Back in 2012, 30 ROCK casting director Katja Blichfeld and actor/editor Ben Sinclair started a Brooklyn-set webseries called HIGH MAINTENANCE. Using the framing device of a weed delivery guy who makes at least one stop every episode, we peek into the lives of various NYC denizens and the very messy, human ways they bump into one another in the urban jungle. What started out as a side project thrown together with friends has developed into something of a cult hit, and Vimeo is now sponsoring the previously independent series.
Ben and Katja have written and directed pretty much every episode, with Ben also taking up editing and starring duties (as the central marijuana peddler, known as "The Guy"). This is their baby, and their personal touch is all over it in a way that distinguishes it from most mainstream TV, and even most attention-seeking webseries.
My friends in Brooklyn had been touting this as a much more real side of the borough than the entitled aimlessness of GIRLS, and watching makes me wistful for the places, sounds, and smells I recognize in every episode (not to mention the members of The Guy's profession that I met in college). This was an interview I was particularly jonesed up for, and if you read below, you can tell that I sort of Chris Farley-ed my way through the entire chat, but Ben and Katja were still more than willing to let me in as to the method behind their madness:
VINYARD: I just want to start off by saying I'm a big fan. I'd seen all the episodes prior to this new rollout, so I was really excited to get a chance to talk to you guys.
KATJA: Oh, cool!
VINYARD: Let's start out by talking about how the whole thing got started. Let's just jump back a few years to when you guys started this out back in…2012 was it?
KATJA: It was.
BEN: Yeah. Katja and I had been married for about five months, and we'd always known that we wanted to do something together. The bulk of Katja's experience was in casting, and she had a really great eye for great talent, and she was very good at directing actors' performances. She had that skill set, and my skill set was more in the acting and editing side, and I knew how to put short videos together on the cheap. The origin of the actual idea is kind of murky…
KATJA: Not surprising.
BEN: Not surprising. But we just wanted to do something on the cheap with our resources in a five-minute window that took place in real-time and kind of felt like a narrative. We wanted to do something where we could change out casts because we had so many actors that we wanted to work with.
KATJA: And we couldn't pay them, so we knew that we'd only be able to take a day of someone's time here and there, and that was a great way to change the cast out.
BEN: We shot the first episode in August of that year, and we really sat on it for a really long time.
KATJA: Almost a year.
BEN: Almost a year, and we shot pieces or whole episodes in the year after we shot that first one kinda trying to figure out what the idea was still. And then when we got four or five episodes in, we kind of knew, "Oh, we want this to be a show that's mostly about the clients. There's character exposition, and then there's a situation development, and a weed delivery, and then a climax, and then a funny line, and then it's over. " From there, we used that as a jump-off point, we gave ourselves a pool to swim in. it just happened that we released the first cycle of episodes right after weed legalization was passed recreationally in Denver and Washington, and that was kind of like a sign that we're in this interesting intersection of changing attitudes about this drug in combination with changing attitudes with how media is ingested by Joe Schmo. That was just stumbling upon that, and it's just, like, fuckin' awesome, man. We're just really happy that this has come to pass.
VINYARD: Like you said, you started out making them like five, six minutes, but even before you were getting funded by Vimeo, they were already getting to like 14, 15-minute lengths on some of those shorts. Can you talk about how your ambitions have developed? What are you reaching for now that you weren't neccessarily reaching for during those first few shorts?
BEN: Nothing different.
KATJA: No, I think our goals remain the same. We don't anticipate that this is the project that we're going to make a living off of necessarily. In a way, that's kind of freeing. It keeps us from having to try to please people. We don't have to try and guess what people want from us. We can just kind of stay true to what works for us. If we find something funny, that's good enough for us to keep something in our script.
BEN: Very early on, we were very concerned about length. We were like, "People aren't going to want to do this." But then we just kind of did it anyway, and people didn't say that they didn't want long episodes.
KATJA: But we didn't do it right out of the gate. I think in the beginning, we were very cognizant of the fact that people have short attention spans, and that there's an expectation when you click on an embedded video somewhere on the internet, whether it be on a blog or what have you, that it'll be a short, snackable video that won't take up too much time. We didn't think that we could ask for any more time from people in the beginning, so it took us a while to work up to the longer episodes. We didn't really do it until we had the feedback from people who were actually watching it, and once we heard enough times that people wanted more, we felt comfortable and confident enough to make them longer.
