Funny Story is a dramedy co-written and directed by Michael J. Gallagher. It’s about Walter (Matthew Glave), an aging television star who agrees to drive Kim (Emily Bett Rickards) as he takes a road trip to Big Sur to see his estranged daughter, Nic (Jana Winternitz, who is also credited as a producer), get married. Walter and Kim are very much opposites, and they struggle to keep their conflict from ruining Nic’s nuptials.

Funny Story premiered at the 2018 Slamdance Film Festival, where it was an official selection. The well-received film has since barnstormed the festival circuit to pick up an additional 18 awards. 

“My first feature, Smiley, which was a horror/thriller, was not a personal story, to say the least,” Gallagher said.

With Funny Story, he wanted to tackle something personal and grounded.

“The genesis of Funny Story started with, ‘What if we put two people in a car who should not be together, who wreak havoc on their families?’”

Gallagher considered an improvised approach. 

“My producing partner Jana Winternitz and I were watching Joe Swanberg movies and Mark Duplass; filmmakers who were going with a beat sheet outline and doing an improvised film,” he said.

“I was definitely inspired by Larry David. Curb Your Enthusiasm is an entirely improvised series, where they have the story outline; they have all of the character beats, they know what’s going to happen in each scene, and the things they need to get across. The way they do it is improvised on the spot by improvisers and actors. So that was the original intent. I’d written a beat sheet — about 25 pages that took you through the entire story — that had every character and it had the main plot points.”

But as they got into pre-production, Gallagher said he started to develop cold feet.

“There are a lot of factors that go into making an independent film, and I knew time was one of them. I had come from more of a production background writing a sketch series, I had been writing and directing self-funded projects for a while. I saw that time is money, and you could hear the budget increasing as you’re thinking of things on set. I think the pragmatist in me said, ‘This is not the most efficient way to spend money, so why not come in with a game plan?’ We could deviate from it, but at least have a great bible to start with,” he said.

“Sometimes, you get a higher power speaking to you and it says, ‘Hey, maybe do a little more writing on this.’ I’m glad I got that message.”

Gallagher called Steve Greene, his co-writer on several spec scripts and produced projects, including The Thinning and Internet Famous.

“I said, ‘Hey, man, I have a fully outlined movie with no dialogue. Can we work on this thing and flesh it out?’ So the two of us got together and pulled crazy hours, went through, acted out all the parts, and made a full 92-page script.”

Gallagher decided to avoid making what he calls a “joke-a-minute” movie in favor of a character-driven narrative.

“That’s what’s so great about a lot of the newer independent films is they’re really letting the characters decide what happens. Even though we wrote the whole script, and maybe 10 percent of it is little improvised tags and things, we stuck really close to the script. I think what we wanted in the writing process was that feeling of anything could happen; letting the characters guide the narrative. That led us to some moments that even we didn’t see coming; characters just blurting things out and some fun tension that could come from that,” he said.

According to Gallagher, making Walter and Kim each other’s — and their own — worst enemy was intentional.

“So we didn’t really want either of them to feel like a hero, and we didn’t want either one to feel like a villain,” he said.

“We had designed it where Kim was going through a quarter-life crisis and Walter was going through a midlife crisis. What if these two individuals happened to meet at not the greatest time and, without knowing it, were both involved with the character of Nic? We didn’t want to make one character better than the other, or more righteous; we wanted each of them to just kind of do what they normally do, but now the stakes are much higher.”

Putting a stress test on both Kim and Walter’s moral compass was a way to see if they, as “self-destructive, and kind of narcissistic” could change, Gallagher said.

“I love movies and stories about prickly people who are kind of in their own way.”

Gallagher said the leads’ conflict is generational, as well.

“We wanted to follow both a baby boomer and a millennial and see their different ways into the world and let those ingredients play,” he said.

Gallagher’s production company, Cinemand, financed Funny Story.

“This was a movie that we wanted to just go off and make; we wanted to preserve the authenticity and do something that felt more naturalistic and edgy,” he said.

“It felt really pure and that energy just transferred into every department.”

The casting process was swift, too.

“We sent [Emily Bett Rickards] the script and we just talked about the character for a few hours … and it was pretty instantaneous that she would do it. She had a full handle on the character,” Gallagher said.

“The same thing with Matt Glave, who’s such a fantastic actor but who had never been given that lead role to kind of run with.”

Funny Story is available for video on demand on Apple TV and Amazon.