Rap World's Jack Bensinger and Eric Rahill on McDonald's, Indie Rap, and the Divinity of the Suburbs

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When I got an invite to see a screening of Rap World, Conner O'Malley and Danny Scharar's brilliant feature starring O'Malley, Jack Bensinger, and Eric Rahill as three suburban wastrels trying to record a rap album in one night, my wife and I literally cut our vacation short to make it back to NYC in time. We made the right choice: Rap World is one of the funniest movies of the year as well as quite possibly one of the best flicks of the year period, a true-to-live evocation of living and dying in the enclave of McMansions and McDonald's drive-thrus that was such an identifiable replica that I found myself recognizing several locations they filmed at—including the McDonald's in Paramus (Route 17, across the highway of the Stop and Shop) and the Washington Township Cinemas, where I saw Casper and I Heart Huckabee's as a youngster (the range!).

Of course, during the Q&A I obnoxiously asked about the McDonald's location, but I was desperate to get Bensinger and Rahill on the horn to talk more about how they pulled this off after the film was released wide on YouTube last month. It was a great and funny convo, check it out:

As someone who grew up in the area that you shot a fair amount of this, I found myself recognizing the settings of Rap World on a very literal level. But there's obviously a bit of a real-feel universality to the suburban settings you guys shot in as well.
Jack: I think God helped us in many ways. For example, the house we were in—we sifted through Airbnbs that that gave us like PTSD flashbacks to the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater Pizza Hut demo, and we just kind of lived in there and set the movie in the town that it was in. [Producers] Harris Meyersohn and Meryl Faye Crock scouted all the locations and made sure that everything felt 2009.

Eric: The house that we shot the Dan Licata scene was an alt-comedy buddy's mom's house where they did punk shows in the basement. That was one of those moments where we got in there and there was minimal set decoration. We brought in the Rock Band drums that weren't used in the final cut. But I feel like God—whoever—helped out somehow, because these places that we found were almost perfect as we found them.

The opening scene at the movie theater really brings you back to waiting for your friend to get done with their shitty job before you get up to whatever you're going to get up to that night. What are some bad former jobs you guys have had?
Jack: My first job was at the public pool in Virginia—I got fired. There's a fridge for stock food and was a fridge for personal food. I didn't realize that I was selling people's personal food. That's when i knew i had to be an entrepreneur.

Eric: My first job was at a coffee shop that shared the same space as a dog grooming salon. The hair would be going into the drinks, it was horrible. My boss was on his 4th or 5th DUI—it was getting serious for him at this point, really—so he'd be biking in. He used to be a Black Hawk pilot, and he'd roll up all the cash and throw it in the freezer. One time, he came in so fucked up, and he had adult braces and he was wearing basketball shorts. He leaned over to get the cash out of the freezer, and he had a gun in his pants.

Talk to me more about the period of time that this movie captures in terms of one's age. Is there an essential truth here in terms of your own personal experiences?
Jack: I feel like there was a lot of "We're gonna make it out of the suburbs with this one" projects. The combination of growing up on CKY and 8 Mile, skate videos, Tropic Thunder, Obama just won—there was so much hope for creative pursuits in our generation. This movie captured that period of time when, after high school, I stayed in my hometown to direct rap videos and was surrounded by a bunch of really, respectfully, mediocre white rappers who were trying to blow up on YouTube in 2010. That vibe of smoking weed with your friends' parents on the porch, sitting around and not doing anything—it's something a lot of mediocre white men [relate to].

Eric: I tie that experience more to my later years in high school than college. I lived in the suburbs of Seattle but I went to college in Chicago, and that [latter] experience felt different than what this movie is to me. But I remember driving around in a very similar Subaru Outback, trying to find alcohol, trying to find anybody's house that will let us in, and parents that will let us get in there—but also being surrounded by guys that were a few years older than me, who I trusted implicitly. Whatever they said was sick and awesome, and they always had some project—maybe they had a graphic novel cooking, maybe they had a rap album, I didn't know anybody who rapped. But I knew a lot of people who were into music and had scripts formulating all the time—and then, flash forward 10 years, it turns out those guys were addicted to meth.

I remember thinking my older brother's best buddies were so sick. They had Acura Integras with the mufflers off, so they were always tuning up their 1994 Acura Integras and you'd stand there as they did it. It turns out I wasn't aware enough to know that they were on hard drugs.

This movie is very funny, but it's very sad too. You guys balance these extremely real, sometimes pathetic lows with the comedic material really well. Tell me more about striking that balance. Sometimes projects like this can accidentally go full-tilt into melodrama and lose sight of being funny completely.
Jack: I feel like we had the opposite problem, because we're all such comedy people. The first couple shoots, it took us a couple of scenes before we realized the stuff where we were trying to be funny less was the stuff that's really working. So we had no problem of making it not feel like a comedy. If anything, we were always fighting to be more grounded and use takes that weren't going for laughs.

