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‘It’s about a 20-something gay man, living in West Hollywood, dealing with the
repercussions of a breakup. That’s essentially it,’ director Brandon Kirby
summed up his new series I’m Fine.
‘Because the
catalyst of everything that happens to him is a breakup, but it becomes much
more than that.
‘It becomes
about his own neuroses and dealing with his own shit, and really… it’s not
about the breakup, it’s really about his own shit he has to deal with.’
Born and raised
in Michigan, Brandon is now based in LA.
His writing
career started in a different direction, though.
Originally, the
director wanted to become an entertainment journalist – a film critic, to be
precise. It was a high-profile internship which led him to Los Angeles.
‘Right out of
college, I got an internship with the Hollywood Reporter,’ Brandon said.
‘Never having
been to LA before, never having been further West than Chicago, I just decided
this is something I have to do.’
Thanks to the
intervention of a good friend Brandon is now writing and directing his own web
series, called
I’m Fine, rather than writing about it.
‘She was like
“No, you should be a screen writer”,’ he said.
‘So she became
my writing partner for the first web series I made.’
Brandon said he
‘probably would’ve reached the conclusion myself at some point’, but his
friend’s encouragement helped.
As for the
inspiration behind I’m Fine, Brandon said he partly drew on his own
experiences.
‘The nugget of
the idea came from a hookup I had, that semi-based off the hookup Nate has in
the pilot episode,’ he said.
‘So I had that
experience, and I just wrote it. I wrote it as a short, showed it to that
friend.
‘I showed her
and she said “This isn’t a short, this is a series”. And I said “yeah, you’re
right”.’
From the
initial hook-up scene, Brandon then built the world for I’m Fine.
But beyond main
character Nate’s breakup, and his struggle to come to terms with everything,
the series also takes a close look at friendship.
‘Filmmakers and
TV shows like Broad City exploring female friendships in this very honest way,
in terms of like… even for females there is that fine line between friendship
and just relationship,’ Brandon said.
‘And that’s
been starting to get word in female friendship, and I wanted to explore that in
gay, specifically gay male, friendship, because there is such a fine line.’
I’m Fine was,
in parts, inspired by the end of Looking, but there is a distinct difference.
‘It’s more
cynical, and I’m trying to be as honest as possible,’ he said.
‘I think in
terms of looking at friendships, I wasn’t so much using Looking as an
inspiration as much as Frances Ha, the Noel Baumbach film.’
And of course,
Brandon said he had made the experience many gay men make – that a first date
very often turns into friendship, rather than a relationship.
‘We’re gay men,
and we’re all, we’re meeting… two of my best friends I met on Tinder. And
that’s a thing exclusive to the gay world,’ he said.
’In, like,
meeting for the first time as a date, but then you realize no, we’re not
romantic, we’re going to be friends.
‘But you could
still have, you know, some underlying attraction because the first meeting was
a date. And maybe the one person decided “no, we’re friends”, but what if the
other person is like “oh yeah, you’re right, we are friends, but if my friend
was magically interested – yeah, I’d go for it”?
‘So I feel like
during these, there is a lot of gray area.’
Despite it all,
Brandon said he is ‘trying to put himself out there’, with the goal of finding
a relationship.
‘It’s basically
a numbers game,’ he said.
‘That’s what
you have to do – it’s almost like a part-time job, dating.’
In terms of
filming, his biggest challenge was not to find a team, but the actual
realization of his plans.
With a limited
budget, Brandon said they shot the pilot in a single day. He had forgotten
about that fact, but his Director of Photography reminded him.
‘I swore it was
two days,’ he said.
‘But I guess
the main challenge is [that] we do try to keep it to one day per episode,’
Brandon said.
‘Because we
were on a very tight budget and people have paid jobs.’
Dekkoo is describing
I’m Fine as their first take-it-with-you ‘pocket series’: none of the episodes
is longer than 10 minutes.
‘‘The vision
was something very digestible in a short period of time,’ Brandon said.
‘But it was
also in the way we worked, in the beginning.’
The first four episodes
of I’m Fine start streaming on Dekkoo on 19 April; episodes five to
eight will follow on 21 June.
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