An IMterview with Morgan Evans

By Brodie Lancaster / February 16th, 2012 in Film / New York / 328 views

In his new YouTube series, The Untitled Webseries (That Morgan Evans is Doing), New Yorker Morgan Evans plays an exaggerated version of himself who attempts to navigate a life filled with bizarre characters, rom-coms and chance encounters. Since the first episode, which premiered just a month ago, we’ve seen him get robbed, go on dates, attend baby showers, attempt to purchase designer jeans and invite a leprechaun into his apartment, all the while working on a development deal with Paramount Pictures.

The fifteen-episode series, which Morgan describes as an expensive “love letter from me to you”, was made as an attempt to push the boundaries of what a webseries can be and includes both soul-crushing reality and hyper-surreal silliness. After producing two short films off his own back, Morgan turned to Kickstarter late last year and raised the $10,000 he needed to get the project—which boast 13 different directors he poached from Broad City, The Onion, The Chris Gethard Show and CollegeHumor, as well as his alma mater, the UCB Theater—off the ground.

I spoke with Morgan on IM on the eve of the series’ penultimate episode—and his personal favorite—premiering online.

me: Hey Morgan how are you?
Morgan: Hey Brodie, I’m well. Yourself?
me: Fantastic. Are you ready for my questions?
Morgan: Yesir!
me: Great! So one thing I love about the series is how disparate the episodes seem, and then you’re occasionally reminded that they’re connected with a narrative thread. How do you describe what it’s about to people who haven’t seen it?
Morgan: I think that’s a pretty accurate description. I should start using that one because I think what I’ve been saying has been something along the lines of like, “A funny series about me living in New York and possibly getting a first look deal with Paramount Pictures but also experiencing weird acts of random violence and occasionally going on dates.”
That being said, it’s also about being a young person in New York in that weird area between like, almost being successful and almost falling flat on your face.
me: That seems to be a pretty common thread with a lot of (the better) web series that are circulating right now.
Morgan: Yeah I think there’s a heavy emphasis on truth, or being honest to yourself, right now, in comedy which is great. Also I think a lot of people have similar problems living in New York and trying to break in, so it can be quite therapeutic.
me: Are you new to New York? What were you doing work- and life-wise before making the series?
Morgan: I’m about midway through my third year in New York. I moved here to go to film school at SVA, but that was really my excuse to get loan money and study at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade. My first year here I did the improv training stuff, second year I did sketch, and I’ve kept them both up. My second year here I landed an internship at The Onion News Network on IFC as a director’s assistant, and I managed to carve a niche for myself by basically putting the whole touchscreen part of the show together. When season one of the show ended I got hired by the paper to be a “web producer” which basically means I just posted the content to the website and also helped run the Twitter/Facebook stuff. It was awesome, because I was always such a huge Onion fan. Then when Season 2 started I was brought on again and given a “Touchscreen Segment Producer” credit. Then when the second season ended I quit the paper to do more stuff like this.
me: Where do you see the distinction between real Morgan and the character you’re playing in the show?
Morgan: This fictional version of me is something I first tried out in my short film Upload which was about me getting this disease in which all of my thoughts and fantasies got uploaded to YouTube against my will. With that it was easier to be like, “Yeah this is a fictional version of me, obviously,” but now the line is getting more and more blurred because I think the stuff I’m talking about in my webseries is a lot more personal. For example I have an episode about me looking at Internet porn. I think if you saw that there’d be no doubt in your mind that I have, in fact, looked at internet porn once or twice. There’s also a running joke about the movie Like Crazy which my character just adores. I thought it was okay, but it speaks to the larger fact that in real life: I love the shit out of rom-coms and regular roms. I’d say the “Morgan” character in the series is basically just myself cranked up to eleven. I have a shit ton of neuroses and am, in general, a very anxious person, but I can more or less deal day-to-day. I think the character in the series has a harder time doing that sort of thing.

