Truth is often stranger than fiction. And no one knows that better than local filmmakers Tony and Joshua Gary.
The brothers have taken their strange truth and turned it into a new short film. “Temple” is based on Joshua and Tony’s experience with their grandfather right before he passed away. It stars Michael Silberblatt as Jean, a young man taking care of his aging grandfather (Rick Andosca) and trying to stave off nefarious local groups who come around asking for money.
Joshua and Tony made the film last year and said they just got accepted into their first film festival, the Big Apple Film Festival in New York. Ahead of that screening, Rough Draft Atlanta spoke with the duo about the making of the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I know that this was based on a true story. I’d love to sort of start with that and talk about the story that inspired you to make this film.
Tony Gary: I was living with my grandfather. I guess he passed away right before we started writing this. It was based off of this situation of him losing his mental facilities and being taken advantage of by different groups of people that were coming around. At first, we just light-heartedly put the idea out there of doing it, but then – I don’t really know how it came to fruition, that we decided to actually do it.
Joshua Gary: The house we shot it in was the house our grandparents moved down here [to] and we grew up in. Our grandmother passed back in 2021, so it was just our grandfather here, and he was falling more into dementia. So we needed somebody here. Tony started living with him, and through that, we started to see, after our grandmother passed, people started to come around, wanting things from him. We’re getting together and talking about how kind of crazy it was that people just started showing up and taking advantage of that situation.
TG: I guess at first there were some funny scenarios of sitting in on these conversations.
JG: Yeah, we thought we were writing a comedy at first – spitballing situations back and forth that we’d seen for ourselves. And the more we went into it, the more we were working through it a little bit, in these stories. It came [down] to writing about what was happening and what we were feeling through it.
In the film, it’s a sort of quasi-religious group, but there were a bunch of different groups showing up? And it coalesced into that?
TG: I’m not gonna name names, or anybody out there, but there was one group of [laughs] missionaries who became the most adamant – the ones that me, my brother, and my dad had the most interaction with. That became the focus of it.
JG: Yeah, we would have to tell them not to come around if somebody else wasn’t here. They would try and sneak their way in, basically. It was all a little seedy, I guess.
It’s interesting it started out as a comedy. What was the breaking point that made it switch over?
JG: As we were going through the stories, they became less funny [laughs].
TG: Reflecting on our grandfather’s death, and stuff like that, because – how many months after he died did we shoot it in the house?
JG: Probably like three months after he passed. So we were writing it kind of during and after the passing. So it was a little funny until his passing happened, and I think it got a lot more real and therapeutic to write the rest of it after that.
I know you guys work together quite a bit. Have you ever written anything this personal? What was that experience like?
TG: This was the first time that we tried to do something like this. It might have been your idea that we try and do something more based in reality,
JG: Yeah, because a lot of our stuff is not so much based in this world, if that makes sense. For this one, we were just like, we have all this material, we should try and put it down, or get it out. It just kind of started flowing.
I want to talk about casting, because you’re essentially casting people to play you, in a strange way. What was that experience like?
JG: Yeah, that was pretty interesting, because both of these brothers are an amalgamation of both of us together. It’s not one to one.
TG: I think we intentionally wanted to make it not directly us, because that’s strange. So with casting, I think at first, we almost looked for people that resembled this idea, or kind of a caricature of ourselves. But then we ended up casting our main character, and – was it his father-in-law?
JG: Oh yeah. It’s weird, we did cast this guy, and his father-in-law passed a week before we shot. He had to step back, so we had to recast. We ended up with Michael Silberblatt, which was great.
TG: He was pretty different from the person we had initially cast.
JG: So it kind of took on a whole new idea with that character, which I think worked pretty well.
TG: Well again, that was kind of when we were like, alright – made it more so – that these are not accurate [to us].
Yeah it’s interesting how much actors can completely change whatever is on the page. That’s wild – a week is such a short amount of time.
JG: Yeah. Almost everyday, he would come over, because we shot it in the house that we live in. He would just come over here to just be in the space, or learn a little bit here and there. He put in a lot of work, and I think that helped out too.
Speaking of shooting in the home you were living in, how long was that shoot? What were the challenges in production that happened along the way? It was probably a very emotional time, I imagine.
TG: It was pretty somber.
JG: We shot over like, four days at the house. Yeah, it was a pretty somber shoot. I don’t think it really got super real until the guy playing our grandfather, Rick Andosca – I think it got pretty real when we put him in wardrobe and we were seeing him at the table that we saw our grandfather at just a couple months ago. We used some of his clothing.
TG: I remember putting our grandfather’s hat on him … I’d spent two years living with him and taking care of him. It was the final thing, and when he had his hat on, and he’s sitting there eating his Oreos [laughs] at the table.
JG: There was one moment when we were putting some set dressing down at the table, and he just sat down and was like, “Ooh, Oreos!” And just started eating them, almost identical to how our grandfather would have done it. It was a weird feeling, seeing it happen.
That casting process for him specifically must have been kind of intense.
TG: A lot of people did auditions for that part. We were like, “He’s pretty good, he’s pretty good.” … But then there was Rick, and I think both of us were just like, “He’s the one we have to have.”
JG: We had seen him in a couple movies. Our casting director Jordan Brown, that we work with a lot, we had mentioned Rick because we had seen him. We got a bunch of auditions, but I was like, “Is there any way we can get an audition from Rick? I think he might be the one.” When we got the audition, there was no video. All you could hear was his voice, and we were like, “I mean, it sounds really good!” [Laughs]
