Robert Capron On ‘Vial’, ‘Diary Of A Wimpy Kid’ Memes & ‘Better Call Saul’

Ansh Dubey sat down with Diary of a Wimpy Kid‘s Robert Capron to talk about his upcoming short film, Vial. Read the full Robert Capron interview below.

To promote his upcoming short film, writer-producer Robert Capron sat down with the press to talk about his career and his short film Vial. He serves as a writer and producer on the film. It’s described as a tragic take on drug abuse and incarceration with its official synopsis reading: 

“One day while trying to buy heroin from his dealer Ronnie, Ken (Joel Austin) is called by his Parole Officer Denise whom he’s been avoiding. She’s going to pay him a visit at home and conduct a randomized drug test. Ken makes up an excuse of going to a job interview and rushes home to change into interview attire to sell the lie. Once Ken returns home he’s berated by his mother and his son hides from him. When his P.O. comes by his mother’s apartment asking for a drug test, Ken is able to delay the test. Denise recommends Ken takes a janitor job she’s floated by him which he ignores. Ken’s delay only buys him a few hours.”

Feature First’s own Ansh Dubey had the pleasure and opportunity of talking with Robert about his past, present and upcoming projects. 

Thanks to the Austin Film Festival and Robert Capron (RC) for allowing this interview to happen. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Listen to the audio form of this interview, below:

Rob Capron On New Short Film ‘Vial’

So can you talk to me a bit about Vial? What’s that like? What’s the movie like in your own words?

RC: I have a long history with it, so essentially there’s a couple different things where it was made by me- it was written by me and a bunch of my friends from college who’ve been making things together for eight and a half years. We met four days into the freshman year. It’s very much the culmination of a lot of what we were doing together creatively. We have been working on different films since we met, almost like a couple days after pretty much.

And I think it’s the type of thing where it’s been really interesting to kind of just at this stage see us all run with it and we’re, you know, and just put it all together. It’s been really, really beautiful. 

To give you a little bit about what it’s about. Vial is about a guy named Ken, who’s on parole. He was in prison for drug charges and he’s just beginning to reconnect with his family. He finds out that his parole officer is coming by for a drop-in drug test, which is bad because as we find out at the beginning of the movie, he has very much relapsed. So he freaks out and tells his parole officer, “I have a job interview, I know you want me to get a job, let me go do that, we’ll meet up.” The parole officer goes “fine.” He freaks out, runs to his drug dealer. He goes, “There must be something to help with this. Like, you must’ve had this situation before. What do I do?” And so the drug dealer, and forgive me, this is a little, you’ll see.

The drug dealer gives him a real thing called a “Whizzinator,” which is a prosthetic penis. And essentially he goes, “You just put this over, a real one, you put a vial of clean urine in the tip, and then it’s time for the drug test. You pop it out, you’re good.” So Ken goes, “Oh, that’s great, but where’s the actual clean urine?” The drug dealer goes, “Oh, I don’t have that.” And so the movie is Ken running around New York City trying to get someone to give him his urine, or not his urine, urine, so he can pass his drug test.

One of my creative partners, who directed the short, has been sober for almost nine years now. And he himself cheated drug tests. It’s very much the type of thing where this movie is kind of the culmination of a couple different things he’s working on, exploring this time in his life and that space for him. For me, I’d say that I kind of came at it — I’ve never cheated a drug test — we were developing it more from the perspective of — I felt really strongly that you’re never a moment. And I think one thing that’s very interesting about this particular situation is that basically your entire life can change in a split second, regardless of why you realize, how you realize, who you are. That situation, that’s it.

I found that very interesting narratively. I found it very tragic on a human level to kind of think about how this country operates in relation to those addicted and drug charges and incarceration in general. And obviously, this is a short, we could get into a ton of that, but we try to dilute a lot of the human elements as best as we could. I’m very proud of it.

It sounds like a great idea. I’m really excited to see it. So those were your influences, were there any specific cinematic influences or writing influences?

