A sad event for a close friend led filmmaker Brian Petsos to create the wonderfully absurd comedy, Big Gold Brick, starring Andy Garcia, Oscar Isaac, Megan Fox, Lucy Hale and Emory Cohen, now available on digital platforms.
“The initial piece of inspiration is actually kind of sad, someone pretty close to me suffered a traumatic brain injury and then sort of healing from that, which took a while, was a crazy thing to watch,” Petsos revealed to Yahoo Canada. “Just the levels of downs, many more downs than ups, was sort of the initial thing that really kind of got me inspired to start writing the screenplay.”
While we can be relieved that Petsos’ friend has now recovered, it’s that old tale about finding humour in difficult situations that reigns true for Big Gold Brick.
What is ‘Big Gold Brick’ about?
The film retrospectively tells the story of aspiring writer Samuel Liston (Emory Cohen) who is enlisted by Floyd Deveraux (Andy Garcia) to write his biography, after Samuel’s near-death experience in a car accident with Floyd.
With Samuel moving into Floyd’s suburban home, which he shares with his wife Jacqueline (Megan Fox) who is 25 years younger than him and an attorney in the city, his daughter Lily (Lucy Hale) whose drinking and drug-use squashed her pursuit of a career as a violinist, and son Edward (Leonidas Castrounis) who is described as having a “dangerous” combination of “incredible precociousness and hard-wired pessimism.”
There is this familial bond that’s formed between Samuel and Floyd, two people who are seemingly very different, particularly with Floyd being a big believer in fate.
As Samuel tries to understand Floyd’s life for this biography, which is far more secretive and odd than initially expected, particularly involving Oscar Isaac’s villainous character Anselm, Samuel is also experiencing his own hallucinations and flashbacks to his life pre-brain injury.
For Petsos, who has a background in improv comedy from the famed SecondCity in Chicago, his “improv” skills are mostly used in his writing process, rather than on set, but he does encourage actors to improvise in terms of making “out of the box choices” in the space.
“It’s more about fostering the idea of play and having people not want to sort of cut themselves off as performers when they’ve got some ideas,” the filmmaker said.
‘The absurdity is definitely a thing’
Another interesting aspect of Petsos’ movie is the attention to not just what we’re seeing in each scene, but what we hear. The filmmaker revealed it’s actually one of his most important components of Big Gold Brick.
“Music might arguably be more inspirational than cinema is to me,” he said, revealing that there are 31 licensed tracks in the movie and nine pieces of original score. “Oftentimes, before I can actually finish [writing] a scene, I have to find the exact piece of music.”
“You’re dealing with something like Beethoven, where there’s so many versions of the same recording and they all are paced differently, and all the undulations vary from version to version, I probably spent almost 200 hours programming music while I was writing the screenplay.”
While the trail of this story can seem a bit chaotic, there’s certainly something to be said for the weird, surrealist perspective that’s reminiscent of Wes Anderson. It may be creatively steep for some but nevertheless, a unique film to watch, particularly a unique approach to comedy.
“The absurdity is definitely a thing,” Petsos said. “Without sounding like some sort of cliche,…I find life to be absurd, if not daily at least weekly, and so for me, absurdity in cinema is something that actually feels very natural to me.”
“I assume there will always be a little bit of absurdity, a little bit of surrealism, a little bit of that in my stuff. I can’t really escape it fully, but where the dial is may change over time.”
Big Gold Brick is available across all digital platforms and theatrically starting Feb. 25
