Band of Robbers imagines what Huckleberry Finn (Kyle Gallner) and Tom Sawyer (Adam Nee) would be up to in their mid-20s, if they hadn’t given up the treasure hunt they started as children. Directed and written by Nee, and his brother Aaron, the film takes place in a quirky universe populated with colorful characters that somehow remain true to Mark Twain’s legacy. The filmmakers have assembled a wondrous crew of up and coming stars, comedians and established actors that make this feel like a mumblecore version of Ocean’s Eleven. I had the opportunity to sit with Adam Nee and Kyle Gallner to talk about bringing these characters to life.

I read that you auditioned to play Huckleberry Finn but you were too old for the part.

Adam Nee: That was the whole beginning, I was always obsessed with these stories. I love Tom Sawyer but Huck is the coolest, so when I moved to New York when I was 21 or 22, I got an audition for a Huck Finn movie and it was a complete verbatim adaptation of the books. Huck and Jim on the raft, Huck is 13, so I don’t even know how I got the audition, but I did and I was obsessed with Badlands at the time, especially with Martin Sheen’s performance. So I’m this 22 year old, trying to play 13 while doing Kit Carruthers from Badlands, (does Kit Carruthers voice) “Jim, we’re on the raft, what are we going to do?”, it was appalling! It was one of those things that was so bad all I could do was laugh, but the idea stuck and I wondered what would happen if Huck was 22 and wanting the same things he did. It was a long time before we wrote it, but that was the beginning.

Did it ever cross your mind not to go to this audition you sounded so bad for?

Adam Nee: In hindsight it seems like a no brainer.

I mean, you do look very young.

Adam Nee: Thank you, and I did look younger then. They didn’t specify his age, so I thought maybe they could age him since I could pass as 16. Maybe it was the naivete of wanting to be an actor? I thought I’d be so good with my Kit Carruthers voice that they’d age him.

These books are an essential part of growing up in America, do you remember how you first encountered them?

Kyle Gallner: My introduction was the Elijah Wood movie, my house was more of a hobbit household. We were more into fantasy. Adam has a much deeper connection to Huck and Tom than I do. I knew the books growing up, and watched the movies, you can’t escape it growing up.

Adam Nee: It seems schools are blacklisting it again, but to me there was a Norman Rockwell-esque environment to how Mark Twain came into my life. My dad used to read it to us, I’m from a huge family, it was nine of us, and we’d sit in our house and my dad would read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and do all the voices, then he’d do The Adventures of Huck Finn, and do the voices. It was a nightly thing for months, it was something we looked forward to every day, and it stuck with me. Part of my love for Twain came from the nostalgia for that.

I almost didn’t recognize Stephen Lang in the movie, and it made me think how besides playing with the Twain iconography you’re also playing with movie references, Stephen always plays these great villains, and we also see Wes Anderson-like touches. Would you say you were interested in combining literary history with Americana?

Adam Nee: Stephen saved us, he came into the movie when the actor we’d cast originally dropped out. We hadn’t even met the actor yet, but he had to pull out of the movie. Stephen came in so prepared and ready, which was important to us because we didn’t want him to look like the bad guy in Avatar, we didn’t want him to seem like a big blockbuster bad guy, we wanted him to be weird. The kind of person who makes your skin crawl and you don’t know why. As for the aesthetic, there was a lot that came into play, some elements came from 70s movies like Badlands, and movies that had an influence on us. We wanted it to be a movie you could enjoy in a theater, so we shot it more like a drama than a comedy, so when we had the transitions from humor to darkness it still felt like the same movie. We were influenced by Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers, P.T. Anderson and all those great current filmmakers.

Kyle, I feel like every time I see you, you’re playing all these dark, brooding character, was it refreshing to play someone who is desperately trying to stay away from doing bad things for once?

Yeah, it’s always fun to do different stuff, I’ve done quite a bit of dark fare, but recently there’s been a lot of branching out, this in particular is the lightest thing I’ve ever done. Huck’s not running around cracking jokes, but he’s still part of the team, it was nice to be around these guys doing their comedic thing, and Huck is in a way the heart of the film, so it was nice to try out something new.

Adam, you mentioned the book being blacklisted in schools, but the thing that was so great about Mark Twain was how ahead of his time he was when it came to discussing racial politics in America. Kyle, you were in Dear White People, which touched on similar topics.

Kyle: Dear White People was an important movie, it was important that it came out.