RC: Oh, that’s a good question. Writing influences is tough, and I say that only because we really… We probably wrote like 40 different versions of the short. Like we had a lot of different ideas. Like I said, some of those themes you were talking about, they were a touch on this, a touch on this, a touch on this. And eventually, we kinda got to the point where we realized that we only had 15 minutes if we were really sticking on trying to make this a short. Like, what is this absolutely about? So I would say like, I’d say writing lines with a short, it wasn’t necessarily, there weren’t necessarily any specific influences so much as we kinda like really just chiseled away at it for a really long time until it kind of came to be. 

Visually, my co-writer and the director [Alexandre Davis] would probably be inclined to give you a couple more than these, but I know that Good Time was a really big inspiration, in terms of that tempo and having only a certain amount of time to complete a thing and how the snowball effect of all of that. I think that was definitely probably the biggest inspiration. He’s a big fan of the Safdies. 

It’s interesting because we’ve since completed the feature screenplay [adaptation of Vial]. And with the feature screenplay, it’s become very different tonally. There’s very much still, I’ll put it to you this way, the short still exists in the movie. But it’s almost after that happens, almost after an hour of The Wrestler, which sounds very unrelated, but we kind of ended up expanding on the family component and wanting to root for this guy. And him being a good-intentioned guy who just keeps screwing up, you know? So the feature definitely gives me different inspiration. My friend AJ, who directed the movie, would be rolling his eyes right now with what I’m about to say.

But I am always very vocal about how I absolutely adore Better Call Saul. 

Me too. 

RC: Yeah, you know, I adore Better Call Saul. I think that show is like, I could rant for hours. To keep it really concentrated for this purpose, one of my favorite things about that show is how it takes that dynamic of knowing where he ends up longer term. And it just makes every single thing that Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) does all the more impactful and tragic. Especially his relationship with Chuck (Michael McKean). And that idea that you can be trying really hard to be doing something, [but] there’s a guy in your life or someone in your life who just doesn’t believe you, you know? Just will never ever really be able to give that to you. I’ve always really liked that dynamic. I think that dynamic is one of the best I’ve seen in anything. 

And so with the feature, I think we also took a little bit of influence from that [as] we added the character of a teenage daughter. In the short, Ken’s got a son that provides him easy validation. And I won’t spoil the short, but the son ends up having a very big part to play, a couple different things. With the feature, I really wanted to take some of these themes we’ve been talking about in terms of relapsing, recovery, the parolee system, addiction, all these different things.

I felt pretty strongly that it would be interesting to have a Chuck kind of person. So what we did was we ended up giving Ken in the future a daughter who picked up the pieces while he was gone and did everything and now he’s back. It’s kind of like the prod of the son, you know, except he’s the dad. And so she’s kind of like, “I don’t know, man.” And so that was kind of something we put into that as well. So I would say between all that, those were some influences.

Acting Influences On and Off-Screen

I’m even more excited to check it out because of those influences you mentioned, I’m a huge fan. Do you still want to pursue acting as well as behind-the-camera stuff? Or do you want to balance both?

RC: What I always say is: I will always love acting. I will always be willing to act and [be] interested in it. A couple years ago, I got to a point where I realized that it was stimulating and creative, it was just building the stories. I think some of it is a control thing, honestly, in terms of like I found that I would be doing speeches or monologues or different things, and I was enjoying finding out where they came from and how the play worked and how this thing came to be more than actually doing the speech. I was doing a study abroad in London, like an acting conservatory.

I was reading all these incredible plays for hundreds of years worth of history, and there was this class where they were talking about “well, this play was written at this time to reflect this thing that was going on in the world,” and I’m a huge history geek, and so I think it kind of just crystallized for me a couple different things about the power that something can have when you write it at a certain time. 

I’m gonna actually rephrase what I just said. Not the power that something can have when you write it at a certain time. It’s not the right way of putting it. It’s more the power that writing something can have in relation to the time in which it exists. I realize that might sound like the same thing really for me, I think it’s different. There’s so many layers to the script component of all of that that I really enjoy and I like getting into character psychology and math and writing. To me, it’s like setting up emotional logic in that sense.