But it's not something like…you just said you saw the latest episodes, and they are longer, but that wasn't intentional. I don't think we went into this thing like, "We want to make them longer." In fact, Ben has been saying the whole time he wants to go back to the old way, and maybe try and challenge ourselves to make an 8-minute episode again. We actually find that challenging at this point to go backwards in that way.
BEN: I do know that it's probably not a good idea to try and make what you think everybody wants. The touchstone of the experience is listening to our guts, and kind of producing and writing and directing performances in a way that we find to be satisfying to us, because the other way is an impossible metric to calculate. We're just kind of letting the story tell us where it wants to go, and I think that has a lot to do with how these people are accepting these episodes. It doesn't feel jammed down your throat, and it's not product, it's just some fuckin' people having some behaviors, and maybe some pot get smoked in there somewhere.
VINYARD: Each episode feels more like a slice-of-life than a propulsive narrative or anything, but they do have the common thread of you, Ben, of "The Guy." Even in the ones where you only pop up for maybe a minute or two, you're still the only character in every episode, so there is some sort of consistency there, a sort of consistent relatability. Can you talk about The Guy? Your approach to him, how you picture him working within the city…you reveal a little bit about his life in the episode about his niece. What's his backstory in your mind? Who is he to you guys?
BEN: Well, who is he to you? That's really the question. I think we are going with the "less is more" attitude with him because this way, he can be whatever you need him to be. We really want the audience to know as much about The Guy as his clients know about hi, which is to say not very much.
KATJA: In the "Rachel" episode, he reveals to his client that he's actually not married. He says he's not married, and he wears a ring to appear more trustworthy. We dropped that in there as a…
BEN: A scrambling device, essentially.
KATJA: Sure, yeah. We wanted to put it out there that maybe The Guy isn't always representing himself accurately. Maybe there are things that you think about this guy that seems totally obvious, but are actually not what they seem, that things aren't neccessarily what they appear to be. I think that might be the most revealing thing we've put out there about The Guy, that he…
BEN: He lies.
KATJA: He lies! No one has brought that up to us ever, that particular thing. It didn't seem to ruffle anybody, or make anybody second guess him, so…
VINYARD: I think the reason why is that in that moment, he was trying to comfort.
KATJA: Yeah, of course.
VINYARD: So that's a consistent character trait of his, he's always there for the customer. So it didn't come from a place of nefariousness, it was like, "Yeah, this is him, trying to comfort his clients."
KATJA: The show really grew out of, besides out of our desire to work together, my desire to…I really enjoy talent development. When I met Ben, I was very taken with him, and was intrigued, and entertained, and charmed, all of those things. I wanted to capture that somehow, I think, and create a space for Ben to display these traits that I don't know that everybody gets to see. He wasn't having those sorts of opportunities to play charming, helpful guys. When he would go out on auditions, he was frequently being called on to be the bad guy, the villain, or the suspect, or the crazy homeless person. It's cool that it's taken off in this way, and that every day, when we're out and about, people will come up to Ben and want to shake his hand, or take a picture with him, or invite him to go smoke with them or whatever. I feel that that's a testament to Ben's acting, but it feels pretty cool that we've created this character that people feel so comfortable around and want to hang out with. He's really an idealized version of us. He's who we wish we were. We wish we were these people who could just float above judgment and sort of be like "Hakuna Matata" about everything. That's how we wish we were, but we're kind of stressful.
BEN: I've heard him described as merciful, and I think that is a great expression. 'Cause he's not…he's helpful, and he wants to help his clients, but…he's also got somewhere to be, you know? This is his job. In terms of his business and the way he works, it seems that he's an independent contractor. This is his own game that he's runnin'. So he really tries to avoid all that minutiae of where and how he gets it, because it's a show about characters, and once it becomes that it's BREAKING BAD, you know? It was worth it to us to make a person who wasn't saccharine, who wasn't some-
KATJA: It had to be believable.
BEN: It had to be believable, yeah. And this is New York City. If you see somebody fall down in the street, you'll be merciful and you'll help them up if you're a good person, but you're not gonna like sit with them and feed them soup for the rest of the week. You got places to be, you know?
VINYARD: I love when the survivalists are trying to get a pound off you, and you kind of just go, "Yeah I don't know if my supplier would be cool with that…"
BEN: There's something, like he doesn't grow it. Now you know he doesn't grow his own pot.
VINYARD: Maybe. Like you said, some of his stuff might not be what he's putting out there. He's just gotta get rid of the guy. Like you said, he has somewhere to be. He doesn't have to get a pound of weed to this crazy guy. Katja, I don't think you've ever actually appeared on the series.