Adam: I think we wanted to deal with racial aspects the same way Twain did, in that we sort of pretend we’re not dealing with race. You make it the second layer, it’s so much easier to make the bad guy a racist, but when you do it with your protagonist you look at it in a new way. The sort of fumbling over the race issues with these not so bright characters, for us in adapting the Jim character to Jorge, we thought there was no modern day equivalent of slavery that wasn’t insulting to slavery, so we looked at people who were marginalized, and treated like second class citizens in the States. After living in Florida and New York, the way I’ve seen illegal immigrants treated, in a way that feels culturally acceptable, is such a mind blowing thing that I think we’ll be very embarrassed about as a culture down the road. We should all be embarrassed really. Even though it isn’t slavery, it has in common with slavery that there is this accepted nature that these people should be treated as lesser citizens, it’s bizarre and embarrassing.

How was the process of fine tuning this to avoid making the film feel like a moral lesson?

Adam: Twain does it too, Huckleberry Finn never says “...and I realized Jim and I are equals”, it’s much more interesting storytelling to put it there and not push it down the audience’s throat. There are so many versions of this movie I wanted to make, one of them with Jorge all the movie, because his story is so compelling.

Kyle, you’re in The Finest Hours next, how is it to go from a huge Disney production to a smaller indie?

Kyle: I like telling good stories, there is a place in the world for everything. The Finest Hours was huge, we shot in this huge pool, with boats, toys and money! And then you do something like this, I don’t wanna say there’s less passion in making big films, but it’s a different kind of passion, no one throws money at movies like these, the guys have to hustle to raise the money because it’s a passion project, so you believe in it and want to be on the ground floor with them. There’s a difference kind of energy in making a studio film and an independent one. When you do an independent film it’s because you want to be there, you can be creative because you don’t have bosses telling you what you can’t do. In a studio film you’re there because you want to get paid. It’s not that one world is heartless and one isn’t, I like working in both, I always ramble when I talk about this because I truly love both, I don’t want to talk badly about either.

Adam, people don’t read as much anymore, so sadly I’m sure there are kids who don’t know Mark Twain’s books. You’ve done Drunk History too, so I wondered if you were trying to find alternative ways to get people interested in literature and history?

Adam: Totally, I think that would be one of the greatest compliments to the movie, if they would direct the people back to the books, because that’s the work, it’s the most amazing stuff. It’s funny that you bring up Drunk History, because the people behind the show said in season one that they wanted that show to be for history, what The Daily Show was for news. These are true historical stories told by drunk people which makes for a special embellishment, so yeah, if Band of Robbers brings people to the books I’d be very happy.

What personal elements would you say you brought to these characters?

Adam: From me there’s a lot, when you write a character you put a lot of yourself into it. Tom is an extreme, exaggerated version of myself. I’m a very sensitive person, Tom isn’t, but I do feel something I have that is similar to him is I’m a very optimistic person, things will get bad and for a day I’ll be like “it sucks” but then I get over it. Tom has this to a level that is unhealthy even, I’m not sure if I’m an eternal optimist, but I’m an optimist.

Kyle: There’s a sensitivity to Huck that I relate to, I actually took a lot of Adam’s brother Aaron (laughs) the first time I met him and was in the room with him I was like “that’s it, right there!”. There was a lot of him in my portrayal of Huck, even in the voice, I wondered how could I give this guy a little bit of a feel without making it an accent. Aaron has that, it’s almost like a cowboy quality. Most of my Huck came from Aaron.

Adam: That’s so interesting.

These characters aren’t James Bond or anything like that, they haven’t been played very often, but were you interested in delivering the ultimate versions of Tom and Huck?

Adam: It’s incredibly intimidating, somehow I escaped thinking about it, which is lucky. When I was a younger actor I thought what it would be like to play Holden Caulfield, would it be worth the scrutiny? Tom and Huck are equally precious, but they have been played as kids so many times, that it’s not quite as intense.

Kyle: My disconnect to the material in that I haven’t thought about it since I was a child, so I put my trust in these guys and the script, in how they wanted the movie to be. I just stepped back, I was aware of the weight, but again there had to be some liberties.

Adam: We shot so fast, there was almost no time to worry.

I love how you used Los Angeles as a location, because it wasn’t a set, and yet it feels like it was shot in some remote town.

Adam: We wanted the movie to look like the 80s! We wanted the world, costumes and everything to feel like they’re in the same state of arrested development as the characters. Like we shot it in some random town, so we avoided palm trees, but that’s the beauty of LA, it’s like a movie set, you can make it look like anything.

Kyle: It doesn’t rain on your day!

Band of Robbers is now in theaters.