[laughs]

I remember not being good with women in middle school and, like, failing with that feeling of just not being, like, cool but not being not cool.

I was, like, always, like, the guy who just did stuff for attention.

And I remember, like, oh, I was like, "Oh, I'm, like, kinda weird, so, like, if I did commercials maybe, like, people would think I'm cool." And so I tried to be a commercial actor in h- uh, middle school.

And then I, like, signed up for, like, every scam possible [laughs] where, like, I was, like, telling my parents, I was like, "I've gotta send them money.

They're gonna put me on this thing." [laughs] And they were like, "I don't think so.

Like, this seems fishy." And I was like, "You just don't understand me." And, uh, yeah.

That's it

So let's talk about the inspiration for Mooch.

There's so many inspirations for this movie.

It's, it, it is a melting pot of things, which the movie kind of feels that way a little bit, and somewhat intentional, and hopefully it all comes together at the end for people.

But this has been an idea I've wanted to make for years.

It's been an idea for over 10 years that I've just never really kind of figured out in my head, and I always just had it on this back burner.

And it, the first inspiration was that my friend's dad sat me down in high school and said I was a mooch and that I was gonna, like, fail in life if I kept being a mooch.

[laughs] And that affected me so much in, like, weird ways where, like, my now wife, when I would go visit her as my girlfriend, I would go and, like, pack lunches with me so that I wouldn't eat her family's food because I was, like, terrified of being a mooch.

Oh

What is kind of the message of Mooch?

So [laughs] Mooch is a, basically a melting pot of me being kind of a annoying person most of my life, and it's an apology note to everyone who had to deal with me as a teenager into my adulthood.

And when I was in high school, my friend's dad actually sat me down and told me that I was a mooch and that I would be a failure in life if I kept going down this path.

[laughs] And that like destroyed me.

I would like pack sandwiches to my now wife's house because I was afraid to eat her food and be a mooch.

But I thought it was a fantastic example of, uh, a character and a very like Big Lebowski crime comedy set in the golf world, and I thought a mooch would be a funny example because someone who is a mooch at a golf course is a very funny just difference in terms of country clubs and, you know, tucking in your shirt, someone who paints his nails black or is rough on the outside.

The deeper meaning to me is- The external is not always what's going on on the internal, and there's something about him trying to be accepted for who he is, yet everyone around him wants him to be this country club version of his own life.

How did you wanna write that to where it wasn't cliche, uh, that it was real and authentic to that environment?