Debuting at Big Apple Film Festival, “Breed of Greed” Spotlights actress Gina Gershon in this Haunting Thriller

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Sunday, 08 December 2024 14:07

Written by Brad Balfour

Photo: Brad Balfour

As produced by Ralph Hemecker, Andrew Boszhardt and Otto Eckstein, the indie feature “Breed of Greed” offers an impressive cast including Gina Gershon, Boszhardt, Adrian Enscoe, Chelsea Gilligan, and Madison Lewis in its debut at 2024’s Big Apple Film Festival. BAFF showcases quality films from the New York City independent film community, as well as selected films from across the country and the world. Additionally, the festival honors a variety of local filmmakers, writers, actors and artists who have played an influential role in the growth of independent filmmaking in the Big Apple.

In this compelling exploration of the darker sides of wealth and ambition, the mysterious death of the Wendolyn patriarch brings this Big Pharma family back together. While the clan goes to war with one another, an ancient curse preys on them and their greed. The Wendolyns have made billions on painkillers, but no drug can kill the pain that they’ll soon endure.

The film’s primary creator NYC-based Boszhardt wrote, produced and starred in this feature-length thriller. The lanky filmmaker has also worked on other memorable projects including “Cutman,” where he worked alongside industry giants Bill Fichtner and Chris Noth.

When this interview was conducted with this 20-something, his tale of determination and resolve provided a great example of what it takes to survive and thrive in this highly competitive marketplace. Over lunch in Neuehouse, we covered much ground as we discussed the creation of his career and this film.

Q: What was the first day you can remember when you knew you wanted to be in this business? 

Andrew Boszhardt: I was 10 years old and it was the first time I saw “Star Wars: A New Hope.” I then watched it a second, third and fourth time. I think I watched it four or five times over the course of one Sunday. I wasn’t 100% sure if I wanted to direct or act…. Did I want to be George Lucas or Harrison Ford? All I knew was that I wanted to make movies and be a storyteller.

Q: And that connected with the idea of you acting? 

Andrew Boszhardt: I was a very energetic and rambunctious child. I remember I did a few school plays when I was younger, but I was very, very focused on athletics, which took up the large majority of my time. Nonetheless, my brother, sister and I, we’d go down in the basement to dress up and would play like “airplane” or “pirates.” I just remember loving that. I was recruited to Cornell for rowing and actually intended to major in theater and film. I took all theater and film classes my freshman year, but Cornell was a rather homogenous place, for lack of a better term. I would say 90% of the people who go there end up working in finance or into consulting, banking, entrepreneurship or engineering.

I just didn’t have the courage or confidence at 19 or 20 to say, “Screw it, I’m going to buck the trend here.” I ended up majoring in history because I love to read and write and I’ve always been a strong writer and am a voracious reader. I graduated college and then worked with startups in venture capital for a year or two. It was actually improv comedy that brought me back to acting. 

Q: You wouldn’t know that from this movie.

Andrew Boszhardt: No, but we tried to sprinkle some moments of humor in there. I think you’re seeing that more and more. It’s very rare that you see films these days that don’t have at least some elements of humor. I had just come back from London where I was doing a theater festival and realized I want to spend more time doing theater, especially if I’m going to be here in New York and be 100% committed to being a New York artist and creative. 

Eugene O’Neill is one of the greats and the first time I read “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” I just thought it was a brilliant but a very dark, bleak and depressing play, which it is. But then when you actually watch it staged you realize that there’s a little comedy in there. It’s a dark comedy for sure. Same with most of Sam Shepherd’s plays. You read these sentences or the characters on the page and it doesn’t jump out to you, but that’s also the job of the actor and director — to bring the words to life.  

Q: Tell me a little of your bio because it’s different to hear it rather than just read it. 

Andrew: I was born here in New York City, Mount Sinai, and grew up on 92nd Street. I lived there full time for about eight or nine years. We had an apartment there for about 25/30 years. We’d always had a weekend house in New Vernon, New Jersey and eventually my parents decided to start spending more time out there, so I ended up going to a middle school out there before going to Lawrenceville, but I’ve been in New York, say about 70-80% of my life. 

I feel I have the essence and soul of a New Yorker, but I’m also very grateful for having had the experience of spending some of my childhood outside of the city. Central Park is great, but being able to play catch with your dad in a backyard and being surrounded by nature and trees, you know, these aren’t things that we get on a consistent basis as New Yorkers. 

Q: What did you learn from sports that you were able to apply to acting? 

Andrew Boszhardt: I was listening to an interview a few weeks ago that Jerry Seinfeld did. He’s a hero of mine, and he said that his friends jokingly call him “The Mule” because he just keeps plodding forward. I played basketball when I was younger. I excelled at track. Then it was rowing. I think more than anything, I developed this Spartan-like discipline and work ethic. This morning, for instance, I woke up at six am and before coming here, wrote for five hours. I do that every single morning. I’m going to do it tomorrow, even on Saturday and Sunday. Well, maybe not five hours every single day, but at least three.

Q: “Breed of Greed” is not your first feature, but it’s the first you’ve done where you really have an important role in it. What got you to this point?