Eric: In the short film version, me and Conner's characters were really combative. One of the main pieces of that was that I was a Christian and he was an atheist. So that was the argument—Christianity versus atheism. We tried to keep that going in this, but we watched it back on the DV cam, and it just felt too antagonistic. So when we were filming the longer version, we decided to just have that first negative interaction at the dinner table and then make them buddies by the end—which is what happens in life all the time, too. You get to this thing and you think you're gonna fucking hate somebody, and then after just sharing some McDonald's, you're back on track.

What's your go-to McDonald's orders these days?
Eric: I just tried the Chicken Big Mac.

How is it?
Eric: Yo, I like it. I've had it twice.

Jack: But do you think it's better than the regular Big Mac?

Eric: I don't think it's better, but it's a good contender. It's a way to have a Big Mac and feel slightly less crazy about it.

What's yours, Jack?
Jack: Just a regular old Big Mac. Last time I went, I got the chicken Big Mac.

Eric: Jack orders McFlurries more than anyone I know. Every time we go to the drive-thru, the McFlurry is locked in.

Jack: Well, I'm trying to drink coffee, but it really just kind of makes me still tired, but more likely to have a panic attack. But when I have a McFlurry, I think that's how I'm supposed to feel when I have coffee.

Honestly, well over a year ago, I asked the McDonald's drive-thru for a Chicken Big Mac, and they were like, "What the fuck is that? We don't know what is." What they did is they gave me a piece of bread—like, there was no second chicken patty. It was just a lettuce sandwich on the bottom and then a chicken sandwich on the top. All I got to say is, I'm tired of the disrespect from the McDonald's Imagineers.

At the screening I went to, you guys mentioned how there was a ton of unused footage and discarded plot details. Jack, you worked on the editing. Tell me about the actual effort that went into editing something like this. How much footage did you guys end up with when all was said and done?
Jack: I'll show you.

[Jack reaches off-camera and produces a clear plastic container resembling a small trophy case, filled with tapes.]

Jack: So, we've got 70 tapes here. I put them in a case where I used to keep the DVD of XXX starring Vin Diesel. After we shot the whole thing, we had some help digitizing them, and then it probably took about a month to watch all of it. There's, like, 70 hours of footage, but because it'smulti-camera I really only had to watch 40-something hours. I just made different types of markers—red for funny stuff, orange for connective tissue moments—and then I started slapping together a cut. The first thing I did was make a trailer.

Eric: That's what made us feel that it was going to be okay, that trailer that you made.

Jack: You gotta do a morale cut before you tuck in. There was a 45-minute rough cut of the movie before we wrote the ending, so it was a really fucked up process editing-wise. We tried a version of it where it was edited by them in 2009, and then we spent six months trying a version where it was a found-footage BBC documentary before going back to the 2009 vibe.

Was there anything that was cut that you wish made it in?
Eric: The original ending was that Conner would get shot but live, and then I was going to be put on trial. The last 20 minutes would've been the trial. I thought it would be fun to have a hospital scene, but when Jack put a real funeral scene from YouTube to show what it would look like—it was this guy singing "Amazing Grace" for his brother who had died, and it was the saddest thing ever. We could hear everyone crying.

Jack: I was hesitant, as an editor, to tell Conner or Danny any of the ideas I had. I never asked them, "What do you think if it ended with a funeral?" I was just like, "Watch the fucking new cut, I'm not gonna say anything."

I talked to Dan for the newsletter earlier this year about his special, and how he broke both his legs when he was younger. Did you guys have any similar experiences of bodily harm as adolescents?
Jack: I fell off the roof of a car one time, but I just lay in bed for a week and didn't go to the doctor or worry about it. I also smashed the back of my head open with a hammer one time. We were breaking open a rock, and I just saw the swing back because what what could have been inside of that rock...lord knows how cool it could have been.

What were you doing on top of the roof of a car?
Jack: I just wanted to see how that would feel. We were going over speed bumps, and I just couldn't handle that velocity. When you're standing on a moving vehicle and you throw a tennis ball—for physics—it's supposed to stay with the car.

Eric: When I was a kid, I'd take rocks from the garden and put them in a vise, and I'd just crank it until it exploded. That's fucking crazy to do, and I was never stopped.

Did you guys ever try to ghostride the whip?
Eric: I never did. Did you, Jack?

Jack: We would do that in a church parking lot. Did you ever do it, Larry?

I tried it once behind my high school, but I was going way too fast and I couldn't get out of the car in time. I didn't even make it out of the front seat.
Jack: We'd do something called "Driving in Wonderland," where you wait 'til it's nighttime and there's no street lights, and then you turn your headlights off.

Eric: My neighbor that I grew up with was killed in a car a horrible car accident after a rave with her boyfriend. It was awful. The car that she was in is now taken around to different schools to tell her story—it's a mangled wreck. I'm surprised that stuff didn't happen more.

Eric, I have a friend who, after seeing Rap World, texted me and was like, "Eric's performance is so incredibly sad in this." Tell me about what you're mining there.
Eric: What I'm tapping into, hopefully, is what I felt when I was 16 in suburban Washington State—this feeling of never having been accepted, in a way that fuels your ego as a child. You find interests that are a little above everyone else's, and you create this world in your head that allows you to believe that there's a reason why you haven't been accepted yet—it's because you're too different, too special. The Jason character has that with what he ends up doing at the end, where he moves to Brooklyn and starts taking pictures of homeless people. By the way, I did do that when I was 17. I got a Canon Rebel and I'd go to downtown Seattle and take pictures of homeless people. It was horrible.

