ACIDMAN: An Interview With Writer And Director Alex Lehmann

Introduction

Maggie (Dianna Agron, Glee) tracks down her estranged father, Lloyd (Thomas Haden Church, Sideways), who is now living in the Oregon wilderness and has become obsessed with UFOs. After joining one of his night-time searches, she realizes that his obsession has only intensified over the years. As she struggles to understand him and share with him her own life-changing news, their relationship ebbs and flows through anger, silly jokes, tender gestures, and sadness.

Synopsis

After being estranged for a decade, Maggie has finally made the decision to visit her father. Without a clear location or destination, or even telling him she is coming, she relies on guesses and asking strangers for directions. She finally happens upon his cabin, on which local kids have scrawled ACIDMAN. Not to her total surprise, she learns that her father, Lloyd, lives a reclusive life, with his only contact being with the waitress at the local diner and his trusted dog, Migo.

He tries to be accommodating and shows genuine paternal warmth, but his struggles are evident as he displays that his social skills have been eroded by his seclusion, as well as some possible mental health issues. During conversations he seemingly becomes ‘spaced-out’, losing his train of thought and hiding behind short responses (and a sock puppet). Are these genuine areas of concern or coping mechanisms?

He begins to open up as she starts to indulge him as he watches and records the night sky, looking for extra-terrestrial life, in order to make first contact. She always knew this was his passion, so much so that it drove a wedge between him and his family when they were both younger. She learns now it has become his raisond’etre. As his guard comes down, so does her’s as Lloyd begins to question Maggie’s motives for her impromptu visit: is she running to something or from something?

Analysis

Those expecting a Close Encounters of the Third Kind-type, CGI-heavy third act are going to be sorely disappointed. Acidman is a slow character-driven film, with director Alex Lehmann utilizing the charisma and chemistry of its two leads, as well as their surroundings. The film moves at its own pace and holds back on deep dives into its characters and allows the conversational dialogue to supply the film with its character development and indeed its humor.

Glen Dower:

Mr. Lehmann. How are you, Sir?

Alex Lehmann:

Well, thanks. How are you?

Glen Dower:

I’m really good thank you and thank you for talking with Cinema Scholars today. So, straight to it. Your new film, as director and co-writer, ACIDMAN, how did you decide upon the title? Was there any point after you decided on the title, you thought ‘Oh, people are going to think this is a superhero movie’?

Alex Lehmann:

Well, I mean, I think superhero movies are still doing okay! That was the whole idea. We were either going to call it Acidman or Star Wars Man, but the lawyers said that Star Wars Man was going to get a suit. So we went with Acidman! No, it’s funny. The first draft of this was seven years ago. Maybe I had put this one away for a while. It was too personal to make for quite a while. The timing wasn’t right. But the original concept of Acidman, there was this guy when I was growing up in my hometown when I was a kid, and he probably had schizophrenia. He was an older guy that lived with his parents and there was a mythology that the kids had made up about him. That he went on a bad acid trip and never came back.

And so, he was reduced to this cartoon character. I only found out a year ago that the adults actually had a name for him too, which was the Walking Man because he would walk around everywhere in the town, but you couldn’t connect with them, you couldn’t, whatever. It all just seemed really lonely and sad. And also, just there, was how much are we lacking curiosity about someone when we just make up a story about them or some lame nickname. So we go, ‘that’s who you are’. That’s the antithesis of what we should be doing to connect and to be more curious about people we don’t understand.

So that man had always stayed with me. And then my thought of, what if your parents, that you used to really close to and connected to, all of a sudden, time goes by, you feel really strange about them, and they are that Acid Man or they are someone so far from who you knew. Maybe because you’ve built up a certain resentment or there are certain conflicts that have just stayed in your relationship, you’ve reduced your relationship with this person to just a couple really over-oversimplified and toxic beliefs instead of remembering that they’re a complicated person that, with a little effort, you could get to know. So that’s really what’s behind the title. And it sounds cool too.

Glen Dower:

Yes, and it does sound cool. Definitely. The idea that Maggie happens upon her father, she’s been looking for him in Oregon and sees the display, the graffiti that some kids have made on his cabin, this is before she has seen him, she has this look that says ‘Yeah, that sounds about right.’ I want to talk about the casting quickly, which came first, Thomas Hayden Church or Dianna Agron, and did one influence the casting of the other, once they were decided?

Alex Lehmann:

Dianna came first and she was my first choice for Maggie, and she really got the script. She connected to it. She brought some really great ideas and helped develop them with me to make it even more specific to the father-daughter storyline. I knew what a father-son storyline could be, which was the original script. And then I changed it to a daughter. There were just specifics that you just need a woman to tell you this is how these are the specific ways that I’d want to connect with my father. And some of these things I can’t even say in this interview because they’re spoilers to the film.

She came up with some really key things. Then she and I made a list of who we would like to work with, and Thomas was at the top of it. And also, something I haven’t mentioned in any of the interviews yet, but they also have these very distinct voices. The two of them. They definitely look like they could be father-daughter. But Thomas’s voice is really interesting and deep, and recognizable. Dianna’s an amazing jazz singer if anybody ever listens to her, but she’s got this deeper, more full voice. And then of course I was like, well, we should do something about that, so found that storyline in the script about their voices. I even played with Thomas’s voice with the sock puppet.