Weirdly, I found that I enjoy acting on stage a little bit more than I do on screen. And I love acting on screen. But I think that feeder dynamic of just like, I’m fascinated by the idea of doing the same thing every night and changing it, it still changes a little bit. Like I think that’s so cool. It’s terrifying in some ways that with film you only get the one and done. And I hate watching myself.

Stage vs the Screen

I would say in theater the writing plays a slightly bigger part in your performance then the screen because the writing is so visible in theater compared to on screen, would you agree with that? 

RC: Yeah, so writing for theater and writing for theater screenplays are completely different because with plays it’s dialogue. It’s dialogue and usually the tightening of it loops. Generally when a play is moving forward there’s certain stakes set up pretty quickly or certain relationships set up pretty quickly as the play is advancing. The tensions and circumstances tend to slowly [and] surely enclose. Like you’re very much like thrown in a room but then you begin to feel like you’re trapped in the room and that’s even with some of the happy ones that hold different stakes, there’s different tensions coming up. With movies, it’s visuals, you know, that’s why. And I love writing dialogue, I love writing all these things, I am by no means saying, like “In movies you don’t do all these things that you do,” but like, there’s this entire world of endless resources that you can implement visually.

You know, of course, I say that with a giant asterisk of, if you want to get your thing made, it’s perhaps you shouldn’t be writing as if you have endless resources, you know? I could write a space opera where it’s like Captain McGilliford runs to Mars X-7, you know? And then I could write all this stuff where this thing blows up and this does that and this does that. But I’m gonna need… 

Well. Okay, I’m jumping all over the place. I’m sorry. But even as I said all of that. Have you seen Hundreds Of Beavers? 

It’s on my watchlist but I haven’t seen it yet. 

It’s incredible. And, as I was saying all of that, I was calling myself out on sounding wrong to a certain degree because I think it’s also really kind of about the particular standards and intentions of the project and your understanding of how you’re going to be executing and then distributing that. 

I think Hundreds Of Beavers is an incredible movie. I cannot recommend it enough. I’ve been lucky enough to meet the director and I think he’s awesome. I think everything about that movie is great, I mean that man with 150,000 dollars made a 1920 silent comedy in the Winter with like all these beavers and really intense knowledge of after-effects. I think that it’s the type of thing where you can make your space opera. It’s also just kind of understanding where that’ll land. I realize I’m completely digressing from the question, to which I would say you have immense visual power, but you have to be careful how you use it. Versus theater… theater is interesting because you are very much given specific resources. Or you have an innate understanding that you have a fair amount of resources.

So you said you’d be interested in acting on stage and screen, but have you written for the stage before? Have you written and would you be interested in pursuing that more? 

Yeah, I have written a play with one of my friends. We were prepping to begin sending that around and then he got into a directing grad program in Australia. So that’s been on ice a little bit. I’m planning on catching up with him soon to talk about that. I’ve always wanted to make a play and I think this may be my next project actually, so it’s funny you ask that. But I live in Los Angeles and I love American Cinematheque. It’s this nonprofit that is basically just a year-long film festival and they have amazing Q&A’s with some of the best directors, actors, [and] everything in the world. Like it’s truly remarkable. Like I adore it, I go all the time. It’s my second home. There’s multiple locations, so second, third, and fourth homes, I guess. But you get what I mean.

I went to a Q&A once without getting too into it where the three people who were on stage were all talking about how there had been a fourth person on the set that had really blown up afterwards and had been really good friends with them on set. And then after kind of blowing up afterwards, never really talked to any of them again. they were all very much relating to how this thing was the coolest thing they did. This person blew up. This person was doing all this stuff. There was a lot of ego discussion in the room, you know, but not only was there a lot of ego discussion in the room, there’s very much this big thing of this person who wasn’t there, you could feel their shadow over everything.

And I remember I went to that and I was really struck by like, what if this person just walked in right now and went up on stage and pulled out a chair and said, “I’m here for the Q&A for this movie that I haven’t talked about in 30 years.” And then it’s kind of been claimed by these other people as their thing. And so I was really struck by that idea and in terms of how in industry, audience members and cast members and crew members and everybody at different levels, different stratospheres relate to something in a different way. Everyone’s got their own unique kind of personal connection. Everyone’s got their own thing. And I thought even though it has to do with movies, it’s a movie Q&A. I thought it’d be an amazing play. 

