Pets rule in Finn Taylor’s return to film as director
Finn Taylor is poking his head over a purple L. To be specific, the filmmaker is standing behind the bottom half of a giant, multicolored sign that reads “Children’s Fairyland,” which stands next to Oakland’s Lake Merritt and advertises the small amusement park behind him.
The area is a sort of a city landmark, Taylor says. But that designation is coming from someone who grew up a half mile away and used the surrounding location in his new film, “Unleashed,” the fifth work of Taylor’s to be shot in the Bay Area.
“Oakland at night, lit up, looks as amazing as Paris. It does to me,” Taylor says on an overcast day.
The Fairyland sign was included in the film, he says, because he sees the story as a fariy tale of sorts. Opening in Bay Area theaters Friday, Aug. 25, “Unleashed” follows Emma (Kate Micucci), a recently heartbroken San Francisco techie who bemoans the absence of honest bachelors before a cosmic alignment turns her cat and dog into two perfect guys ( Justin Chatwin and Steve Howey) who vie for her love.
First premiering at last year’s Mill Valley Film Festival, where it won the audience award, the film partially came out of Taylor’s observation of female friends who found themselves commodified on online dating sites through checklists of physical features, job status and other superficialities.
“When you think about the way animals respond to us, they don’t care about any of that,” Taylor says before beckoning sweetly to a gray pit bull walking by the trail surrounding Lake Merritt. Taylor himself doesn’t have a dog because of his transient nature as a filmmaker.
“Unleashed,” along with a documentary on photographer H. Lee Waters that has toured museums this year, is Taylor’s return to the screen after more than a decade. In the years
after his last film, “The Darwin Awards,” he directed “probably the biggest film I would’ve ever made” — a starstudded movie musical based on the life story of a musician.
But the film fell through, Taylor says without disclosing more than he is legally allowed. Yet Taylor, 59, who has a passing resemblance to comedian Bill Burr sans the anger, is chipper about what he says is simply the way it goes in Hollywood. Instead, out came “Unleashed,” another opportunity for an indie project in the Bay Area, where filmmaking is slowly on the rise after a long lull.
The Bay Area “used to have enough of a vibrant commercial business that the crews had work,” Taylor says. “But in ’97 when I moved back (from Los Angeles), a lot of that work was draining away. TV shows had ended, commercials weren’t shooting here anymore. They were going to Canada. So film is a huge injection into the local economy.”
The film also was a chance to give Micucci a long-awaited spotlight. “It felt like I was dreaming every moment of shooting this movie,” Micucci says by phone from Los Angeles. “I was, like, ‘What is happening?’ ”
Taylor sought out Micucci after rounds of seeing the “cookie-cutter version of a leading lady” during casting. Micucci is a unique everywoman, Taylor says, and she quickly gave the impression of being grounded.
“She made 90 paintings by hand — one for every member of the crew,” Taylor says. “That’s the kind of person she is.”
Micucci has been a familiar face in film and television for years, while being one-half of the popular comedy-musical duo Garfunkel and Oates. She calls on the phone on her “day off,” which includes a preinterview call before her appearance on Conan O’Brien and time to rest her voice (Micucci does extensive voiceover work) before she begins shooting her next movie, where, Taylor says, she is in another leading role.
Micucci’s last film, the recent “The Little Hours” — a comedic period piece in which Micucci plays a hilariously profane nun in a medieval convent — is a far cry from the gentler humor of “Unleashed.” But Micucci and Taylor see value in what is an admittedly lighter pet-to-human transformation comedy.
“It’s scary to say, but a lot has changed since we shot the movie,” Micucci says. “I feel like the news is really scary to read and watch, and it’s nice to be able to escape.”
Taylor was inspired partly by the darkness of world news in recent years. “I thought, what did they do during the Depression? They made films about joy, unconditional love — trying to remember why we’re here,” he says.
Audience reaction to the film so far seems to support its place as a necessary reprieve, Taylor says. Of course, watching a movie about animals can naturally have that effect and might even teach us a thing or two.
“When I see the way animals respond to us, even a total stranger,” Taylor says, “I think we have something to learn from them.”