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A Conversation with AJ Thompson, Toby Jones & Ben Hansen (AJ GOES TO THE DOG PARK)

AJ’s life is so perfect – buttered toast breakfasts, low stress job, regular meals with his dad and his friends, and regular trips to the dog park for his two puppies – that even his boss understands why he won’t take a promotion and complicate his life. His boss is also his dad. But then his friends move to Texas (the horror!), butter gets recalled, and the mayor closes the Dog Park, changing it into a Blog Park, where people type out their live journal and myspace entries in peace. No, this is not 2005, but the mayor has been working towards this dream since she took office.

Therein lies the central, albeit ridiculous, premise of AJ Goes to the Dog Park, AJ (played by AJ Thompson) embarks on an epic adventure to take the mayoral office and reverse the dog/blog park decision. Diving into the wrestling ring, fishing for big mouth bass, and tree sap tapping, AJ learns what matters and what a life of contentment really requires. Low budget in execution, full of big dreams and even bigger absurdity, Toby Jones’ (not the British actor) first feature follows ‘logically’ from his work on the Cartoon Network’s The Regular Show and O.K. K.O, Let’s be Friends. I had a chance to sit down with AJ, Toby, and producer Ben Hansen at Fantastic Fest shortly after the premiere.

Hammer to Nail: So, considering your animation background, I was fully expecting it to be insane, and it just got weirder and weirder to the point where at the end I was like, “How is this not over yet?” And then it got weirder.

Toby Jones: Can’t get weirder now.

HtN: So congratulations on that.

TJ: Thank you. Why else would you make a movie?

HtN Yeah, no, you’ve got to go all in. You got to go in. I love going all in on a low budget too. I think you guys really milked every little nook and cranny out of this idea. So tell me a little bit about where this idea came from and how you got started with it.

TJ: So this comes from my love of obsession with my muse, AJ. We’ve just been friends, all us have been friends for a really long time, and we discovered, at a very young age in high school, that if we place AJ in the middle of a scene that it just automatically creatively blossoms into something funny. And so it’s become something I’ve always wanted to return to. It’s almost been like I’ve treated AJ as almost like my Antoine Doinel or something where it’s just like I want to do stories of AJ for each phase of our lives.

HtN: When was the last time you did an AJ story?

TJ: We did a short for a Cartoon Network called AJ’s Infinite Summer and then I also wrote some scripts after that as well. So I’m always returning to AJ just because I find it’s a very creatively fun thing to do. I find that the tone emerges naturally from this fictionalized version of the character. And I reached out to AJ and Ben and our cinematographer, Tucker Lucas, and I was just like, “Guys, what do you think if we just made a movie in Fargo for no money and just see how long it takes to do?” And then everybody was just like, “Let’s do it.” It’s like, “Okay.” And then thus began three years of nights and weekends and countless hours of just figuring out how to even do that.

A still from AJ GOES TO THE DOG PARK

HtN: AJ, what was the part that you were most excited to get to do?

AT: There was a lot of really funny parts that I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know how we’re even going to do this but I’m excited,” because it’s mostly like a live-action cartoon. I would say the whole wrestling ring fight scene that was really described in the script — it was mostly like ‘now they fight.’

TJ: Yeah, you like opportunities to ad-lib and kind of come up with stuff on the spot too.

AT: Right. And obviously the ending but not going into but-

HtN: Can not be revealed.

AT: Very excited about that.

TJ: The ending, one thing we’ll say about it, we were excited about it, but also it was like negative 40 windchill outside when we shot it and it was unbearable.

HtN: It was Fargo. I mean you didn’t choose to shoot it in Orlando.

Ben Hanson: It was Fargo in March, and we had to huddle in our cars between shoots and pour out hot chocolate that became frozen immediately. People get to see that on screen.

HtN: Ben, what was your thing that you were most excited about getting to work on in this film?

BH: When I read the script, the scene I was the most excited about was when AJ and the mayor start rhyming at each other for absolutely no reason. And the scene is the style of dialogue is self-contained just to that scene.

HtN: Just that scene, yeah. AJ, how different is AJ in the film to AJ in real life? What is the main difference?

AT: The main difference is I am more lazy in real life.

HtN: You would never go through all this just to get a dog park.

AT: The original AJ is so gung-ho. I would have given up pretty quickly early on, but they are my actual dogs too. So if they really wanted a new park, if they asked me. But I would say that’s the major difference.

HtN: Did you guys all grow up in Fargo, North Dakota?

TJ: Yeah.

AT: Yep. A lot of the script too, I worked with a lot of great actors who could remember all their lines perfectly and do great. And I hardly could remember the next line I had to say. So a lot of times I end up ad-libbing and the script, I didn’t really follow the script exactly to it. It usually worked out for the best too.

TJ: Yeah, there’s a lot of fun in the energy that happens, putting you in the room with a very seasoned local actor and there’s a really fun thing that happens there. It feels like there’s a normal guy in an unusual crazy situation.

HtN: What’s the filmmaking scene in Fargo?

