'The Snake' Interview

In 1989, a sitcom debuted that broke all the rules of the genre by following the maxim of “No hugging, no learning.” Seinfeld would go on to become one of the most successful and critically lauded television programs of all time. Unfortunately, it seems that few writers learned from the idea of omitting those hackneyed elements that weigh down so many works of art. Sure, there might be safety in using what’s been proving to work, but little progress can be made without risk.

Meet Adam Goldstein and Eric Kutner. They’re risk-takers. When they sat down to write The Snake, they threw out more than just hugging and learning. They did away with true love, death, crying, weddings, funerals, and many more movie standards. Their film tells the story of Ken, a womanizer who joins a body image support group in the hopes of bedding a recovering bulimic. Some say that the key to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Similarly, Ken discovers that the shortest route into a bulimic’s pants just might be by enabling her affliction.

As Alexander Pope said, “To err is human,” and Ken errs so much in the course of the film that he seems more human than most characters occupying the screen today. Ken is multi-faceted, his actions hinting at a past that created the sort of person one may find on the street, at a café, or even in a bar rather than in the midst of the sort of cliché movie that would have him learning a valuable lesson and finding true love. No, Ken stays the course, resulting in a film that’s as funny as it is original, satisfying, and memorable.

Ben Kharakh: What words would you use to describe Ken, the film’s protagonist?

Adam Goldstein: I would say he has really low self-esteem. He’s desperate, sociopathic.

Eric Kutner: [Laughs] Yeah, I think one of the keys to the character being even remotely likeable, to me, is that he wants to be this real Lothario, and it’s so clear that he will never achieve that. So I think that that disconnect, or the fact that it is unattainable to him, undercuts those aspects of his character that are so dark and selfish — basically the asshole part of him.

AG: Yeah, I would say another thing that helps get our audience’s approval is, to me at least, how clear it is that his behavior stems from a place of serious self-doubt. I mean, it’s his own lack of worth that prompts his desperate need for validation and approval, so I think that’s part of it. Also, I think he is suffering from arrested development a little bit. Eric and I had discussed that if only the character had gotten laid in high school, he might not have been such an asshole.

BK: It’s interesting that the woman he is pursuing is a bulimic, because it seems like there is a lot that his personality flaws have in common with her condition.

EK: What do you mean? Explain that. Maybe you’re making a connection we haven’t seen.

BK: Because bulimia is all about having this low self-worth and trying to achieve a greater sense of self through thinness, and it seems like Ken is in a similar pursuit. In the beginning of the film, for example, he doesn’t hook up with the girl because his friend disapproves. When his status is in jeopardy, he doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity, so he doesn’t get that status and he keeps reaching for it by pursuing other women, in the same way that the bulimic is reaching for greater status by purging. But in the end, neither Ken nor the bulimic will ever actually achieve what they’re shooting for because they see so little worth in themselves.

AG: Yeah. The other similarity that I can see between them is that they both don’t necessarily play by societal rules. They’re a little bit amoral and desperado in their quests for status. She’s got her distorted body image and she doesn’t really give a shit about the things she has to do to achieve what she wants, and, in a similar way, Ken doesn’t really give a shit what he has to do to try and get laid. It’s a little bit mercenary, I guess.

BK: It’s a shame for Ken because he has this affliction of being an asshole, but there is no asshole support group for him.

AG: It’s interesting you should mention that because we almost, at least in earlier drafts of the script, saw the body image group in the movie as an asshole support group by proxy, where Ken would learn to be a better person through his interactions with these women. But then we ditched that because that is less interesting than Ken continuing to be an asshole.

BK: What was the genesis of Ken’s character and of the film?

EK: Well, I think, in a lot of ways, the title came first. I was living in New York at the time, and I was out at a bar with a friend of mine, and my friend was at the bar with his girlfriend, and while his girlfriend went out for a smoke, he actually pulled the number of the girl that I was with. I told my uncle the story later and my uncle said, “Ah, he’s the snake; Harry’s the snake.” And that stuck with me. I thought that would be an interesting title and character to explore in a comedy.

AG: Yeah, and that’s how Eric first pitched it to me. He had that conversation with his uncle, he had that idea, and then he came to me and said, “Let’s do The Snake. Let’s figure out what this movie is together, and you’ll be in it, et cetera.” I think one of the things that it evolved into from there was a way for Eric and I to explore some of the darker elements of — I’m going to go ahead and generalize and say, the male psyche — and really just take some of those darker personality traits and impulses to their logical conclusions. The movie’s not deep — it’s a comedy, but I feel like we’re exploring things a lot of guys can relate to and just sort of isolating them, separating them from any sort of redemptive quality, and just taking a look at what a person looks like when they’re completely controlled by their “id.”