BEN: Are you kidding me? She was the wife in RACHEL. She was the woman in the 13th episode who was married to the cross-dresser.
VINYARD: Oh, okay. The one with Dan Stevens?
KATJA: Yeah.
VINYARD: Wow, I didn't realize that. How did you get Dan Stevens, or Hannibal Buress who you had on in one of the earlier episodes? Did they come to you?
KATJA: They did, we were lucky in both those instances.
VINYARD: That's awesome.
KATJA: Yeah. I worked on 30 ROCK, as you probably know, in casting, and he was a writer for a season on the show, so he had my e-mail address. After we'd released a couple of cycles, he heard about it, and he just threw me an e-mail, and went, "Hey, your show's cool. If you ever want to work together, I'd totally be down to do one." And I of course immediately forwarded it to Ben, who was so excited. He's our favorite stand-up, period. So we had to work pretty quick to cook something up for him. Dan Stevens, similarly, found out about us through a friend, and got our e-mail. Same thing, he e-mailed and said, "I like the show, I'd love to meet sometime, and I'd love to work together somehow." It was an extra added bonus that when we did get together, we all just really hit it off in a really cool way, and now he's one of our very close friends.
BEN: Yeah very close.
KATJA: That was a really cool thing. We've actually made a lot of close friends just from the show, as people do. People we've just come to know from working, but now who are like family members.
VINYARD: I think your most recurring character so far besides The Guy is Evan, the asexual magician. I was really stoked to see him get his own moment in the sun (in the episode GENGHIS), so I figure he's a guy you guys like writing for and stuff. But is there something about that character…the character, to me, feels "Only in NY." I lived in New York for six years, so this is a guy I saw every day. I totally get his reality, even when you only saw him for snippets. Can you talk about why you felt the need to revisit that character a few times?
KATJA: Part of it has to do with…we just love Avery Monsen, who plays that character. He's a really good friend, and longtime friend of Ben's. They were college roommates, and even post-college roomates. They studied abroad together in Russia. They have a long history, and I came to know him through Ben. From a casting director's perspective, I was immediately impressed by him. I cast him on 30 ROCK, and we really wanted to showcase his unique skill set, which happens to include magic and tumbling and improv comedy and a host of other things. Asexuality is the only thing that's manufactured, because he's actually pretty successful romantically.
BEN: I wouldn't say successful. He gets by. He gets by well enough. No, he's a really, really talented guy, man. And we'd been doing scene study classes, and I knew that he could…I always joke with him about how he can't cry. So it was cool, at that moment when he gets frustrated at school-
KATJA: He did cry. He made me cry.
BEN: Yeah. That scene was a last-minute decision.
KATJA: It was, actually. That part of him running out and crying was not in the script, but when we were there, we felt that we needed it, and he delivered.
BEN: Yeah, and I just remembered him doing the scene from GOOD WILL HUNTING in college, and thinking it was so funny that he was doing this dramatic scene and trying to cry and whatever, and now he's a man.
KATJA: He's come a long way, yeah.
VINYARD: I didn't know that was actually him doing the magic tricks and stuff, that's awesome. How'd your relationship with Vimeo come about? Did they approach you guys?
KATJA: Yeah, basically. The timing was luckily right on for us. We needed a home- well, we had a home, but we were sort of at a point where it felt like we'd exhausted a lot of the goodwill we had with people. I'm sure the people we've worked with might say otherwise, there might be mixed opinions out here, but we didn't feel good asking people to work for free for much longer. We were getting some nice critical attention, and it was like, "Come on, surely someone out there has some money that they can part with to help us make this show so that people can actually get paid." It was just really cool that it all sort of came about when they had just allocated this money for original programming right when we were looking for money. We had a meeting, and it all happened very quickly, but it was very great because we didn't have to do anything dramatic. THere wasn't any dramatic changes. We were able to just sort of continue to do things at the scale that we'd been doing them, which, for us, is comfortable. It just felt very seamless. I described it earlier today as like when someone moves into a new apartment, but it's in the same building. They just got a bigger space, there's now a window in there maybe, there's a bathroom maybe they didn't have before, but it's the same structure, which is pretty cool.
VINYARD: So this season's gonna be six episodes, but I guess only the first three are coming out?
BEN: We've always released them in threes, and we'll continue to do so until we don't release them anymore.
VINYARD: Have you shot the next three yet?
BEN: Yeah, we shot them all, we're just still editing them.
KATJA: We shot them all this summer.
