Posted in: Exclusive, Interview, Movies | Tagged: Eliza Roberts, eric roberts, exclusive, hippo, interview, Kimball Farley, Lilla Kizlinger, Mark H. Rapaport

Hippo Star Kimball Farley on Casting, Family Mystery & More

Kimball Farley (Andronicus) spoke to Bleeding Cool about his latest black comedy Hippo, casting, Eric Roberts & Eliza Roberts, family & more.

The ideal situation for many Americans is to have a nuclear family. Still, the harsh reality is that single-parent homes have become just the norm, and their dreams for financial security and stability have become a steeper hill to climb. Director Mark H. Rapaport and co-writer/star Kimball Farley erode that innocence in the Kinematics & Rough House film Hippo. Farley, who plays the title character, is a high-strung gamer steadily becoming a survivalist while living with his mother, Ethel (Eliza Roberts), and his heavily religious Hungarian Catholic stepsister, Buttercup (Lilla Kizlinger), who's in a hurry to grow up ignorant on what to do with her biological impulses. The Andronicus (2021) and In a Silent Way (2020) star spoke to Bleeding Cool about whether the film's identity was shaped by who Hippo and Buttercup's father is, casting, and how the film could easily about either sibling.

Hippo Star Kimball Farley on Family Identity, Casting & Buttercup

Bleeding Cool: Was there any consideration to physically introducing the father character, or was it intended to be more alluded to and played out for Hippo to discover?

It's funny. We thought, "Should we show his father?" We had some flashback ideas, but we liked that you never see him, and then you're left to wonder if the narrator is Dad. Who is the dad? You find out towards the end, maybe where you find out where the dad is. It was fun to play with that, which in most movies would be a huge reveal, and it changes the course of the film like he found out this key piece of information, and now we're going to go here with it. Since Hippo is so self-absorbed, cares only about himself, and focuses on things like world domination, he takes that, tosses it aside, and says, "I don't have time for this."

That was part of the mystery since you got Eliza and Eric Roberts involved. How did they get involved in the film, and why was Lilla perfect for Buttercup?

Eric and Eliza, what's great is that we previously worked with them on the short film Andronicus, and they played my parents in that. It was a similar kind of character when we made this one. The character wasn't fully like Hippo, but it had a bit of that, so we were this became like the feature version of that in a sense, but not really.

We already knew them, and we had a great relationship with them. We were like, "Do you want to do this?" They're so great, and they said, "Yeah, like, sign us up. Eliza is amazing. She's perfect as the mother, and Eric's voice is perfect for carrying you through the whole film. With Lilla, what's funny as originally, we were writing Buttercup to be an American girl, but something didn't feel quite right.

Mark was at the Berlin Film Festival at the time with the movie 'The Scary of 61st' (2020) that he produced, and Lilla was there with this movie called 'Forest: I See You Everywhere' (2021), and she won the Silver Bear for it. They met and became friends. Mark said, "I think I found her, Buttercup," and it was her first time in America. It was a complicated process because this new variant of Covid had come out, this Omnicron variant. It was a tough process, but the movie could not have been made without Lilla. She is the core of the film, especially towards the end. The movie could be called 'Buttercup.'

I don't know if it's within the nature of the film or cut I've seen, but would there be any subtitles regarding what Buttercup was saying since she was speaking in her native tongue in her prayers?

Definitely, we thought about it, but it could be more interesting since it's almost like you're watching her have this moment alone, and you don't know entirely what she's saying, but you can feel it from her heart. We thought about having subtitles, but it was more important you felt it was like you were peering into her world. That way, you could almost feel her isolation because almost no one around her with this family she has now even knows her native tongue. She's the most isolated of all of us.

Hippo, which also stars Jesse Pimentel and Vann Barrett, is in select theaters.

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