Glen Dower:

I love that moment.

Alex Lehmann:

Yeah? it’s Great. They felt right as father and daughter and our prep process, we didn’t rehearse the script, we just talked about the scenes and sometimes improvised stuff on the phone, but most of all just talked about how we connect to our parents or in Thomas’s case, how he connects to it, his kids, and just even how our parents connected to their parents. And as we got to know each other better, we really kind of figured out how we all had real personal skin in the game and how we related to the characters, and getting to know each other as vulnerable people, allowed us to dig deeper into the actual filming of the scenes because we all knew what we were bringing personally to the table in all these scenes.

Glen Dower:

One area I really want to ask you about as a creator, is Lloyd’s dog, Migo. And I don’t want to go too much into it of course, but I just wanted to ask your opinion as a creator, as a writer, Migo as a character, a companion. I was taken back to watching the Predator film, Prey. And I remember thinking, ‘if anything happens to this dog, I’m walking out of this theater.’ Why do you think audiences invest so much or why do creators utilize dogs as companions so specifically in stories?

Alex Lehmann:

Well, why is this guy, Lloyd? Why is he able to connect with a dog when he just can’t get along with people? There’s that unconditional love that we get from animals easier than people. I mean, God, the animals teach us how to love, right? Animals just, do it. They say, ‘I don’t care if you didn’t feed me or if you’re grumpy or whatever. I still love you. As long as you don’t try to kill me, I’m not going to try to hurt you. I love you. And so these beacons of unconditional love, if something happens to them, I think that’s just more soul-crushing.

Humans are far less perfect in the game. And so we can go, well, we watch a war movie and go, like, ‘that guy got blown to pieces.’ But he probably didn’t pay his taxes. He probably has an asshole of a brother. So it’s okay. But I don’t know. We can justify people in a way that we can’t justify animals. And of course, I mean, I don’t want to talk too much about what happens in the movie, but Lloyd’s connection to the dog is really important.

And I think that, okay, I’ll just say one more thing. I do this as well. I see a lot of people with their pets. When we don’t know how to resolve relationships or issues in life, that love, we put that work into animals. And so I know people who have gone through divorces and the animal is their relationship that they then build with their pet. It’s the healing of the wound. The wound of the divorce, which they couldn’t work out with their partner or with the person. We do a lot of self-work and growth with animals that aren’t tangible. But yeah, a lot of our excess love goes into animals.

Glen Dower:

Yes, it makes a whole lot of sense in the context of the film. Another area that really struck me is when I read, then reread the ‘storyline tagline’, if you will. “ACIDMAN tells the story of Maggie who tracks down her estranged father Lloyd, now living in the Oregon wilderness obsessed with UFOs; together they attempt to make first contact.” Now first reading, you think, ‘oh, we have a sci-fi exploration/father-daughter story’. And then reading it after I had watched the film, we can read first contact as the pair trying to connect in a meaningful way after all these years apart: making first contact again with each other.

And it’s really interesting you’ve said the story changed when Dianna’s character was changed from male to female, and that relationship worked. Also, Lloyd, we could see Lloyd become so lucid when he was talking about the UFOs, or IFOs (Identified Flying Objects) as he corrected his daughter, he’d come so clear and when he was creating his music, interacting with Migo, and then when he is with his daughter, he switches and has that absent-mindedness. At that moment in the car, for example, he looks around as if he is asking ‘Where am I? How did I get here? With Thomas, what direction did you give him in regard to showing a possible mental health issue?

Alex Lehmann:

Yeah, we did want to show that there were some mental health challenges. Nothing that would require help, we still wanted to feel like he could live on his own. But it was also kind of that there is maybe this ticking clock of ‘if you don’t get to know this man now, he is maybe disappearing’. That does, unfortunately, happen in life happen where the older we get the more of a chance there is that our awareness goes away, and our memory goes away. And so the idea that she, she’s got some unfinished business, and she wants to regain the connection with her father, we don’t have forever to do that. I don’t feel like I have forever to do that. So there’s that.

And then I think the passion that Lloyd has, he comes awake with the passion when he is talking about certain things like that that goes to show, we just wanted to make sure that he felt like a kid in some ways where he was so excited and alive by his own beliefs and his own world, his own games, his music, and everything, showing that he wasn’t just a dude that was sadly ostracized in the woods and had nothing to live for, but in fact, he had some really cool things to live for that were really nourishing to him.

I think it is important to know that there is a purpose to how he’s living and why he’s living that way and it makes him likable ultimately without giving too much away, I think that getting to see him as a child in some ways to behave like a child and really appreciating that about him allows you to appreciate what their connection used to be and how it’s way more cyclical when you remember your parents were children, you were a child, your children will be adults. We all go through that cycle and we connect on all those levels instead of just this one moment in time.

Glen Dower:

Definitely. And the idea that he is really excited about it, but he’s very articulate and very matter-of-fact. They are UFO/IFOs, they’re just on what he calls ‘an interplanetary drive-by’ and he states their motives and superior intelligence as facts. Is that something again that you and Chris brought, up a personal belief or is that just for Thomas’ character that these are UFOs, they’re up there, they’re coming to see us and communicating – this, is it?