EK: Right. The stuff you wouldn’t want to tell other people that you did last night.

BK: What sort of research did you do for the film?

EK: Adam and I wrote the film together over about the course of a year, and a lot of that process was talking about our insecurities and darker impulses. Just being honest with each other about that, and talking about relationships we’ve had, talking about things in the past… So that was one form of research. Just being comfortable with someone, to look inward and talk about those things about yourself that were the less nice parts about yourself and how that could be mined for comedy. Then the only other research thing that happened to me was in San Francisco. I was having something to eat at this café, and these two women next to me were talking and they were having this really weird conversation about staying true to their program and what they’re eating and this and that. I asked these two women, and it turned out that they were a part of a compulsive eating group. So I found out when the group met and I went to a couple of those meetings.

BK: Speaking of communities, do you think Ken is someone who would have read The Game, Neil Strauss’s book on the seduction community?

AG: Actually, that was one of the things we explicitly didn’t want in our movie. We didn’t want a set of rules for the character to follow in terms of how he does what he does. There’s sort of a comedy truth where, especially in movies about womanizers, where someone’s like, “Here’s the three golden rules to always getting laid, or…”

EK: There’s a really good example of that in The Tao of Steve. That movie had a character really explicitly explaining how he gets women, and we didn’t want to do that.

AG: Yeah, we wanted to avoid that. Ken, A: is not all that successful at what he does, and B: I think we both sort of had the impression that he was more of a self-made man, doesn’t subscribe to lists or rules, will just sort of play it as it lays. So we just avoided that whole thing entirely, which is why I think we never bothered reading The Game all the way through. We did watch a few other movies that you could say fall into the womanizer genre, like the original Alfie, like The Knack, like The Man Who Loved Women…

EK: We also came up with a list of things we didn’t want to do with the film, because we had the title, and we had the idea that we were going to have this main character, and Adam was going to play it. We were thinking we were going to shoot it in San Francisco, so we had some parameters to the film: we knew our budget, which was zero. Beyond that, we weren’t exactly sure what movie we wanted to make. It was helpful for us, at that point, to think about what we didn’t want to do. So, in reviewing a lot of the generic things, we came up with a list of things to avoid. That’s on our website. The biggest one, actually, the one that influenced the film ultimately the most, we decided no one was going to find true love in our film. Finding true love is the typical solution to a womanizer movie. You know — he’s a cad, he meets someone and realizes, “This is the person for me. I want to change my behavior.” Then he has to prove himself to that woman to gain her affection in the end. Great. And what was interesting is Adam and I cavalierly discarded that option. That’s an easy out. We may believe in love, but we don’t believe in love in that way, and it’s overdone in movies. But then you realize that the reason so many movies end that way is that it’s satisfying. So without that as our conclusion, it suddenly became difficult to craft a satisfying story.

AG: Yeah, if you think about it, true love actually not only ends most womanizer films, it ends most films, or is at least a subplot in most films. If you remove the ending of, “They fell in love and lived happily ever after,” you’re actually removing a major story option. So it was challenging, at that point, to figure out where does the story go if it’s not “will they or won’t they?” So that was an interesting challenge for sure.

EK: And the other thing that is very common in films that we decided we weren’t going do is death. Death is not something I have a lot of personal experience with, but it seems to happen more to movie characters than anywhere else, and when we put that on our list, all of a sudden I would think about any movie I liked and it seemed to end with a funeral or a death. And that’s not just action movies or thrillers. Comedies often end with death too.

AG: It also can be sort of a cheap ‘out’ in scripts where they’re like, “Okay, now it’s time for the character to get serious and mature because there is a death, and death is as real as it gets.”

BK: On your website, you mention that you followed the rules “for the most part.” Which are the rules that you did not follow?

EK: Well, one of our initial rules was no puking, and as soon as bulimia entered the film, that one had to go to the wayside.

AG: Puking, for us, in indie films, is something that happens at the end of the second act when the character hits rock bottom and someone needs to signal total moral and psychological collapse.

EK: Which, for the record, is exactly what we do in our movie. [Laughs]

AG: That’s exactly what we do in our film! We justified it narratively, so it’s okay. But yeah, we ended up doing exactly what we said we wouldn’t do on that one. We also had no crying on the list, which, in a scene that was shot but cut, there was some crying. So we broke that rule.

EK: And that was the kind of thing where we broke our rule and realized later on that we were actually right to have that as “verboten” — we should have not had our characters cry. So now, in the movie, they don’t.

BK: The length of the film is also unconventional in that it is the exact amount of time you needed to tell your story, rather than the amount of time you needed to fill, which likely would have required you to add some fluff to it.