Talk to me about what went into writing the raps that are captured onscreen
Jack: I wrote my raps beforehand—Conner did not. He wrote his on set. It was very hectic. Some of it was freestyled, of course. The final rap in the end was very true to the movie. I sent my verse over as a voice memo to Conner to ask if something like this made sense, and now it's in the final cut.

Why do you think it is that young white men in the suburbs love rapping? It seems like a very specific, constant, and pervasive impulse.
Eric: These guys who do this are not satisfied with how they're perceived by their peers. They want to have a breakout moment and convey a crazy interior life. My fantasy was always to hop into a cypher. No one respected me in high school, ever—but if I can hop in a cypher like crazy and get everyone's respect in one fell swoop...there's something about using that as your stage.

Jack: That was what was so hot right then. That's why God made the suburbs—to have a creative spawn point for some of the best rap in the world. That's what it was like when 8 Mile came out and totally blew up with rap battles—specifically, white guy rap battles. I definitely ended up watching a lot of underground rap battles on YouTube—Scribble Jam, World Rap Championship, King of the Dot. Like Eric said: Yes, at school I'm a fucking loser, but at night, I'm fucking Batman.

Eric: Especially with the suburbs as the backdrop. I feel like that's emasculating to teenagers—they have these crazy emotions and then they go back to the McMansion cul-de-sac. It's not coming out at home, or in school. They have no outlet for it. So what's the most fucking sickest thing that I could do? It's rap, and fucking guns, and fucking alcohol.

Jack: I'm not going into fucking Pinkberry with you, dude.

Do you guys listen to current rap? You guys are in your early 30s, you're approaching the age where people more or less check out of listening to new music.
Eric: I've definitely fallen off of modern rap, but I definitely had moments over the years where I was into it.

Jack: All my music, across genres, is mostly driven by nostalgia. Rap specifically— growing up on skate videos, they had so much '90s hip-hop. I've never been super trendy with the music, but I liked Joey Bada$$, people who kept an East Coast sound.

The songs that are playing while all of you are driving around in the car feel pretty intentional too.
Eric: We would drive around in the Subaru and just play stuff from the period to get in the vibe. Nujabes was the big one that I felt most connected to. It's about songs that you can picture yourself in a music video to. These guys were like, "Yeah, I'm in a car right now, but I'm about to be listening to this in Paris in 2012. with the Eiffel Tower in the background with my wife. It was an interesting period, because for me it was right before the MF Doom-style white boy taste world was opened up to me. So you were working with what was popular—Gorillaz, Nujabes, and Coldplay.

Jack: Conner is a little older than us, but me and Eric connected on the Nujabes. I felt the same impulse in picking the music that went into this that I felt when I was like 16, having to do community service to get my grades up in government class. I was like, "I want to show Conner this song," in the same way that we were like, "Listen to this—trust me."

Eric: I felt that same thing, only a little different because I wanted to connect on a nostalgic level. I was like, "I'm gonna pull one out that you guys haven't thought about since 2008"—and then I felt sad when sometimes you guys wouldn't recognize it. I was so into "intelligent rap," it was so fucked up. In Washington state, it was about Blue Scholars and Common Market, who I'd go and see at like fucking church basements, and Atmosphere. I don't understand anymore why I was connecting with that.

There were a lot of men in the screening I went to. It wasn't all men, but there were definitely plenty of people in that room who had their own suburban experiences reflected back onto them, perhaps in a re-traumatizing way. Let's get into aspects of masculinity when it comes to Rap World—how consciously were you guys operating there?
Jack: The truth of what we were thinking about before going into it, is zero thoughts. I think we stumble into satire a lot, but it's never our goal going in to, like, explore the satirical elements of these characters. We're just like, "Let's go in and try and do it truthfully, and it'll be satirical."

Eric: We didn't discuss how we were going to approach masculinity, but it is a case of writing what you know—your life experiences. I was extremely shaped by that time in American culture, and it still drives most of what I think is funny, and most of what my ego is missing in the current age. It's very informative to what I'm making now, those teenage years. That was an especially fucked up time for everyone, but the fellas were having to put on masculine airs in ways that, I think, is starting to fall off a little bit—maybe not, I don't know. Who knows, under this new regime.

People keep saying this online, but Rap World really is capturing the moment before social media was ubiquitous. Maybe it's obvious, but it's such a big reason as to why we can't get those fucking basement hangouts going anymore. Or maybe they are happening, and we are just too fucking old. It's so possible to just not know what they're up to.

Jack: I remember having this discussion about the comedic characters that we grew up watching. So many of them were really high-status, flawed anti-heroes where, you don't want to see them succeed, but you do want to be there and be around them to watch their behavior. You root for them as a human—you see the humanity, but they are wrong. That feels like something that we were missing a
little bit these days in a lot of comedies: Main characters who are wrong, who are anti-heroes, who are hilarious—Eastbound and Down, Anchorman, Zoolander, Tony Soprano.