TJ: There are so many just amazing people who are very creative. And that was one of the cool things about making a movie like this, where we were able to call in every favor from everybody at every level of the filmmaking scene. So we have our cinematographer, Tucker, and then we have the people who did the costumes and all the wacky props and stuff. It’s like the thing about Fargo that’s so great is if you need something done, you always know a guy who knows a guy who can make that happen.

BH: Here’s another aspect about Fargo that’s so cool. There was a day where we were filming a scene outdoors and a landscaping crew came through and was about to start working on the lawn and it would’ve totally screwed up our audio. They didn’t know we were shooting a movie in Fargo that day and I walked over to tell them about it, and they said, “Oh, well if you’re filming a movie, this equipment’s really going to mess up your sound. We have several other lawns to do today, we’ll just come back about two hours later. Is that all right?” And they didn’t have to do that. They did that for free. That’s incredibly nice of them.

HtN: Yeah, in LA they’d charge you like 500 bucks and then they would do it again and be like, “Oh, you got another 500 bucks.”

BH: I wasn’t going to mention that, but potentially, yes, in some other larger cities that could be the case.

HtN: I also noticed that in the credits at the end, there were several last names that were the same, over and over again, of family members involved in different ways, not just your family, but seemed like five or six names of the same family in different sequences.

TJ: I mean, look, this is very much a friends and family type production. We called up everyone we could, at any level, to help however possible. And of course the two sides of my family are Jones and the Gompfs. And so there are a lot of Joneses and there are also a lot of Gompfs, our production manager, Hattie is a Gompf, and then everyone in her family is in that movie. And then everyone, a lot of cousins, aunts and uncles are in the movie.

HtN: Was that the coffee girl, that was a Gompfs?

TJ: Her and her sister.

HtN: Yeah, I noticed that. Yeah.

TJ: So yeah, she was also a production manager for the whole film. And then her sister came in to play the other coffee kiosk lady. Their parents are in the blog scene. My cousin Cory runs a local costume shop and helped us out with props a few times. My grandfather, Jim Gompf, is the elder statesman with a scroll on the movie. So it’s just really bringing in every single person from that we know.

HtN: You’re in this section of Fantastic that’s called Burnt Ends, right? How did they explain that to you, and how do you think your film fits in that?

TJ: It was explained to us as being offbeat, a lot of low-budget kinds of things. And especially one of the things that was brought to me about it is it’s for discoveries. This is a team at Fantastic Fest finding stuff and kind of staking their claim on being like, “There’s something here. I think there’s something here.” And so I’m really, really excited to be part of that sidebar with a lot of other really cool movies. And it’s one of those things where it’s just like if you go on the website and read the description, you’re just like, “Yeah, that sounds about right. That sounds about right.” The analogy with the barbecue burnt ends, of course, where it’s like some people will think this was the best thing that they got to do.

HtN: I mean, that’s very Texas too. Yeah, it’s the discarded parts that actually are many people’s favorites. Yeah. Have you had barbecue yet here?

TJ: You know what? Not yet. It’s embarrassing.

HtN: I feel like that’s important as a member of the burnt end section, you should be eating some sort of barbecue.So what’s up for AJ next? Where does he go? I mean, it seems like you left us in a very dangerous spot at end of this film that I again, will not reveal, but I’m very concerned for Fargo.

TJ: We do have our plans for ideas for what we want to do for our next features, but it may or may not include the AJ character necessarily. But one thing AJ really, really wants to do is these guys are the biggest fans of Xena, Warrior Princess you could ever imagine, and your guys’ pitch is to do a sequel army of darkness style that takes place in a totally different type of world that’s much more fantastical. What do you think?

AT: I think I mostly want to do it just because that nineties style of syndicated episodic fantasy doesn’t exist.

HtN: It really doesn’t. And it was all shot in New Zealand too, before they actually had a film industry there.

BH: It’s a really fun flavor.

TJ: The feeling of like you tune in into an episode every week and there’s never any way to have any idea what’s going to be going on. They’ll try all kinds of crazy stuff, which is very spiritually connected to —

HtN: To this whole film. Yeah.

TJ: So if anyone wants to help us make a syndicated weekly fantasy show.

AT: Including Sam Raimi.

TJ: So that will be the next thing. Or we’ll come back in 10 years and do the, what was the last Antoine Doinel movie, Love on The Run.

HtN: The AJ version.

TJ: Exactly.

– Bears Rebecca Fonté

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Bears Rebecca Fonté is a transgender filmmaker, festival programmer, and journalist. She founded Other Worlds Film Festival after two years as the Director of Programming for Austin Film Festival. Her SciFi shorts ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE, PRENATAL, and THE SECRET KEEPER have played 150+ festivals including Fantasia, SciFi London, Boston SciFi, FilmQuest, Austin Film Festival and Dances With Films. Her LGBTQIA Horror short CONVERSION THERAPIST made its world premiere at Inside Out in Toronto and US Premiere at aGLIFF. Her feature thriller iCRIME, which she wrote and directed, was released on DVD, VOD and streaming by Breaking Glass/Vicious Circle Films in 2011. Bears Rebecca also was one of the producers on the Sundance Jury-Award Winning short THE PROCEDURE. In 2021, after five years on the Board of Directors she was made Artistic Director of aGLIFF, the oldest Queer film festival in the Southwest.

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