Bunny’s birthday is not going well.
His wife, Bobbie, wants to celebrate, and his best friend Dino eagerly pushes Bunny to open his present, but there’s trouble at his East Village apartment building – including two dead bodies, one of which gets crammed into a suitcase – as Bunny deals with unexpected visitors and his neighbors’ endless requests for his help.
In the hands of Quentin Tarantino or “After Hours”-era Martin Scorsese, “Bunny” would offer a dark, albeit comic, view of humanity; if “Bunny” were a Sean Baker film, it would be an empathic look at life on the margins.
Ben Jacobson’s directorial debut, however, blends elements of both. A movie fanatic who freely acknowledges his influences, Jacobson, who plays the character Dino, performs with his real-life best friend, Mo Stark, who plays Bunny. This distinctive and original movie, which Jacobson and Stark cowrote with Stefan Marolachakis, is getting a limited theatrical release, and will be available for streaming on November 14th.
“Bunny” is a high-stakes comedy that lovingly, even joyously, celebrates the oddball community within this apartment building. That’s on purpose: the film was shot in and around the building where Stark and his wife Liza Colby (Bobbie) live; their unit doubles as Bunny’s apartment as well as one where some twentysomething girls host a party.
The cast is fleshed out with actual friends and neighbors. Marolachakis’ wife, Genevieve Hudson-Price, plays an Orthodox Jewish woman who is staying in Bunny’s apartment (AirBnb is one of Bunny’s more decorous hustles); her father, the acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Richard Price (“Clockers,” “The Wire”) plays a needy neighbor, as does screenwriter Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump,” “Dune”). Other key roles went to Colby’s friend Kia Warren and a neighbor, Linda Rong Mei Chen.
While these longtime East Villagers have made a quintessential New York movie, Jacobson, 41, hails from the Bay Area, and Stark, 48 is from Long Beach. (When our conversation turns to baseball, Stark quickly pulls up a photo on his phone of the force play at home plate in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the World Series.)
The two met through “The Wire” actor James Ransone at a dinner party and it was “love at first sight,” Jacobson says, with the duo bonding over movies, TV, sports and being silly. “He walked me home that night,” adds Stark.
When I arrived at Stark’s apartment, Jacobson, Stark, Colby, Marolachakis, two publicists and my son Lucas, who was serving as press photographer, were all crammed in the entryway having three conversations at once, creating something akin to “Bunny” come to life.
But in real life, the apartment is impeccably neat and (thanks to Colby) beautifully decorated. There’s none of the chaos that seems to propel the lives of the movie’s characters, although Jacobson and Stark share Dino and Bunny’s exuberant energy, whether they’re talking about how “Drugstore Cowboy” influenced a crucial shot in the movie or chatting about a Dean Martin biography on Stark’s shelves, Jewish grandmothers, Ethan Hawke or how Dave Roberts managed that Game 7.
While the duo – who are now working on an action movie and an FX series – say they’re a bit smarter than their characters, Stark says they share one trait with Dino and Bunny: “We would do anything for each other.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. How did the movie come about?
Jacobson: We were both individually trying to figure out how to write, and we were able to whisper that to each other after a while. Then we started writing together – short plays and scripts at first. One led to a fuller script.
Stark: We had a father who comes looking for his daughter, but he finds her husband who she had left and those two go on an adventure. We knew we were onto something tonally and had a point of view. We just had to learn how to write movies.
One day I said, “It all takes place in one day in one building,” and that gave us boundaries, and we ran with that. And this building is a piece of crap, but it has character, and we knew this whole world and the voices of different people.
Jacobson: I’m friends with Zoe Kravitz, and she let me watch her direct “Blink Twice.” It was crazy to watch how she worked with every single department and how it was so collaborative and everyone was so jazzed to do it.
Stark: And one day I woke up and wrote a 41-page outline and sent it to him on that shoot, and he wrote back and said, “I think I can direct this, I think we can do it.” That was a big moment. We didn’t have any money, but something clicked in our heads, and we were delusional.
Q. Where did it go from there?
Stark: Stefan came on and we all finished the script together. And Genevieve and Liza brought us good questions about the female characters and their points of view.
Since it took so long until we got to make the movie, we came to the table with a clear sense of the visuals, the music, the tone.
Jacobson: We knew we wanted it to look colorful – it’s summertime in New York, man, so everyone’s wearing some wild stuff.
Q. You’re friends with people like James Ransone. Could you have cast names to get the money?
Stark: We fought against that tooth and nail – we’re huge movie fans and want to work with everyone, but this story was very specific.
Jacobson: If we had James or Simon Rex or another celebrity friend come in, it wouldn’t have fit the movie.
Q. Ben, you were bartending right up until you started filming?
I’d been bartending for 15 years. I left the bar in April, and we started shooting in June. In the second week of shooting, I walked past the bar, and I swear it looked smaller, like when you go back to your elementary school.
Q. Was it challenging to maintain the balance between the goofy comedy, the themes about community and the suspense about the dead bodies and the police?
Jacobson: In one scene, Dino and I kicked the suitcase with the body in it down the stairs. When we showed the movie to a friend, he said, “That didn’t fit with the characters – there’s a dead guy in there, have some respect.” And that opened the idea of finding the right balance.
Q. At one point, an arm flops out of the suitcase. Was that scripted?
Stark: We had a contortionist playing the body.
Jacobson: But we didn’t want to keep him in there for too long, so we’d unzip it. And at one point, his arm was dangling out before we closed it. We thought that was hilarious, so we added that on the fly.
Q. Mo, are you as helpful to your neighbors as Bunny?
Stark: It’s based on reality – Ben has seen me carrying stuff up and down for people.
Jacobson: While we were filming, the guy that Richard Price is based on walked by and yelled at us for being in his way.
Stark: I had to say, “I’m the only one in the building that helps you, so let us do this.” That guy had women’s sportswear and a kennel of dogs that he sold out of the apartment. It was really wild.
Q. Is this underdog story the ideal movie to kick off the Mamdani era in New York?
Jacobson: A hundred percent. It’s not political, but this is today’s New York. We’re not jumping up and down saying, “Look at these eclectic people,” but we’re just New Yorkers, and no matter who you are or how you look, you’re still our neighbor.