In November of 2024, Will Ropp was standing in the gymnasium of an Oklahoma high school presiding over a particularly heated game of dodgeball. Ropp was in the middle of directing his first feature film, and the dodgeball game was one of its more involved sequences. With two cameramen capturing the melee, Ropp had a mix of his cast, crew and whoever the hell else was around join in the game.
As Ropp tells it, rather than choreographing complex gameplay, he opted to capture “organic little moments” of the furor of high school gym classes’ most time-tested and ridiculous way to waste an afternoon.
A year and a half later, those little moments have been strung together in Ropp’s Brian, which will premiere in the narrative competition section of the SXSW film festival.
Ropp, up until this point, is best known for his work as an actor in films like Ben Affleck-starrer The Way Back and Megan Park’s The Fallout and TV series The Sex Lives of College Girls and Love, Victor. While dreaming of making his own turn in the director’s chair, Ropp thought back on what he appreciated working with directors like Gavin O’Connor, whom he counts as his mentor, and Oscar-winning Peter Farrelly, who directed him in the Vietnam War-set comedy The Greatest Beer Run Ever.
“I was taking little bits from each one and storing them in the back of my head until I had the opportunity to direct,” says Ropp.
That opportunity finally came and nearly as quickly went away after a feature based on a short film he had written and directed fell apart. With financing already in place from Danielle Lauder’s Act 4 Artists, he thought that, instead of coming up with a new idea, writing a screenplay and starting the process all over again, he would find an unproduced screenplay he loved and keep the tentative production timeline he had already in place. So, he co-opted a friend’s Black List account and sifted through hundreds of scripts until he found Brian, a high school-set comedy from Late Night with Seth Meyers writer Mike Scollins.
The film follows the titular Brian, who has emotional outbursts, which means he has a hard time making friends, but also has enough self-awareness to make him thoroughly likable. With a supportive family, a TK-wearing therapist and an enigmatic newfound friend, he decides to run for senior class president after learning that his favorite teacher (and current crush) is the faculty advisor.
“I’ve dealt with mental health issues my whole life. A lot of my family members have. I identified with the lead character so much,” says Ropp. “But then came the hard part of trying to convince the writer.”
Ropp understood Scollins’ apprehension. After all, he was an untested filmmaker. But Brian was previously in development as a traditional studio with a veteran director attached, where it too fell apart. This all happened a few weeks before Ropp reached out about the screenplay.
Says Ropp, “A lot of the time when these movies are being put together, it’s gonna be years of development. I was like, ‘I know that I can go out and make this — very scrappily, albeit — but I can make it a good movie in two months.”
He sold Scollins on the plan, and prep for Brian started in August for an 18-day shoot in Oklahoma three months later. Ropp found his Brian in Ben Wang (Karate Kid: Legends, The Long Walk) and filled out his younger cast with actors like Joshua Colley and Sam Song Li, surrounding them with veterans like Randall Park, William H. Macy and Natalie Morales.
Still from ’Brian’
The production landed the state’s tax rebate and used majority local crew, save for cinematographer Matthew Pothier, shooting in their high school set over Thanksgiving break and, when school started again, on nights and weekends.
With under three weeks for filming, Ropp and his team had to race through parts of production. For the movie’s penultimate scene, where Brian gives his campaign speech alongside his fellow hopeful class presidents in the school’s cavernous auditorium, Ropp planned for 70 camera setups. With limited time (and even fewer extras), Ropp raced through the day, grabbing only one take before moving on to the next shot.
Brian splits the difference between a more nuanced coming-of-age story a la Sean Wang’s Dídi and a straight comedy in the vein of Superbad. It has what every good high school comedy should — a cast of characters that audiences will wish they could have hung out with during their teenage years. Watching Brian is a comfortable experience; like putting on a well-worn letterman jacket.
As with anything involving high schoolers, Brian takes a seemingly low-stakes scenario and injects it with high-stakes emotion. Explains Ropp, “When you’re in it, when you’re in high school, it’s all life or death. Someone breaks your heart, it’s gonna be the end of your life.”
Comedies, points out Ropp, whether high school-set or not, are not the current popular kids in the proverbial Hollywood lunchroom. And while there seems to be more proof of life — One of Them Days and The Naked Gun did well at the box office last year, while the Olivia Wilde-directed comedy The Invite was the biggest sale out of the most recent Sundance Film Festival — it’s still far from the halcyon days of the mid-aughts. Still, heading into Brian, Ropp was inspired by high school comedies like Wilde’s Booksmart and the John Hughes oeuvre.
“I’m not that far removed from [high school] and still have perspective on it,” says Ropp, who thinks about something Meyers, an executive producer on Brian, told him. “As my first movie, I was like, I should use the fact that I’m relatively young, because, as Seth Meyers said, they don’t let teenagers direct movies, unfortunately.”
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