From horror comedy to political ads, the Conversano brothers will shoot it

By Joshua Encinias

Kids from the mid-90’s were seemingly born with cameras in their hands, so how do you stand out when anyone can point, shoot, and monetize? Grant and Adam Conversano, brothers and Brooklyn-based filmmakers, had the advantage of learning storytelling from a young age (as opposed to mere content creation).

As kids, Adam went to a visual arts high school, and Grant stumbled across a summer job playing an extra on Showtime’s “Homeland” thanks to a Facebook post. When Grant arrived on set, he was picked from a crowd of kids to be a teenage actor’s stand-in — that actor was Timothée Chalamet.

This fall, the brothers released a horror comedy short called “We Want Faces So Bad” under Apple House Pictures, the production company created out of their Bushwick artist’s loft. The story follows Alexx, a girl born without a face, who must “face” the comedic repercussions of accidentally growing one.

Elsewhere, the brothers are breaking into political media. In 2021, Andrew Yang’s 2021 mayoral campaign hired them to make a series of videos. And just last month, Adam edited videos for John Fetterman’s senate campaign.

Brooklyn Magazine recently sat down with the enterprising brothers behind Apple House Pictures — named after their beloved grandparents’ home. Adam tells us how it makes sense for him to work for both Yang and Fetterman’s campaigns despite their ideological differences. Grant talks about working with Timothée Chalamet as a teenager and directing actor Lucas Hedges in college, and the duo share details about their new movie “Summer’s End.”

Characters in your new horror comedy “We Want Faces So Bad” repeat that line a bunch of times and the more they say it, the more their situation devolves. It creates a really funny and surreal tone in the movie.
Adam: The idea was originally pitched as a YouTube SNL sketch video. We wanted to make the concept of people born without faces funny but also ground it in reality as much as possible. We really pushed to make it more than a bit for the characters. Visually we were inspired by “Suspiria,” this old Italian horror, and we merged it with millennial/Gen Z/Twitter discourse.

Grant, your first short film “Pigeonhearts” starred Lucas Hedges, who received an Oscar nomination for “Manchester by the Sea” around the time you met at college. That’s huge for your first movie.
Grant: It was totally crazy. I was 19 years old when Lucas got nominated for “Manchester by the Sea” and I think it almost gave me a heart attack. Being at school felt so far away from the film industry back then. I hadn’t even been to New York or Los Angeles yet. I was just like a local kid from Concord and drove an hour up the road to go to film school at North Carolina School of the Arts. His nomination had me asking, “what does this all mean?” It was massive and intimidating.

How did you cast Lucas?
Grant: By the time Lucas got to University of North Carolina School of the Arts, I was a sophomore and we kind of knew about each other. I knew he had been in movies when he was a kid, but I had no idea he was in “Manchester by the Sea.” I was writing the script for “Pigeonhearts” with Emma Geer in mind, and it turns out she had really good chemistry with Lucas. So I asked him to be in the movie and they both were totally committed and wonderful. We shot the movie and his career took off not long afterward. We’re still good friends and talk all the time.

Grant, will you talk about being Timothée Chalamet’s stand in on “Homeland”?
Grant: “Homeland” was filming in Charlotte and I found out from a Facebook group they needed extras. I showed up on set and the assistant director picked me out of the line of a bunch of kids and was like, “how tall are you?” I was the same height as Timothée. So that’s luck and privilege, I guess. I was 15 and he was 16, and I spent that summer as his stand in. When I wasn’t working in front of the camera, I got to watch the crew work. I would sit by the monitor beside the showrunners as a 15-year-old kid and watch them make “Homeland!”

To this day, I still don’t know how to make sense of the fact that I got to know two guys who became important actors in our generation. At the time, they were just trying to figure it out like everyone else.

So flash forward to 2021, Apple House made a series of videos for Andrew Yang’s campaign. Political non-fiction seems a lot different from working with your friends on a short film or even a TV show.
Grant: Part of that just came out of looking for work. We wanted to take our skillset and find a way to pay the bills. I thought Andrew was interesting in the presidential debates in 2020 and the next year he made a bid for mayor of New York City. The filmmaker Darren Aronofsky directed his announcement video and Andrew shared it on Twitter. We followed everyone on his campaign team and his creative director followed me back. Two days later, we filmed Andrew for a day. They liked the video we put together and brought us on through the entire campaign. We ended up having a front row seat to New York politics, which led to Adam editing videos for John Fetterman’s race for senate Pennsylvania.

Adam, how did you link with John Fetterman’s campaign?
Adam: It was through a recommendation. They were looking for editors and I told them about working with Yang, so they hired me to edit quick campaign editorial videos.

Yang and Fetterman are on opposite ends of the liberal spectrum and Yang isn’t even a Democrat anymore. How are you able to work for such different candidates?
Adam: The through line between Andrew Yang and John Fetterman is that they’re compelling protagonists with real stories that you can build a cinematic language around. I think that’s why Aronofsky directed Yang’s campaign announcement video. Andrew knows how to navigate people and images in a way that’s sincere and compelling, but not everybody in politics can necessarily do that. I think a big connection between narrative filmmaking and politics is connecting a compelling character to a compelling story.

Will you talk about deconstructing the image you held of your own family in the documentary “Father, Can’t You See I’m Burning?”
Grant: I was in therapy for many years and I think I have to credit my therapist for beginning to even help me find a story about my own life that makes any sense. I had the impulse to start filming when our father’s situation start to nosedive. I was like, “Oh, our childhood home is decaying from the inside.” I was looking for a way to balance my emotions with a story concept, and ultimately the concept became “family photographs are fictitious.” The truth is every image is fictitious. They’re constructed. They’re authored. They have a point of view. And we started to question the authority our family’s pictures. Why do we have one image and not another? Who’s taking it and why? Then we built a through line between the images that my father took of me as a child to his generation and my grandfather’s. Our editorial choices allow the viewer to project their own family relationships onto ours.

Tell me about your new movie “Summer’s End.”
Grant: “Summer’s End” is about a son, Elliott, who discovers that his father is cheating on his mother with a younger man during a family beach trip. The revelation comes at a time when Elliott is questioning his own sexuality and he discovers his father isn’t the man he thought he was. It comes from a personal place with aspects of our own family story. It’s set in Myrtle Beach, where we vacationed as kids. We’re shooting it sometime in 2023 and fundraising on Seed & Spark right now.