Because what better, like I was talking about earlier, with the tension kind of noose tightening, what better way of doing that than building up the shadow of this person for a little bit and then you have them come in and all of a sudden it’s like completely recontextualized everything they’ve said before. And he hasn’t heard it, which makes it funnier. So I don’t know. I’ve only outlined it really, but I really like that idea. 

It sounds really cool. I hope it comes to fruition. 

Yeah, yeah. I’ll see. I gotta actually just sit down for some time. I’ve been absolutely chugging along on the feature scripts for a while, but yeah, thank you. 

How Acting Has Helped Robert’s Writing Skills

So I’m gonna jump back a few questions. You said that you were in London for something related to acting. [Quentin] Tarantino likes to say he wanted to pursue acting before and his acting classes shaped his writing. So would you, would you agree with that? And how has your acting experiences and professional acting training framed your writing? 

That’s a great question. Um, in a couple of different ways, I think the first way, weirdly, almost has nothing to do with acting, but the process of acting, which is that I have been lucky enough to have already read thousands of scripts in my lifetime. The audition process alone, it throws you into different scenes, does all this different stuff. It forces you to just go with it, you know? It forces you to kind of be familiar with the formatting. It was one of those things where in college when I started taking like my first screenwriting classes and started really actually vaguely giving it a go. 

People were trying to figure out the format. I was like, no, that’s interior, exterior, and the dialogue goes like this, and then a little page, and then it goes like blah, blah, blah. Like it was just basic knowledge. Interestingly, just because you’ve read a lot of scripts, doesn’t mean you actually understand the mechanics of the pacing. And that was something that I really had to learn. So there wasn’t like a whole thing. How else has acting affected my writing? I think I’m pretty good at having an understanding of how the dialogue would be read.

One thing I talked about with a friend once was that idea of like it helps to have acted because you want to write scenes that are fun for actors. I think Bryan Cranston, who I am a colossal fan of as you can infer, has a quote which says something along the lines of like… “If a writer’s done a really good job, the actor’s job is insanely easy because you just get what the line is saying and you do it.” There’s this transference in it. So I think I’ve gotten a bit better at that with all of that. Just by having experience as an actor. 

Improv, weirdly I would say when you’re writing, I think, I didn’t do a lot of improv, but I think that thinking of the energy transference of what would be a fun version of that, so many acting exercises and scenes related to that, it bleeds in an interesting way. 

Robert Capron On ‘Diary Of A Wimpy Kid’

Jumping forward to Diary of a Wimpy Kid, I mean that’s your claim to fame. Being such a young actor at that time, do you look back at it fondly or is it kind of mixed? How do you look back on that?

Diary of a Wimpy Kid completely changed my life. I wouldn’t be having this conversation. I wouldn’t be in Austin. I wouldn’t be living in Los Angeles. Maybe I would, but that would be like maybe 60 out of like 10 billion multiverse concepts, you know, like I was so insanely lucky to be in the position where at 11 years old, I could do my dream job, you know? There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with that. There’s a lot of kind of collective world understanding as you grow up that you kind of need after that.

I’ve had a couple conversations with Zach [Gordon] who plays Greg. As you’ve gotten older  we’ve talked about this idea of like sometimes we will be talking with different people and we’ll meet people who would have absolutely killed to have a line in this particular thing. There’s a weird kind of complex that you can get of like, we had very large roles in a very large franchise at a very early age. It’s not to say that we didn’t earn it so much as it is to say that was like a different us, you know? Like truly our brains weren’t even remotely fully formed yet. It’s one of those things with it that’s very interesting. Like, conceptually to think about. 

But I would say that… I don’t even know how to put into words how much it changed my life in terms of how good Jeff Kinney’s been to me. Jeff Kinney let me see the world. He took us on book tours all across America and Europe. I got to go to places that people don’t get to see like throughout their entire lives sometimes. What it’s really done, that entire process, has just given me an intense sense of gratitude, but a lot of responsibility. Like a massive sense of like, okay, like I’ve been given a lot by the world and I really want to try and pay that back in some way, shape or form. 