me: A lot of the stuff coming out of the UCB right now is getting a lot of attention online (Broad City, I Hate Being Single, It Gets Better-ish, etc.). You’re obviously connected to some of those shows, having worked with Abbi and Ilana on your show. What do you watch when you’re not working on Untitled Webseries? What comedians or shows in general influence you the most? (I noticed a picture in your apartment in the Leprechaun episode of Werner Herzog. He’s obviously a comic genius.)
Morgan: Yes! I adore Herzog, Stroszek is one of my favorite movies ever. But my biggest influences are definitely Woody Allen and Albert Brooks, who I think play really similar characters whose neuroses are designated by their respective coasts. Albert Brooks to me is just Woody Allen had he been born in Los Angeles. I rip them both off a lot. Louis CK’s show is also a huge influence for this. I like comics who play themselves and strive for high-art because they want to be Bergman or something. I identify with that mentality a lot. Internet-wise, I think my favorite webseries is by far Broad City. It’s really hard to watch something and feel like you know someone, and I think Abbi and Ilana do a really good job of that. Duder by Matt Kirsch as well, that shit is dense. I respond very well to things that end on sad notes or attempt to be as real as possible. And I think the funniest web series of all time is Danger 5, which I believe is Australian.
Danger 5 does not end on sad notes or attempt to be as real possible.
me: I am a bad Australian for having never heard of it before
Morgan: It’s fantastic. They did a five-part web series as a prequel to a television show. It’s fantastic. They did a five part web series as a prequel to a television show. It’s got Nazis and cigarettes and exterior shots of houses that are really intricate miniature models. It’s very campy, really high budget, and absolutely a big indicator of where things are headed television-wise.
me: Speaking of where things are headed…I wanted to ask you is about the direction the show is going in, and how you ensure the episodes link together given their different directors and the situations they’re depicting?
Morgan: Well, I wrote every episode at once, so it hasn’t been something that we’re like shooting week-to-week, which made the plot really easy to control. We shot it like a movie, in blocks, which is also how we did Missed Connection. For example, I believe we shot scenes from four different episodes in one day, because we had the location. It made it really annoying for my producer Matt Hobby, I’m sure, because we’d be working with one director and then they’d leave and then someone else would show up that night to do a different episode and I’d have to change clothes and It’d be like, “Shit, when did we film the first part of this episode?”. The different directors thing worked out surprisingly well though, I think. Everyone really got what I was going for (whatever that is) and they each brought a different style to everything. Remaining tonally consistent episode to episode was important to me though, which is why I edit them all myself.
me: wow, that’s a huge undertaking
Morgan: Tell me about it! I hate editing more than anything in the world and it’s all I’ve been doing for like two months. I’m going to tear my hair out I swear. But then I remember that people are dying in the world and I’m just using Final Cut Pro. I believe we had ten days of shooting total and 12 different directors, so scheduling that was insane.
me: And you’re directing some yourself in between the others?
Morgan: Yeah I directed three. I was only going to do one originally but people drop out and stuff like that. This would have been much easier if I had directed all of them because we wouldn’t have had to wait on anyone to show up, or for example, if we wrapped early on something and still needed pick ups from another episode, we’d have to bring that director back because I didn’t feel comfortable shooting any scenes without them. But I was really concerned with my performance, and whether I’d be able to focus on that while also ordering lunch for people or directing from the floor. The different directors thing was, partly, a safety-net in the event I wasn’t behaving like a real person in front of the camera. I’d talk to them and be like, “Hey, let me know if I’m acting like total shit because I’m super stressed out and didn’t sleep at all”, and then they’d be able to pull a performance out of me in a way I just don’t think I could have if I had directed all of them. Because when you’re running around and it’s so chaotic on shooting days the last thing you’re thinking about is your performance. I was afraid of taking that for granted and blowing it.
me: I think it’s worked out. What’s your favorite episode so far?
Morgan: I think my favorite episode, or at least the one that really captures the whole essence of the series is the penultimate one we’re releasing Thursday. For fear of spoiling anything I’ll just say that we filmed it at a real film screening I had and shit hits the fan. If you’ve watched every episode most things get wrapped up there in interesting ways.
me: Thanks so much Morgan!
Morgan: Awesome! Thanks Brodie this was a blast.