Sketch: Tony Hale and Seth Worley on a TIFF Premiere That Colors Skillfully Outside the Lines
Crayons, wax, and glitter. That’s the stuff the monsters are made of in Seth Worley’s directorial debut, Sketch, which is premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“The monsters are made of whatever Amber (Bianca Belle) draws them with. If she drew them with crayons, when they’d come to life, the monster would drip and melt in the heat. If it’s made of chalk, they make a room foggy with powder,” says Worley.
The director uses childlike and tactile ingredients to have “lots of Spielbergian fun” in Sketch.
The movie grounds its story in a family led by veteran comedic actor Tony Hale (Inside Out 2, VEEP) as Taylor Wyatt, who’s grieving the recent loss of his wife, and the mother of Amber and Jack (Kue Lawrence).
Amber takes up sketching disturbing pictures of monsters as an outlet for the loss, but she’s misunderstood and finds herself in trouble. When her monsters come to life, the creatures act on Amber’s every grief-stricken whim, forcing the entire town to confront the family’s loss.
Despite Sketch being Worley’s first feature film, the movie wrapped production on time and under budget — while juggling a cast that includes three child actors.
In MovieMaker’s conversation with Worley and Hale, they attributed their successful production to a core team of friends who together developed Sketch over the last seven years.
Joshua Encinias: Sketch is described as “Jurassic Park meets Inside Out,” so it feels appropriate that Tony would be involved as he just starred as Fear in Inside Out 2. Tony, how did you become involved in Sketch?
Tony Hale: We’ve been working on it together for about seven years. I’d seen Seth’s work on other things and loved it. When he showed me his ideas for a script, I would throw back a fun idea and do an edit. I loved the idea of doing for live action what Inside Out orchestrated for the emotional life.
Seth Worley: We were friends at the time and I reached out for his thoughts, but I was absolutely writing it for him. I thought of Tony immediately because he’s so good at playing neuroses and anxiety, especially from a very grounded place and that’s why it’s always so funny.
I didn’t tell him I wrote it for him because I was scared he would not like it. I got his advice on it for six months, and finally, when he confirmed that he liked it, I was like, “Hey, random idea. Have you ever thought about playing the dad?” We don’t often get to see Tony play a guy who cares deeply about his family, but that’s who Tony is.
Joshua Encinias: Tony, have younger people who grew up watching you in Toy Story 4 realized you also make adult comedies like Arrested Development and VEEP?
Tony Hale: I have had people be like, “I’ve been watching Arrested Development,” and they find out that I was also Forky in Toy Story 4 and they’re like, “Uh, those two things don’t go together.”
But what’s fun is when kids are between the ages of three and six and their parents find out that I’m Forky. I’ll send a voice memo saying hi to them from Forky because during that beautiful age, they think Forky exists. I tell the parents, “You cannot say it’s a human. Don’t tell them it’s a human.” Then they’ll send back a video of the kids listening to Forky saying hi and their minds are like, “How the hell did you meet Forky?” That’s when it gets really fun. I love that stuff.
Joshua Encinias: Sketch feels like a movie about kids that’s made for adults. It’s genuinely scary at times. It’s like John Krasinski’s IF meets Stranger Things.
Seth Worley: We had no interest in making a kid’s movie and we still have no interest in making a kid’s movie. This was a movie that we made first and foremost for us. I would say we did it in the same spirit that any of the team at Pixar makes their movies. We are trying to entertain ourselves first, knowing that we are people who want to be able to share this with our families. The Holy Grail is seeing a movie, loving it, and being like, “I can’t wait to show this to my kid.” The type of movie that adults don’t just have to tolerate for their kid’s sake. A movie that everyone is finding value in having that shared experience.
Joshua Encinias: How did you make the monsters look like a child’s drawing but also make them look believable when they come to life?
Seth Worley: A lot of these drawings started with me having an image in my head. I knew I wanted a monster that was a big blue ball with long legs. I can’t draw and I’m angry that all of my friends have Ridley Scott-level storyboard artistry skills. But I drew a couple of the drawings in the movie they look so bad that it looks like a kid could have drawn it.
Most of the drawings came from me giving ideas to a concept artist and I would then take their concept art and have my kids draw their own adaptations of it. We hodgepodged them together. The goal was to make the monsters threatening and goofy because we wanted them to be both as much as possible.
Joshua Encinias: Being a first-time feature director, I can’t imagine you had a huge budget. How did you create CG monsters that didn’t look cheap?
Seth Worley: I’m fortunate to have a background in making short films that were marketing pieces for visual effects software companies. Specifically, the company called Red Giant that’s now called Maxon. So I have a lot of experience making visual-effects heavy shorts. Through that experience, I’ve gotten pretty comfortable knowing what makes a good visual effects play, and what things to lean into.
A lot of it is knowing the weaknesses of certain technologies or certain tools, and creatively leaning into those. It helped us tremendously that the monsters were supposed to look like kids drew them. It gave us a lot of margin for error.
Joshua Encinias: Children’s characters can very easily become caricatures, but in Sketch, the kids aren’t smarter than adults but they’re not dumb either. For example, when Amber tells her dad, “You gave me your covenant,” it sounds clunky and awkward but natural coming from a kid who is trying out new words and concepts.
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Sketch Director Seth Worley and Star Tony Hale on ‘Kid Logic’
Seth Worley: Yes, the worst characters are the worst characters in history. It’s so difficult to watch a bad kid character. So the covenant line came from something I heard a kid say when I was growing up. I grew up in an Evangelical household but I never heard the phrase “Give me your covenant.” It was such a stupid thing to hear coming out of a kid’s mouth but they were saying it aggressively with force which made it even funnier. “I’m not letting go of you until you give me your covenant!” It’s like, are these kids in a cult?
The trick that’s helped me write bearable, realistic, kid characters is to resist the urge to put any extra mustard on it. Kid logic is hilarious on its own. Kid vocabulary and kid rhetoric is just funny. You have people who are not who are not old enough to know what they don’t know but know a lot of weird shit.
Tony Hale: We were lucky because Bianca, Kue Lawrence, and Kalon Cox had a natural sense to them. The casting process is tricky and there are some fantastic kid actors, but there are a lot of different types of acting that you see kids do on TV. So to find three kids who knew the power of subtlety and even off-the-cuff humor and mix that with D’Arcy Carden, who is so funny and at the same time very genuine, we got really lucky.
Joshua Encinias: How involved were your producers during production?
Tony Hale: Dusty Brown was a real boots-on-the-ground producer for us. He’s the kind of guy who’s great at putting out little fires. Dusty and I are producing partners, and making an independent film is such a stressful environment, so the fact that we all had a good time and we’re all buddies really helped us get along with each other.
Seth Worley: Dusty and our other co-producer Steve Taylor are very good at putting on fires but also preemptively seeing what’s flammable in a situation. I remember early on the first week, I felt bad because after a take, said to myself, “I’m micromanaging Tony Hale. Why am I doing this?” and unprompted, Dusty walked up to me and said, “You’re doing great. You can bend Tony and you won’t break him. Keep going because you’re getting great stuff.” And it was like, “How did he know?”
Tony Hale: I loved to get those little bits from you. It’s so funny because I remember you thinking that, and it’s like, when you trust the director, there’s not enough micro-managing. I don’t call it micro-managing either. To me it’s refining.
Main image: D’Arcy Carden and Tony Hale in Sketch, courtesy of TIFF.
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