And a lot of what I hope to do with a couple different things is to just make a career where I can put all of that to good use and try to help other people. I would love nothing more than to make another 11-year-old get to love movies and have that access to opportunity and everything. Now, all that said, there’s definitely some times where it’s just kind of weird because you can’t really wrap your head around it. I have a lot of fan interactions that I think are delightful. Like one of my favorites is, there’s one time I was in a Barnes and Noble and this teen boy walks up to me, just screaming at me in French. I had absolutely no idea what he was saying. I just, you know, kind of, I don’t know. Then finally he just stopped and he looked at me and he went “zooweemama!” And I was like, “oh! Oh!” Then I gave him a high five and I was like crossing language barriers, you know? 

Stuff like that is funny. Another time I was out to eat and a woman, a waitress, just came over, she wasn’t even a waitress for a table. A waitress just came over, threw a plate down in front of me with a piece of cheese on it and said, on the house. And I clapped. Like I thought that was so funny. I thought that was so funny. 

So like I love that I live a life in which there’s a lot of these really idiosyncratic experiences I get to have with other people. But again, that said, there’s been some like, uh, I had a very long period where I struggled with my weight. I had a very long period where I struggled with body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and a lot of different things. I always hope I’m clear on this because I always am very vocal to say, I don’t hold Wimpy Kid accountable for that. Because Rowley is a very beloved character, which could not have any less of an effect on who he is in any of the movies. It is not an issue in and remotely. 

The whole message of the first movie is that, be who you are and own that. And people will appreciate you, you will find people who love you. That’s the entire point of the first movie. So when I say this It’s not because I think we’ve been keeping in on itself directly contributed to that. I think there are a lot of things that when you are struggling with weight and you happen to be magnified to a lot of different people they’re bound to respond a certain way. Much like if you put a video up on YouTube and the comments get spammed.

For me, some of the meanest things I saw were on IMDB messaging boards, which is so gated, you know? But yeah, I don’t know. 

You mentioned Zach and Jeff Kinney, and not just them, but do you keep in touch with all those people and would you like to collaborate professionally with any of those people again?

Yeah, so like, I see Jeff probably twice a year, on average, I would say. He’s really good about checking in, which is something I’ve always really appreciated. He’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life. He is so… that man is hilarious. I see Zach probably once every two, three months, you know? [We] keep in pretty good touch. I have had probably the busiest year I’ve ever had in my life this year, which has been interesting. So sometimes I feel bad because it’s very much, “Oh I should be checking in,” and then not even just because of life right now. So I gotta be running around like a maniac.

I still keep in touch. Devon [Bostick] has moved to New York, but I hung out with him a couple of times while he was still in LA. I adore Devon. He’s always been the wiser older brother. And I love him a lot and I thought he was pretty positive. And Grayson [Russell], who played Fregley, is the sweetest man I’ve ever met. Like the best guy I’ve ever met. I know that happiness and goodness in this world exists because Grayson Russell exhibits it by being, you know? 

It’s good to try and keep up with them, I caught up with Karan [Brar]. I hadn’t seen Karan in like nine years. We caught up in LA. It must have been like a year and a half, two years ago. And it was almost like no time had passed. It was really interesting. It’s fun to meet someone. It’s fun to meet someone that you haven’t seen for that long. I don’t know if that was proper speech. It’s fun to meet up with somebody that you haven’t seen in a long time. But then when you see them even though you’ve had completely different life paths, you’re very much, you’ve kind of arrived at the same place psychologically. It was very interesting to meet someone and talk about that. So yeah, I love all those people. They’re great. And I’m thankful that I had a family from that early, outside of my family.

And would you like to collaborate with any of them again?

Oh yeah, I’d completely collaborate with them. I mean, absolutely.  A lot of people ask about whether or not we’d ever do Wimpy Kid or something like that. I’m not sure in terms of the brand, whether or not a lot of people involved would want to do the aged-up version. Like I remember having a conversation with Jeff Kinney, where he said — now keep in mind this was a while ago — he said, like he always kind of did these characters like Charlie Brown-esque.