EK: Well, there’s also the second part, where he leads the failed revolution and he dies. We’re thinking about showing the two parts together.

AG: That’s right. It’s going to be an awesome film when side-by-side. [Laughs] We knew that we were making a comedy and wanted to be short because we see that a lot of comedies overstay their welcome. We wanted to get out while people still liked us and not twenty minutes after. So that was part of it, and then the other thing was that we shot our script and our total rough assembly edit was over two hours long, and then we just cut and cut and cut. So all we had left were the essential parts and the best parts, and that’s how we got to the run-time.

EK: We were really ruthless in our edit, yeah. And there are much longer versions of the film, but we felt like this one was the strongest, and because, ultimately, we were just making the film for ourselves and not handing it off to anyone, making it the strongest length was our priority.

BK: Adam, your portrayal of Ken is fantastic. What sort of preparation did you do for this role?

AG: I, for whatever reason, have a fairly easy time falling into the role of the lovable asshole. That’s kind of a comfort spot for me. There wasn’t a whole lot of preparation there, but the other thing that I find, because I act on and off, is I also tend to enjoy doing behind-the-camera stuff — photography, writing, et cetera — and so I find that when I do have a role coming up, I just tend to prepare by subconsciously becoming more and more performative in my daily life until it’s time to perform on camera, and if I don’t have a role coming up, I’m just more like a regular person. It was just the sort of slow psychological shift from “show up at a party, have conversation, listen to people, yadda yadda,” to okay, “try to tell a few jokes and make a few people smile,” just get the performative behavior happening a little more. But in terms of the character himself, it’s a fairly comfortable spot. And the other thing I did was grow a sleazy mustache. That was also in preparation for the role.

EK: The shoot maybe took a couple of months because it was all weekends and evenings, but then we had lots of shooting that had to happen afterwards. So Adam had to maintain that facial hair for a very long time, and I have to tell you, I wasn’t very sympathetic about it at the time. But just recently, for Halloween, I grew a mustache for kicks and I wore my mustache that day while I wasn’t in costume, and people looked at me like I was a total scumbag. I got into fights with people under circumstances where there shouldn’t have been a fight because they were just reacting to the mustache. So now I feel bad that Adam had to go through life like that.

AG: It was for like a year that everybody was looking at me like I was gum on the bottom of their shoe, and then in [Tom] Scharpling’s plug for us, he pointed out that it’s practically the worst mustache ever. I rocked that thing for a year. In real life.

BK: Do you think Ken has any philosophy on picking up women?

EK: I think one of the ways to think about Ken is along the lines of, “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one around to see it, does it make a sound?” That would be the equivalent of, “If Ken gets laid and none of his friends hear about it, did it really happen?” Does it count? Adam, would you agree with me that it’s all about the validation of other people knowing about it?

AG: Yes, I would agree with you there, which is why we decided Ken isn’t too prone to lying about his conquests, because it’s important to him that he actually has the conquest and then that people know about it. That said, I think Ken enjoys sex, but he sure enjoys it less if his friends don’t know.

BK: Now that the film is done, will you be adding more rules to your list?

EK: This list of rules was film-specific, but I would say that I think it was very helpful and that it’s a good way to approach future projects — to think about things you want to avoid — just so you’re not regurgitating things you’ve consumed in the past.

AG: I feel the same way. I’m very interested in genre as a filmmaker, and genre films appeal to me, but I think making a list of rules like we did for The Snake is a pretty good way to avoid the genre elements that are redundant and don’t really have much to do with real life. To me — and this is going to sound a little high-minded, especially given our film — but making a list of “don’ts” like that is a way to try and inject just a little more truth into a genre film than is usually there, so to go back to a previous example, if Eric and I don’t believe that true love is the solution to all of life’s problems, then we have to make sure we don’t make that the ending to our movie, because then we’re making a movie we don’t believe in.

BK: The film has been seen by a few people now, and the response has been very positive. Patton Oswalt, for example, has become a champion of the film, screening it a number of times at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.

EK: In a lot of ways, we made the movie as a proof of concepts. We think we can make entertaining movies and we wanted to prove it to ourselves before we tried to prove it to other people. So for Patton Oswalt to push as forward as he’s been doing is something we’re really appreciative of. He’s really been the kindest and most generous person, and we’re thrilled he likes it.

AG: I also want to echo Eric’s sentiment that Patton Oswalt really has been terrific to us. It’s hard to express how grateful we are. I should also point out that we only recently got to the point where we were ready for people to look at it.

EK: Yeah, and at this moment, what we’d really love is for more people to see it.

For more information on The Snake, including screenings, updates, and the trailer, visit TheSnakeMovie.Com.