COM Alums Helm New Indie Dramedy Give or Take
Director and producer on themes of loss, memories, and gay marriage, pandemic delays, and how everyone pitched in to get it made
Film poster courtesy of Breaking Glass Pictures
COM Alums Helm New Indie Dramedy Give or Take
Director and producer on themes of loss, memories, and gay marriage, pandemic delays, and how everyone pitched in to get it made
Paul Riccio has experienced a lot of loss in his life: his parents died when he was in his teens, followed years later by the death of his brothers and a sister. So when the Hollywood veteran set out to make his first feature film, he wanted to explore the themes of love and death.
The film, Give or Take, opened in theaters last month and is now available on digital platforms. Riccio (COM’90) directed, cowrote, and produced the dramedy, which was filmed in and around Orleans on Cape Cod in spring 2019. Riccio has worked in the film industry for three decades: his 2013 short film Space Cadet premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival; his mockumentaries, 2016’s The Timmy Brothers—Water Makers (about Brooklyn-based makers of bespoke water) and 2018’s Boccamazzo Construction—We Build “Walls”! (about the idiocy of building the Mexican border wall) have played at numerous festivals. In addition, he has created commercials for brands such as JetBlue and Gillette.
Angela Malley (COM’10), who has worked on Emmy-winning commercial campaigns and as a postproduction coordinator or assistant on feature-length films (including How to Survive a Plague, nominated for a Best Feature Documentary Academy Award), was also a producer on the film.
Give or Take follows Martin (Jamie Effros, the film’s cowriter), a young man whose estranged father, Kenneth, has just died. Their relationship was further complicated after Kenneth came out following his wife’s death and quickly started dating a younger man, Ted (played by two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz), who eventually moved in with Kenneth. Martin makes the trip home to Cape Cod to clean out his dad’s house (which Ted is currently living in). Martin and Ted clash at first, but come to understand each other and work to honor the man they both loved. The film also stars former Saturday Night Live comedian Cheri Oteri as a pushy real estate agent.
The movie had its world premiere at an all-virtual Woods Hole Film Festival in 2020 (where it won the audience award for best narrative feature) and later appeared at numerous other festivals. The film currently has a 94 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Bostonia spoke with Riccio and Malley about their BU connection, what drew them to the project, and what it was like to make an indie film during a pandemic.
Q&A
with Paul Riccio and Angela Malley
Bostonia: Did you two know each other before you started this project?
Paul Riccio: No, Angela and I did not know each other.
Bostonia: When did you realize the connection?
Angela Malley: The first time we met. Jamie Effros, Paul’s partner on the project, is my husband’s best friend. He had sent me the script back in the fall of 2017. And I remember reading it and just loving it so much. He asked for feedback, and I said, honestly, I really have no notes, this is great.
I had a full-time job at the time, but I asked them to keep me in the loop about their plans. And then about a year later, things started to ramp up and Jamie asked me to come on board to produce, so in January 2019 I met Paul for the first time. They already had a producer, but they still needed some extra help, so we just wanted to all meet and figure out next steps. Paul said something about how he went to school in Boston, and it was a really cool coincidence because it’s so fun meeting other Terriers.
Bostonia: Angela, what interested me most about your background was that you combined an undergraduate degree in film with a master’s in public health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Can you talk about that?
Malley: My parents are in the medical field, and I would go on medical missions with my mom to Central America when I was in high school. I was doing TV production in high school and I did news stories about our travels, and I remember that our work really resonated with a lot of people. It made me realize that video and film can really have an impact.
I ended up going to BU (which was my dream school), and there I grappled with: do I go into medicine or do I go into film? I chose film, but I also took classes in public health and epidemiology.
Give or Take deals with human behavior, social norms, and social stigma, and so it’s pretty remarkable what you can do with the power of film and TV. A lot of my work has crossed the two fields; this film is indirectly public health–related and touches on important social topics, like gay marriage and what it means when people aren’t legally protected.
Bostonia: Paul, can you talk about these themes and how audiences have responded to the film?
Riccio: It’s amazing—there are a lot of universal themes that are explored in the film. I must say I get a lot of feedback from gay men who have actually lived this story or from men whose fathers have lived this story.