And so I think that in terms of that, I don’t know if logistically that’s really in the cards, like I don’t. I would be beyond happy to look at a lot of these people again. I think it would be really fun to try something that’s just completely different. Obviously because of the size and everything that Wimpy Kid has, it’d be tough not to think about that to a certain degree, but I also think it’d be fun to just give something like that a go. 

One of my favorite memories of filming is from one weekend that we had off from filming. I made a short film with Devon about us just like getting into a fight all throughout the hotel and like beating each other and throwing each other into walls and doing all this stuff. And I have the DVD that we made of it. It was very fun. My dad makes a cameo in it. Like he’s a guy just at the urinal and all he looks over and says, “what’s going on?” It was goofy. I would want something more with that energy. If that makes sense. Like, I’d like to do something with us together, but I think it’d be fun to just get together and do something. 

As fans of the series and of the movie specifically, have grown up, there’s been a lot of resurgences in scenes of the movie and memes made from it. Are you familiar with that? Have you seen those? 

From the bottom of my heart, my favorite part now, truly. A lot of people would yell at me for this, but I mean it. I truly think my favorite part of having been in that film franchise now is the memes. As somebody who went to high school and sent around some goofy GIFs and all of that, it is so delightful to me that I am now being sent around as a reaction GIF, presumably in a lot of different high schools. Like, I’m only half joking when I say that I think one of my crowning career achievements is having my own Know Your Meme page. Like genuinely, like I think that is, I think that is dope. I think that is so funny. I’m very, it baffles me. It’s really weird when I’ll watch something funny on Instagram and then I’ll go on the comment and the first thing that I see is my face. 

Oh, like the one of me looking where  I wave and I look down. That one is my favorite because when I say we filmed that on a random Tuesday and that was it, I mean we filmed it on a random Tuesday and that was it. Like, there was no thought, well there was thought put into it, the director obviously was going for it, but like, it was just another gag, you know? And like, it’s so funny ten years after the fact to get that thrown back in that particular way. Like, it’s really funny. 

My high school friends also used to do all these memes with me years before. Like my friends in high school used to use, “Don’t call me, don’t come by my house, we’re done” on me. And I was just like, it was such a specific in-joke. So like the school and the music, “Alright guys, blah, blah, blah.” Now it’s what it is. 

I pray that — but I’m also equally terrified that Olivia Rodrigo has seen an edit of “drivers license” with Greg and Rowley breaking up. That terrifies me. I’m like, she probably has. Like at some point, she’s opened up her phone and that like her, the algorithm has to regurgitate some of her, I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s very, very weird. I don’t know. 

I send that GIF like once a week, of you waving, that’s one of my favorite reaction GIFS.

People talk about winning an Oscar and different things. I think like the goofball teenager in me is very proud to be a part of the meme pantheon that way, it’s very weird but I’m thankful for it. It’s kind of wild.

Which ‘Diary Of A Wimpy Kid’ Is Rob’s Favorite?

As someone who grew up watching the films, I think all of them are so good. I love the movies. Do you have a favorite movie? I think Rodrick Rules is genuinely a masterpiece. Like it’s the pinnacle of cinema. Do you have a favorite?

The way I always put it is, the first one’s my favorite, I’m biased towards the first one, which is my first time getting together with everybody, and it was such a specific special experience and having all of that. The first one’s my favorite. I think the second one’s the funniest. I think the first one’s rounded in a specific way. The second one’s the funniest. I think the third one has the most heart, in a couple different ways. And I could get into that. My favorite joke in the franchise, and honestly the person who every time I have seen the movies again, the person who I’m always dying laughing at. Steve Zahn. Like Steve Zahn, as a kid, I thought he was hilarious. As an adult, I think he’s hilarious in those movies.

I think he’s like one of the finest supporting comedy actors ever. 

