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Tom Brown: I don't know about Daniel, but I do. Not even a filling in these bad boys. Mother pumped me full of fluoride as a child and I broke my glass candy jar and then there were no more treats. I also choked on a hardboiled sweet on my sixth birthday and was banned from ever eating one again. I did have some extra canines though—double rows of them like a shark. They were taken from me. In fact, I had eight teeth removed, but technically I have all the teeth I'm meant to have.
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Gray: Those are good, but don't forget hitting your teeth with the edge of a knife, with real conviction.Brown: My favorite sound is Céline Dion, which I guess for most people is one in the same.Where did you guys come up with this story? I have to make sure it's not an autobiography.
The story goes, we were stuck on the Eurostar for hours after a bird hit the power lines just sitting somehow in first class waiting for another train to come pick us up. We were joking about a pair of twins only having one pair of dentures between them, and the rest is history, kind of.Gray: The story is a Holbrooks [their production company] original. We were stuck on a train in France when the main story was written. It was formed from the more interesting aspects of some other ideas we were toying with at the time—plus the guy next to us bit off his tongue with homemade dentures. [This is a joke.]I absolutely love your animation style. It's dark, haunting, and wonderfully enhances the tension of the story itself. Did the story or style come first? Or how did they influence each other?
Like anyone else, we try and make sure that everything fits and carries its weight toward what we're trying to achieve. There was a story first, but it influenced the visuals as we developed it, and vice versa.
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It's sort of like that, except Dan lives in Budapest and I live in New York. So we don't touch each other, or look at each other, or talk to each other really. It's best that way. We just text each other and share files over Google Drive.Gray: It's all about pattings-on-the-back with us. We're always choking on bits of whatever is laying about.Which one of you is a better director? Spill all of the dirt.
Brown: We are animation wives: We both do the housework, and neither of us kiss and tell. And if Dan says he's better than me, I will fight him and then we will find out.Gray: Holbrooks is better than both of us put together, of course.What are you two working on now? Anything together, or separate?
Gray: We have a short all written up and being storyboarded as we speak, and pitching for ad work.Brown: We are always available for commercial work through my partners at Blacklist, who EP'ed the film.Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.