I think there’s a misconception in this country that with gay marriage comes the exact same sort of levels of protection as a marriage between a man and a woman, but that’s just not the case. You can be [in a gay marriage], but upon your death, the other family doesn’t give it the proper respect that they might give a traditional marriage. It’s very sad how some of these men are sort of ostracized and sort of left out of the equation, even after having a legal marriage in a loving relationship.
Bostonia: How did you get the idea for the film?
Riccio: The themes that are in this film are sort of an amalgam of ideas that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time. I’ve had a lot of loss in my life, starting at a very early age—my parents, brothers, sister—and it was something that I always wanted to explore in a film. This story has been told before; usually it’s the passing of a father or mother and the character reconnects with a new girlfriend or boyfriend, so this is that story, just told differently. A guy’s wife dies, and he comes out of the closet and lives a completely different life than he did with his wife and his child.
And so, while this story is not a direct lift from anything that I’ve experienced, it’s really a combination of things.
Bostonia: Death isn’t normally funny, but you and cowriter Jamie Effros manage to make this film really funny at times. How did you do this?
Riccio: There’s a bit of crying in the film, but I also thought that humor was crucial to it too, otherwise it would be just a real downer. Cheri Oteri’s performance is integral to the enjoyment of the film and its sort of cohesive nature. I’ve done a lot of writing and a lot of films and that’s one thing I’ve always remembered: you’ve got to let the audience off the hook, so to speak, and give them places where they can breathe. We were very careful about mixing the humor and the drama, and I think they play off each other.
Bostonia: Angela, what made you want to produce the script when you read it?
Malley: I loved the story, I thought it was so great. Jamie is a good friend of mine, and I really wanted to help him and I trusted him and Paul in terms of their creative vision. It was an exciting project to be part of, and I also love a challenge.
I knew this was going to be a tough one since it was a small indie and there was no studio backing. And when you have a limited budget, you really have to be resourceful and you have to be really great team support. Sometimes it can be tough, but overall it was a great experience.
Bostonia: Paul, what were some of the challenges you encountered making this film?
Riccio: I actually give ourselves a lot of credit, because I don’t think we bit off more than we could chew. We knew what we had at our disposal. We knew the time we had, we knew the money we had, and I think we made a movie that we knew we could get done in a reasonable amount of time if everything went perfectly. It felt like we were pushing a rock up a hill trying to get the thing going. We had the script in 2016 and it took three years to kind of get it going. We had to wait for Norbert [Leo Butz]’s schedule—he was on Broadway in My Fair Lady, so we had to push into the spring of 2019: we shot in April and May of 2019. That was the biggest challenge.
Bostonia: How did the pandemic affect the shoot?
Riccio: It didn’t affect the shoot at all, but it affected our release.
Malley: We did a lot of virtual festivals because of coronavirus.
Riccio: It was a little bit disappointing, my first feature, and we were all stuck at home.
Bostonia: Paul, you say in your director’s note that an important moment in your life was going through a shoebox in your childhood home and seeing old family photos and mementos. How did this memory make it to the screen?
Riccio: Well, there’s a part in the film where Martin goes back to his old house and he is going through these accumulated mementos and ephemera and what have you. I’ve done that personally, many times. And it’s a very odd experience, where you’re going through boxes and you’re wondering why they kept something. And then what you realize is that you’re looking at the accumulation of someone’s life and their things speak volumes about them, even though they’re not there. It’s a wave of memories, and some of the pictures are ones you hadn’t seen for 25 years and moments that you never thought were captured, things like that. So that always sort of interested me and it’s a very difficult thing to go through.
Bostonia: Paul, any parting thoughts?
Riccio: The film’s feedback really does make you feel great, and I’m so thankful that Angela and I met. You have to understand: Angela was seven months pregnant when we were shooting this film and we’re talking about 12- to 15-hour days. I didn’t see anyone work harder than Angela. She was on her feet the entire time. We were a very, very independent film. One moment Angela would be trying to secure a location, the next moment she’s propping up or setting up or decorating for the shot, I mean it was crazy the work that Angela put into this thing.
With filmmaking, everyone has to be rowing in the same direction. It was just amazing the amount of thoughtfulness, the amount of effort people put into this project.
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