No, I think Steve Zahn is a genius. I think Steve Zahn is incredible and he’s so funny in those movies. My favorite joke period is in the second one when the photos from the party get discovered and Rodrick is like, “That’s not me.” And then they get into a big fight about it. And then one of them says that there was a lock on the door and Steve Zahn’s like, “I knew there was a lock on that door. You’re trying to make me think I’ve lost my mind.” Like, I love that. There’s like so much sense of humor. So I adore that. And I love in Dog Days when they get the dog bowl and it’s just “Sweaty”. I think Devon delivers it, “pretty sure it says Sweetie dad”. I think he delivers that perfectly. 

Yeah, like, so the first one I have the most sentimental attachment to. The second one I think is the funniest. And the third one, I think, has the most heart because that was the one we probably had the most fun filming. It was the one where we felt like a high-stakes summer camp, you know? It was cool. And then with the third one where we got to kinda come back, I’m not sure if we knew it was going to be the last one. I think we kind of assumed. It was a little ambiguous. 

One thing that a lot of people don’t know is that the original plan had been to do the first one and then the next summer to do two and three back to back. And then the third one, fourth and fifth back to back. And I don’t, I don’t remember exactly why we didn’t do it that way, but they ended up deciding to just go, ah, one, one, one. What kind of ended up happening was, is, uh, during the third one. I mean, it’s kind of funny. And I think Zach would be completely okay with me saying this because it’s objectively true, but like if you’re watching all of them, like back to back to back, Zach looks completely different in the third one. Like he’s very clearly going through puberty. And I mean, I went through puberty almost immediately after we finished that movie, you know? And so it’s one of those things where like, you just can’t really have time with it, but they were all a blast.

Collaboration Aspirations

I just have a couple more questions. I don’t want to keep you too long. Are there any directors or actors that you want to work with, either as a writer or as an actor?

Great question. I would love to work with pretty much anybody in the Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul universe obviously. I think it would be an intensely interesting experience to work with Jeremy Strong. I would be very deeply intrigued from a craftsmanship perspective to work with him. Whether or not I had written something for him or was acting alongside him, I would just be very, very curious because he has a very specific method that I did not exhibit whatsoever as an actor. And I almost just think like somebody who really deeply cares about all the different aspects of these things. 

Obviously Jeremy Strong is a human, and an actor I respect immensely in terms of… I adore Succession. But I just think it’d be very interesting to see how that crosses. I went to a panel the other day with him inside the Succession writers room, and they were just kinda talking about his way of going through things now. He’s like, oh, if you’re using this book as an inspiration, I’m gonna read it. I tend to very much be like that, just because I like knowing all the information. Some people do completely differently. It’s funny because I like reading the books because as an actor I tend to be more like, wait, so do you mean more like this or more like this? 

I would honestly love to make something like Hundreds Of Beavers. I was lucky enough to meet the director and I think it would be very fun to do some kind of zany comedy like that. I’d love to do a good horror movie. I’m a big horror guy too. I have to think about specifics for that. I’m going to be beyond embarrassing and pull out my Letterboxd because the moment I got this app, I was psychologically bullied. 

I didn’t know you had one! 

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I was going to say that like ever since I’ve gotten this app, it is insane how much psychologically I  allocate things onto this in terms of like where I’m at and how I’m feeling about particular things. Like it’s almost gotten to the point where I go blank unless I consult it, which is embarrassing. I’d love to make something like Spider-Verse. That too. I’d adore that. I think that first movie was very much like, kinda the future of a lot in terms of brilliant storytelling, beautiful visuals, and pacing. Oh, I’d love to work with Cillian Murphy—

Devon got to work with him in Oppenheimer! 

Devon did get to work with Cillian Murphy and [Christopher] Nolan. One of my favorite clips I’ve ever seen is Christopher Nolan doing an interview and Devon comes up, Christopher Nolan’s like, “yeah, like Rodrick Rules.” I was like, that man’s seen Rodrick Rules? That’s crazy. Honestly, there’s so many people I’d love to work with. I think definitely on the TV side, I would adore working with Vince Gilligan and that team in any capacity. I have so much respect for everybody. I keep going on and on. 

Robert Capron’s Letterboxd Top Four

Well my last question, since you mentioned it, what is your Letterboxd top four? 