Andrew Boszhardt: Five years ago, I was sitting around on a Saturday with some of my roommates and I had this silly idea for a short film. I sat down and started writing it and three months later we were filming it. I also produced and acted in it. I just remembered loving being so creatively invested and involved in a project in not just one way, but in multiple ways. 

The short got made. We screened it for like 500 people at SVA’s theater. I regret not submitting it to festivals. I got very, very positive feedback on the short. Actually, if I recall, we were planning on doing that and then COVID hit. I basically used COVID as an opportunity to really lean into screenwriting. 

This is not hyperbole when I say this. There were weeks and months where my schedule was legitimately writing 6-8 hours in the morning and then reading two scripts at night. Over COVID, I was mostly focused on “Breed of Greed,” which took about a year of writing it with Otto Eckstein to get to the point where we were comfortable sending it out to directors. We got a great director attached, Ralph Hemecker. We raised some seed funding from private equity. We got Gina Gershon attached. We got other great cast members attached. Then we made the movie. Coming up this November it will be two years from when we wrapped. 

The editing process took a bit longer than any of us anticipated. And frankly, the strike prolonged everything. I actually thought the strike was going to be a good thing for independent films. I was under the impression that distributors would need more films because there would be a four- to six-months stretch where films weren’t getting made. What I did not anticipate was just how much of a backlog they already had and how flooded the market already was. Anyways, we’re now in the process of selling the film. We have a great sales agent. I’m very optimistic. We’re going to find the right home for it.

Q: Do you think it’s going to land in a theatrical distributor first, or you’re going to land with a streamer?

Andrew Boszhardt: If I’m being realistic, it’ll probably be both. It’ll be a limited theatrical release, maybe in a few major U.S. cities like New York and L.A., Austin, Chicago, D.C. and then digital. 

Q: Had you always thought of it as becoming a psychological thriller? It’s a curious title.

Andrew Boszhardt: Originally, we envisioned it as more straight horror and it morphed into this very interesting tonal mix of a few different genres. It’s a satirical, thrilling family drama with elements of horror. One of the things I have learned through this process is that it’s very important, especially when you’re doing a genre film, to give people what they expect and want. 

If you’re David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino you have a bit more license to experiment and try new things. But I’d advise first-time filmmakers — writers, directors, producers — to really make sure you’re honoring the elements of that genre because genre fans are very hardcore. They know what they want and how they want it.

Q: Ultimately, you landed at the point where you are going to make this movie, a kind of genre film, with an offbeat title. Talk about its origins, and especially that title. What did you think of it as meaning?

Andrew Boszhardt: This was the first feature script I’d ever written. My friend, Otto, was an English major at Harvard. He’d written a few scripts. He had one in development, and I really learned a lot about screenwriting by working with him. We’d gotten together and were just throwing around ideas. We looked at everything that was going on culturally, all these conversations that were happening around wealth inequality. And also how certain families and companies were engaging in oftentimes illicit, dubious and deceitful activities. 

We decided, for lack of a better term, to make an “eat the rich” horror/thriller. Otto and I, also growing up in New York, felt like we could bring authenticity to the script and could write these characters and their dialogue and their motivations very well.

Q: Had you already thought of yourself as acting in it? 

Andrew Boszhardt: Yes, yes. Otto had seen me act before and when I asked him to partner with me, we originally conceived of this as a short film. We were going to write and produce it together and we had a different director attached. We had a producer, had started casting it and doing table reads when COVID hit and it kept getting pushed back. 

The budget kept going up and we just decided, well, the industry is in a bit of a standstill. The goal of this short was always to turn it into a feature. So why don’t we just take a stab at trying to make it into a feature? And that’s what we did. It took two years or so.

Q: You get it done and then you hit the strike.

Andrew Boszhardt: Got it done, and we hit the strike. We had an incredible director who does a lot of TV work. And he had to go shoot a few episodes of TV, so post-production took a bit longer than we had planned. I think the first cut I saw was two hours and 10 minutes long. Now the total runtime is about 95 minutes, so it just takes time. Writing a script or anything really worthwhile: however long you think it’s going to take, multiply that by two. The same goes, I guess, for everything. 

Q: Most recently, some of the movies getting the most attention and heat are genre-oriented, which isn’t always the case. Just look at the movie “Longlegs,” this one that’s in theaters now.

Andrew Boszhardt: I’ve not seen “Longlegs” yet. I have an interesting prediction. I always try to look at the contrarian point of view, and we’ve just had like five to 10 years of very IP heavy, genre heavy films — action, horror, superhero films. Not a lot, in my opinion, of great character-driven dramas and comedies. The kind of films that Jim Brooks, Cameron Crowe or Woody Allen would have been making 10, 20 years ago, I actually think. I hope there will be a resurgence of those films, too. 

Q: “Twisters” is another one. It’s kind of action, but it’s also very character-driven. 

Andrew Boszhardt: There’s nothing wrong with that. I think you can do both. You can make something with characters that we really care about, while also making it very commercial, as Hollywood likes to do. But I would love to see the kind of movie that Jack Nicholson would have done 20 or 30 years ago, like “Terms of Endearment” or “As Good as It Gets.” I can’t remember the last time I saw something like that. 

