GHILD : Full Short Film and Q&A With Director David Yarovesky

By Melissa Howland | May 2, 2012

Hey kiddos, Melissa here… and I have a short film that you have to see! GHILD, from Rose and Bomb Productions in association with Yarvo Productions, is a fairy tale for the giant child in all of us.

GHILD stars Michael Rosenbaum as Brauly Gullivan, an 8-year-old boy who has grown abnormally larger than those in his community. As Brauly struggles to fit in, his parents find raising a giant child, or Ghild, to be rather difficult.

You can watch GHILD in its entirety here:

Interview with Director David (Yarvo) Yarovesky

How did you and Michael Rosenbaum come up with the concept of GHILD? How did the idea come about?

Yarvo: Well I should say that me, Rosenbaum, and Rob Danson all created GHILD. We all talked about doing something and when we got in a room, we started talking about a friend of Rosey’s who has a head of a child and the boy of a woman… and they called her a GHILD. So anyway, one of the first visuals we talked about is this tiny mother, pregnant with a HUGE belly, lugging her stomach around in a wheel barrow. Obviously we couldn’t afford those big effects so it never made the final script… but quickly, Rosenbaum stared thinking about funny things that the GHILD could do. I started thinking about how awful childhood already is, and adding this defect… how it would destroy your family and effect your humanity. Rob started thinking about wild crazy things like the wheel barrow. We kinda mashed those things together and that’s GHILD.

Wait… Did this woman know they called her GHILD?

Yarvo: I have no idea.. I don’t think i have ever met her. But I do expect to get accosted by a baby headed grown woman on the street one day.

You would probably deserve it.

Yarvo: Most likely.

With this being a short film, and you coming from a music video background, what was your biggest challenge making GHILD?

Yarvo: Well, it’s a different muscle. I enjoy making music videos, but I ****** love telling stories. I had been doing a lot of videos lately, and hadn’t shot anything completely narrative in a while… and I think I bit off a lot. I get really excited and think that everything I’m working on has to be perfect, and I have to push every dollar the absolute furthest. We had NO money, and I was like, lets build the house, and let’s have all this CG, and all this dramatic lighting, etc… it was just this HUGE idea, and we did NOT have the money to support it. THANK GOD FOR PANAVISION and Mike Dallatorre, our cinematographer. They got on board and really helped us.

How long did the film take to actually shoot?

Yarvo: The film took 2 days to shoot and a year to finish. The 2 days we had were psychotic! We would look across the stage and see Brauly’s bedroom as a stack of wood in the middle of the floor, and I would say “Hey… you know we’re shooting that scene in 15 minutes?” The art crew, Brent Mason and George Contorinis, were amazing, but as I said.. the time and money I gave them to work with was kind of a sick joke.

How did the casting process for this work?

Yarvo: Well, Rosey knew Harland. I gotta give Rosey a lot of credit, because he wrote that scene for him… and it was a great scene. I loved shooting it, mostly because I had seen his stand up and thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. So, I was way more excited to work with him than I think he knew.

Did Rosenbaum want to play the lead?

Yarvo: Yeah, I mean from the genesis of the project, we were talking about making a vehicle for Rosey. We would play this party game Mafia all the time and talk about how we were doing a lot of other people’s work, but nothing that we could control and make our own. We had a lot of time to bond because everyone in the game would kill Rosey and I first, so we would just sit in his backyard talking while all his guests enjoyed the game.

So, you are admitting to being horrible at Mafia?

Yarvo: No, I take it as a compliment that the mafia kills me IMMEDIATELY. They know I’ll get em. I am admitting that you are horrible at Mafia.

I’ve played Mafia twice… I know I am horrible at it. You are a terrible teacher.