Okay so I think I know them off the top of my head, I’m gonna double check all this thing. Oh super random, I’d love to work with Paul Giamatti. I’d love to work with Paul Giamatti. I have so much respect for him, he’s incredible. He’s one of my favorites. I should have, honestly, I should have went with that. I’d love to work with him. 

Did you see The Holdovers? 

Yes. The Holdovers was one of the most distressing film-going experiences I’ve ever had because it was a movie that took everything I’ve ever felt about myself within the state of Rhode Island, when I’m growing up there, in relation to kind of everything I ever felt about entertainment, and made this like abstract, like, narrativized version of it, complete with people I knew while acting in Rhode Island. It was insane. I adore that movie. That will always be one of my favorite movies, because it was just so specifically connected to a lot with me, psychologically. Sometimes you just watch a movie and it’s just like, oh wow, this really gets a part of me, or this really gets like, yeah, I know I felt the way. And I felt he was brilliant in that. I do not cry a lot during a movie. At the end of that movie, there is a handshake that is one of the most expressive things I’ve ever seen in my life. I adore that movie. 

Top four, yeah, sorry. Usually when I’m answering favorite movies, I do like something that really inspired me as a kid or whatever, this is kind of a mixture. Fantastic Mr. Fox, I adore Fantastic Mr. Fox. I saw it when I was, I wanna say, 11 or 12, and I just had never seen the movie. I thought it was so unique and heartfelt. And as an adult, my favorite thing about it is that it is structured like a children’s movie, but really it’s a very adult movie about how Mr. Fox is being a child and how he literally destroys everybody’s life. It does not get fully resolved at the end. There’s a lot of very adult themes within that, but I think that even as a kid, I was like, oh, “this is like very much doing something with this medium that is like, you know, kind of playing with the idea of like, animations for kids,” which is raw. Have you seen Army of Shadows? 

I don’t think so. 

So I watched it very randomly with a friend, probably like half a year ago or so at this point. It’s a French World War II movie. It came out in the 60s about the French resistance. And it is one of the best war movies I’ve ever seen. It is about how being a member of the French Resistance is a completely thankless task. It is heartbreaking, it is cold, but in a necessary way. I tend to like movies that really are able to put you in the head space or the shoes, you know? Movies are empathy machines, you know? If it’s not empathy machines, it’s like shoe-walking simulators. You know, like one of my favorites, I know I’m going all over, one of my favorite moments in the movie is… have you seen Dunkirk? My favorite moment in the movie is at the end of Dunkirk, when the last time we see Tom Hardy is, the planes crashed on the beach, he’s watching it be consumed by flames, and he just marched off. He just marched off by night. You have no idea what’s gonna happen. They might shoot him in the head, they might like, you don’t know. But he did his job, you know? And like, I genuinely still get emotional when I think about that, because I thought that was just such a beautiful way of speaking for so many people. Like, I think movies at their best can like, really just get it so much in like, a couple seconds. I think Army of Shadows takes that idea, that dynamic, it really keeps it going. 

This is kind of a cheat because it’s a show but Cowboy Bebop. I think what that does stylistically is brilliant. Have you seen it? 

I’ve seen like 10 episodes of it and I’ve wanted to continue it for so long and I’ve not done it.

I get that I know a lot of people that feel the same way. Something I’ve heard from a lot of different people is that it’s because it’s so loosely connected. That is a show where it’s very aggressively not really trying to build overarching storylines. Like it doesn’t really spend a lot of time. Every episode is almost a different genre sometimes, every episode. Without spoiling it, it’s doing that. And then in the last couple episodes, it just doesn’t do that. And it really slaps you in the face with not doing that anymore. And I think it’s brilliant.

I also tend to love stuff that really plays a long game. I think Cowboy Bebop does that in a very specific way. And my last one is Tammy and the T-Rex, because Tammy and the T-Rex is a ridiculous film. And I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I can’t recommend it at all.

We’ll be checking it out. 

Vial is directed by Alexandre Davis and written by Robert Capron, Alexandre Davis and David Holmes. 

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