Rookie filmmaker Kasra Farahani understands why people might roll their eyes when they find out The Good Neighbor is a psychological thriller that uses a found-footage technique.
He knows the pitfalls, and he tried to avoid them in his low-budget cautionary tale about two voyeuristic, tach-savvy teenagers who prank an elderly neighbor by staging a haunted house and filming his reactions before having the tables turned.
“So many tropes of the found-footage film are silly. The camera is always shaking and the people are needlessly zooming,” Farahani said during the recent South by Southwest Film Festival. “In actuality, even young kids are pretty sophisticated with this technology. They’re good at it. By the time they get to be teenagers, they’re pretty adept.”
In the film, Ethan (Logan Miller) and Sean (Keir Gilchrist) are best friends who set up their elaborate scheme from Ethan’s bedroom, bugging the house of their reclusive, unsuspecting victim (James Caan) during his rare trips to the store. Their goal, besides mischievous pleasure, is ostensibly to create a documentary that would achieve viral fame. But what they see isn’t what they expect, and the ramifications could be severe.
“It has some genre elements, but it has a lot of discipline, in terms of staying focused on the characters,” Farahani said. “I don’t know why so much of genre filmmaking feels like it needs to be on one side or the other. You either have to be a horror thriller or a character-driven film. We wanted to make a classy and substantive genre picture.”
The stories of both the pranksters and the old man present a contrast not only in terms of motive, but also technological knowledge that allowed for some visual experimentation, Farahani said.
For example, since the youngsters are making a documentary, he mixed grainy, anamorphic surveillance footage inside the house with a digital single-lens reflex camera on the boys to resemble a look commonly found on YouTube or other amateur video hosting sites.
“The film is about the progression of this kind of slow-motion car crash of these two worlds,” Farahani said. “We wanted to give their story a crisp look. I wanted things almost to be jarring when you cut between them, so when the characters merge as the film progresses, it means something.”
Miller (Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) said he was attracted to the film’s fresh approach to familiar themes and techniques, as well as the moral complexity of his character.
“So many things in this film were combatting how I feel about the internet,” Miller said. “I was really excited to try to play somebody who manipulates the world around him, but also try to show the idea that millennials can have this desensitization to the reciprocations of their actions.”
The history of The Good Neighbor can be traced back several years, to when the script by newcomers Mark Bianculli and Jeff Richard was a hot property in Hollywood and attached to a studio with more of a supernatural genre concept.
That project never materialized, and the screenplay languished until being rescued by some independent financiers who handed the reins to Farahani, an art director (Star Trek Into Darkness) making his feature directorial debut.
“The story is really focused on the mystery of Grainey and his character,” Farahani said. “Is he a good guy or is he a bad guy? We were trying to balance getting an honest performance without red herrings and keeping the suspense up.”
The filmmaker credits Caan, 76, for helping to sell the twists in his story with a mostly solitary portrayal that includes little dialogue.
“It’s a little more difficult, but I’ve been trained to listen and be aware of your surroundings,” Caan said. “It was like going back to school. I had my own dialogue within myself.”
