded in when it became a surprise hit.

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It was a good lesson in how to inject personality where there isn’t money.”Įven The Squid and the Whale was a low-budget quickie shot on handheld 16mm and stripped of showbiz glitz. “We’d be cutting and gluing and Xeroxing. Kline also played in “obnoxious novelty bands” who put out vinyl singles with handmade covers. “He’d write sweet messages on my wall and post pictures of himself in the mask doing funny things,” he says. He drew comics, made CDs of his own prank phone calls and befriended the late Chris Sievey, AKA Frank Sidebottom, on Myspace.

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His adolescence was full of lo-fi, DIY exploits. Photograph: Samuel Goldwyn/Sportsphoto/Allstar

Divorce comedy … Owen Kline and Laura Linney in The Squid and the Whale.

Expression see you in the funny pages