Filmmaker Mark H. Rapaport’s early career started with stand-up comedy, where he enjoyed getting up on stage and making the audience feel “severely uncomfortable.” That’s something he brought to his film Hippo.
This black and white film certainly leans into its dark, odd and oftentimes uncomfortable, but funny, elements, with co-writer and star Kimball Farley, along with Eliza Roberts, Lilla Kizlinger, and the voice of Eric Roberts (Eliza’s husband) as the narrator. The movie also has several impressive executive producers, including David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, Jody Hill and Brandon James.
“If I’m going to push the envelope, I always try to do it in an endearing way,” Rapaport told Yahoo Canada. “[The audience] at least can understand that this is coming from the weirdness of the situation.”
Hippo is centred around one family. Hippo, a narcissist teen obsessed with playing Body Harvest on Nintendo 64, and his adopted stepsister Buttercup (Kizlinger) is a religious, Hungarian Catholic immigrant, who knows very little about sex, but wants to have a baby with her stepbrother. Ethel (Eliza Roberts) is their mother, who oftentimes dotes on her son Hippo. All three of them have very little contact with people outside this family.
The voice of Eric Roberts guides us through the story were Hippo and Buttercup are exploring their sexual desires in a space of isolation, with Ethel not being the best source of information on sexual education.
‘He really is this mix of a child, but also a grown sociopath’
There’s a personal connection to the development of Hippo, and the collaboration between Rapaport and Farley.
“I always felt a little awkward as a kid and I grew up in a religious household, Orthodox Jewish in my case, and in my co-writer’s case, Kimball, he grew up Mormon,” Rapaport shared. “The strange way we both [felt] kind of like misunderstood young men growing up, let’s capture that energy and play with the trope of the mentally ill young man, … let’s bring our perspective to that in an entertaining, wild way that maybe we’ve never seen before.”
“Both of us trace back to our younger days. In Kimball’s case, not understanding what sex was. And he actually believed that it was when two people laid in a bed naked. And then I actually did receive a talk where my mother said that you will wake up in a puddle of goo. I literally was told that. And that was the impetus creatively for saying that there’s something here. Let’s have fun with it.”
Farley saw his participation in the script development as an “extension of the acting process.”
“It’s fun because I get to live with the character a little bit longer, which is, of course, a little crazy when it comes to a character like this,” he said.
With Hippo being such a particularly intense presence on screen, Farley likened the character to a “sociopath.”
“He’s like a sociopath, … almost like Javier Bardem’s performance in No Country For Old Men, but like, if you take that and mix it with a six-year-old,” Farley said. “He really is this mix of a child, but also a grown sociopath, and it’s a scary mix.”
“But something that helped me a lot was, I really love drawing. … I just created this little black book that had inspirations and things, but specifically, I drew a lot of pictures of hippos. This sounds so weird, but I drew a lot of pictures of hippos, and then I would love to colour them with crayon, like really crazy in dark red, like outside the lines, and make them look really scary. Because it just reminded me, it’s this fully formed hippo drawing, but it’s bursting with this childlike, chaotic energy.”
‘What I was trying to do the whole time was avoid a tantrum’
There’s a particularly interesting relationship between Ethel and Hippo, where he’s mostly being rude and barking orders at her, while she tries to essentially just stay on his good side. But you don’t get the sense that he completely doesn’t care about his mother at all.
“He really does care about his family, but he’s not going about things in the right way at all, to put it simply,” Farley said.
“I think that what I was trying to do the whole time was avoid a tantrum, because this kid’s tantrums, … Hippo, those tantrums could be dangerous, and I could just feel that probably she had dealt with those tantrums since he was very, very young,” Eliza Roberts said in a separate interview. “One of the easiest ways to avoid a tantrum is just say yes to everything the kid wants.”
In trying to avoid these tantrums, Eliza Roberts has an oddly alluring, specific performance. It’s that interesting approach that made Eric Roberts particularly want to narrate the story, which also came after the couple worked with Rapaport on his short film Andronicus.
“I’m a fan of my wife anyway, but the performance was like, ‘Wow, this is good stuff.’ Eric Roberts said. “It freaked me out.”
“You believed her so much that you knew you could not rescue her, and that is a walking tragedy with a smile on its face. It’s heart rendering, because we all know those people. A lot of us are related to those people. … She hit it so hard and so perfectly that it was like she was playing herself, and that’s where my wife’s a genius actor.”
‘Is this too insane?’
While some may be inclined to think that making this a black and white film is some sort of gimmick to get attention, both Rapaport and Farley stressed that it was specifically a tool to dull some of the absurdity.
“It turns out that gimmick, if it were a gimmick, distributors and buyers don’t like it, so I wouldn’t recommend it. If you’re doing it as a gimmick, it does not work,” Rapaport said. “But in our case, I’d fallen in love with black and white from my cinematographer’s photography, William Babcock.”
“He was like, we’re onto something here where, if we shoot something in a black and white world, it’ll tone down the absurdity of the comedy. A counterpoint to the absurdity is the black and white. … From a story building perspective, I really liked that and leaned into that, and realized we’re building our own little weird monochrome world. And if it’s in colour, some of that absurdity, it’s almost like too many things with your senses at once.”
When asked if and how any sort of line was established to not cross in the absurdity of the comedy, Farley shared that questions did come up, but they largely leaned into that desire for “insanity” in films.
“A week or so before filming I was like, ‘Is this too insane?'” Farley said. “We had a lot of conversations.”
“There [were] even a few people in Mark’s ear at the time being like, ‘You’re not really going to film this, are you?’ Because it gets very out there and raunchy. And I think to in today’s world, … there’s a real appetite for just weird, bonkers things. Like I loved The Substance, I thought that was amazing. … So you’re like, how much can we get away with before it gets to be like a giant platter of insanity.”
In order to be able to real dive into this dark story, Eliza Roberts highlighted that she had full trust in Rapaport’s vision.
“Some of this gets darker than I usually like, as an audience, but there’s total trust there,” she said. “You feel like he’s kind of teasing whatever might be inside of him, but you’re not scared.”
“You have to respect the genre and the vibe, even if it gives you shivers. And also on a set, we all had so much fun that you just trusted he was going to put together something, and it didn’t feel the way that it came out while we were doing it, which is kind of genius.”