Q: So you are self-schooled more than anything else?

Andrew Boszhardt: On the acting front, I did two years of a Meisner conservatory at Maggie Flanagan. For the last 10 months I’ve done a four-hour Strasberg class every Saturday afternoon with an actor and teacher by the name of David Gideon. He used to run the Strasberg Institute. He trained and lived with Lee Strasberg as one of his protege teachers for the last seven or eight years of Lee’s life. David is just incredible. I mean, truly one of the highlights of my week. 

I look forward to being in that class every single week. The work means so much to me. Part of your journey as an actor, frankly, is finding what works for you. Same with being a writer or any other type of artist.

On the writing front, it’s taken me a while to realize that outlining actually holds me back. I’m better off spending a day or two coming up with the main characters, theme, and major plot points and then diving in and attacking the first draft. I might go through five drafts before I send it out to a producer, but I discover so much more about the story through the act of writing. 

Q: You worked with Michael Mailer. Is that the first thing you really did, or did you do shorts before that? 

Andrew Boszhardt: I did a lot of shorts before that, and did a feature film that was shot up in Cape Cod before that. Then I did “Breed of Greed.” Then I did the film with Michael. And now I’ve been exploring more theater opportunities. I was just at that theater festival in London, Camden Fringe, and am doing readings and workshops here in the City. 

Q: I’m assuming you have an agent and manager. 

Andrew Boszhardt: I had a manager who very tragically passed away unexpectedly. Yeah, she was wonderful. She ran her own shop but was a very respected and well-known manager here in the city. I’m being hip-pocketed at the moment as a writer. But on the acting front, I’m talking to people, and frankly, and have had a few offers. But I don’t want like four different managers. I don’t want someone to cover me on producing versus writing versus acting. I want to find the right manager, the right agent, to cover me on all bases. 

Q: You have a producing partner?

Andrew Boszhardt: I’ve got partners on multiple projects that are both coming up and obviously that have already been made, like “Breed of Greed.” 

Q: What’s harder or easier? To get your ideas sold, or to get into somebody else’s ideas? Do you need to network more to be that actor that they’re gonna pick up?

Andrew Boszhardt: Depending on that, theoretically, it’s easier to break in as a writer because if Universal or A24 wants to buy your script…. But yes, it helps to be Aaron Sorkin. Of course, if you write a fantastic script and it gets seen, it doesn’t matter if you’re a no-name writer. Someone will want to buy it. 

As an actor, especially these days, it’s very, very rare. I think the days of Edward Norton as a no-name actor being cast as the lead in “Primal Fear,” at least at this moment, are over. I know they famously auditioned like 2,000 actors for that role and Edward Norton was incredible. I can’t imagine anyone else in that role, but these days I couldn’t imagine a studio going with an unknown, no matter how good they are. 

Q: We are having movies with unknowns that suddenly break the unknowns out. 

Andrew Boszhardt: We are, but those are usually at the independent level that, like, then crush it on the festival. 

Q: You have the streamers and theatrical, so you have more opportunities to find acting work. It’s just a matter of how you drive the career to make sure that the acting work you get takes you to the next acting work. 

Andrew Boszhardt: In “Breed of Greed” I played the lead and was also one of the writers and one of the producers. What I’m doing now, which I think is smart, is writing scripts that could be made at the studio level. They’re high concept, bigger budgeted, like $10,000,000 to $30,000,000 films that could be made by a major studio or production company. Rather than writing a lead role for myself, I’m just writing a really good supporting role who’s maybe in one, two, or three key scenes. If that film gets made by a major studio and does well…. I think with Cameron Diaz’s first film role, she was in one scene. But that was all it took. Was it Jim Carrey’s film, “The Mask?” 

Q: And the one that really made her was the one with Matt Dillon in it. 

Andrew Boszhardt: Yeah, “Something About Mary,” of course. Amazing movie, amazing comedy. Love the Farrelly brothers. I am really leaning into writing because I think talent is important. You have to have a baseline level of talent, but more important than talent is skill. And you develop skill by being a mule like Jerry Seinfeld and just doing it every day. The compounding effect of writing a few hours a day over months and then years –– you do that for five or six years and you’ve hit Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. 

Q: You’d rather have this happen, get recognized, and lose sight of everything else?

Andrew Boszhardt: I also believe you have to take the doors that are opening for you at the moment. You have to throw as much shit at the wall and see what sticks. Right now, a lot of people are really hot on my writing, so I'm leaning into that a little more. But tomorrow I’ll be in acting class for four hours. Again, I was just performing in London and I'm auditioning when the opportunities arise. If I were to get cast in a TV show, I wouldn't turn that down. 

Every year, I used to specifically write out my goals. Like, "Oh, I'm going to have my romantic comedy done by this date. I'll have to raise x amount of dollars for my movie this year. And will have X number of guest star roles on TV."

I don't do that anymore. All my goals are simply around the process now.

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For more info on the film and where it will screen after Big Apple Film Festival go to: www.andrewkboszhardt.com

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