Buddy is Casper Kelly’s third feature and the largest production of his career. Ask him what the extra money actually bought, and the answer is blunt.
It was more money but it didn’t seem to help at all.
We caught the Fantasia screening on August 1 and stayed for the Q&A that followed. Kelly spent a good chunk of it comparing Buddy to the two Adult Swim features he made before it, and the comparison does not land where you would expect it to.
What The Yule Log Movies Had That Buddy Didn’t
Kelly’s first two features were Adult Swim Yule Log and Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin’ Out. Both were made for less money. Both, by his account, came with something Buddy could not offer.
They were even a lot lower budget but the benefit was no executives on set giving you notes, they might come one day from the catering but that was it. So it was a lot of freedom.
That freedom was partly a function of the price tag. Kelly told IndieWire in 2022 that part of the trick was doing it cheaply enough that nobody upstairs had to be asked for money, which kept the project clear of people who might have had notes about it.
Buddy came with producers in the room. Kelly frames that as a fair trade rather than a grievance.
“I had producers on set, creative producers but I think it was good,” he said.
They were strengthening me and helping me, you know, push me to hopefully new layers that I can do. So that was the main difference.
Spoiler warning: the following section describes the film’s final death scene.
The Buddy Death Scene Casper Kelly Only Got One Shot At
The budget did not fix the thing Kelly actually needed fixed, which was time.
He shot Buddy in roughly 25 days, a number he gave No Film School back in January, and the schedule left no slack in it. That same interview has him and cinematographer Zach Kuperstein ruling out period cameras for the show sequences, because a breakdown would have meant cutting scenes outright. Nobody was getting an extra day.
At the Fantasia Film Festival, he gave the harder example. The last death in the film is Buddy’s own, and it leaves a pool of blood across the floor.
Like the death scene, that was, you get one of these because we don’t have time to clean up all this blood again.
Kelly said. “You get one shot.“
Which is how a bigger production ended up feeling like the smaller ones. “It was kind of similar that way,” he said. “Not enough time and you always wish you could do more.“
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Sweaty Suits and a Reptile Mannequin: The Hardest Days on Buddy
Asked to name his worst day of production, Kelly went to the sequence at the bottom of the Worry Well, where the kids find a workshop and a unicorn assembling objects for the show. (The film’s production company is credited as Worry Well Productions.) It is a cramped space, and Buddy has to perform in it in full suit, alongside the unicorn and the children.
“That was just a horrible hot day,” Kelly said.
That set fell through so we had to move it into another room really fast but I think it works great. And just that day things everything seemed to go wrong but thank God the crew was there to help fix it as best we can and make it work.
The suits caused their own problems on other days. The mouth mechanism failed. The thing overheated. “It would just be too sweaty,” Kelly said. “This thing needs to air.” Fogging was a recurring issue. The darker Buddy rig ran heavy enough to give the performers trouble.
The hardest element on set was not a suit at all. Buddy’s final form is a black reptilian creature with claws, teeth, spikes down its back, and an oversized horn, and it took a team to operate.
The mannequin was the hardest; it’s very hard to control. That was very hard.
Kelly has talked to Bloody Disgusting about how much the production leaned on people who knew this specific kind of performing, including a puppeteer who came in as a genuine Barney expert. What he added at Fantasia was how that crew behaved when he asked them for more work they had not signed up for.
Mid-shoot, he decided he wanted a bluebird. He knew everyone was already buried.
“I was like, I want the scene to feel very happy and light. And I know we’re already shooting and you guys are busy but could you do a bluebird?” One of the junior puppeteers took it.
She was like, hell yeah. She was so excited. I love that about the team that they just never said no.
The bluebird made it into the movie. So did the workshop set they had to rebuild in an afternoon, and the death scene nobody got a second pass at.
Buddy opens in theaters August 28 from Roadside Attractions and Saban Films.