VINYARD: Cool. What are your future plans for the series? Do you have anything you haven't done yet that you wanna do? Do you have anything you're already doing that you never did before that you're excited about?
BEN: I mean, every time we do it, there's something we've never done before, and I think the next couple in cycle five is traditional HIGH MAINTENANCE in as much that the only difference is that they're longer, but they're still like these contained stories. I think that in the sixth cycle there's more branching out, and you learn slightly more about The Guy's character, only slightly. There's some character arcs that are beginning to form over the series of a couple of episodes.
VINYARD: Nice.
BEN: I think we did kinda want to throw a slight amount of serialization, in that something that happens in one episode will affect something that happens in another episode. But we're just trying to remain as open as we can to the human experience, so what we have something to write about. I think the more we use living our life as a means to an end, the end being HIGH MAINTENANCE, I think the shallower the stories become. It's really important to us to give ourselves enough breathing room to be authentic human beings, and not to just think of the next idea for our show.
KATJA: Yeah, there's more to life.
BEN: There's more to life than this show for us.
VINYARD: So is it safe to say that you guys are strictly focused on HIGH MAINTENANCE, or are you working on other stuff right now?
BEN: No, it's not safe to say that.
KATJA: We're pretty focused on it right now.
BEN: We're focused on it this time because of press, except there are other ideas that we definitely want to get off the ground. Right now, we're just trying to figure out who we want to work with next.
KATJA: It's a pretty cool situation, where because of this show, it's opened the doors to a lot of relationships with people that we admire, and it's kind of cool. Like Ben said, we can just kind of sit back and think, "Okay, who do we want to work with? Who have we met over these last couple of years? Who have we crossed paths with that we feel compatible in spirit?" You know? It'll be cool to sort of branch out and do a different project with different collaborators, and not wear so many hats.
VINYARD: Sure. Can you talk about the music? I'm always a big fan of the end credits, and the music. You were knocking these out in a couple of days, at least for the first few seasons, so how do you get the great music done so fast?
BEN: What you mean knock them out in a couple of days?
VINYARD: I read that your initial shooting strategy was to shoot them over weekends, so I assumed that you had a really tight production schedule in general.
KATJA: But it's not really. I mean it is now, because there are people who are expecting us to deliver by certain deadlines, but for those first 13, there was no one deciding but us. We were determining when we were releasing them, so we would just release them when they were ready. If we didn't have music or whatever, well, then…we had the time and space, and no one was breathing down our necks to put something out, so sometimes things came together over a very long period of time.
BEN: As for music, it's a case-by-case basis. We knew McFabulous, I went to college with McFabulous, and we had hung out during the summer that Katja and I had met. He was very helpful in assisting us with music. Gordon Boydwell is a person that we have also come upon who is a talented, talented musician. He even scored GEIGER (Episode 1 of the latest cycle). He's been very helpful to us. And then we worked with this very talented music supervisor named Liz Fulton, who was very helpful in pointing us out towards some of our favorite musicians like Night Moves or Connan Mockasin. It's really just friends of friends or people who happen to be fans of the show who allowed us to use their music. For some episodes, the music kind of drove the episode. Like QASIM was a result of hearing that song and being inspired by that song that plays over the long montage in the beginning. It just so happens that we heard that song on Radiolab, and we were like, "We have to know who this is." The drummer of that band, Dawn of Midi, was in our weekly, or biweekly, Sunday roast supper club. It's just kismit, mostly kismit of what we could get our hands on.
VINYARD: It's serendipity. Because every end credits sequence, not only do you guys have some interesting stuff going on in the video, usually in slow motion, but I also love the music. One more question: you shoot a lot in New York, and as someone who has shot in the streets of New York, it can be a huge pain. Have you ever had trouble with that, getting permits and stuff like that?
BEN: No.
KATJA: We've never had problems.
BEN: We haven't had problems. We're a skeleton crew, so even if we did have problems, we would be out before it became an issue.
VINYARD: Hell yeah.
KATJA: We get the permits and everything, and like Ben said, we're a small crew, we don't have a lot of equipment, we're never in anyone's way. It's lucky for us it's always worked out.
VINYARD: And none of the weed is real, so...
BEN AND KATJA: No, no, no!
High Maintenance // Stevie from Janky Clown Productions on Vimeo.
High Maintenance // Olivia from Janky Clown Productions on Vimeo.
High Maintenance // Elijah from Janky Clown Productions on Vimeo.
You can watch both new and old eps of HIGH MAINTENANCE on Vimeo.
