{"id":119,"date":"2025-10-07T14:19:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T14:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educationenigma.org\/?p=119"},"modified":"2025-10-07T14:19:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T14:19:08","slug":"short-films-in-focus-stooper-with-bennett-watanabe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educationenigma.org\/?p=119","title":{"rendered":"Short Films in Focus: \u201cStooper\u201d (with Bennett Watanabe)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bennett Watanabe\u2019s \u201cStooper\u201d tells the story of a boy (Valor Hirsch) on his tenth birthday. Presumably, his mom is at work (or out somewhere) while he waits for his father (Emile Hirsch<\/a>, Valor\u2019s real father) to pick him up on his weekend with him. The boy gets a $10 bill in one of the many birthday cards he opens on his dining room table and adds it to a small pile of money he keeps under his bed. We later find out he has been saving for a cool bike. His father picks him up without a plan for the boy on his tenth birthday, but coyly suggests going to the horse track.<\/p>\n

The majority of \u201cStooper\u201d takes place at the track where the boy\u2019s father asks him, \u201cWho do you like in the second?\u201d making sure the boy understands it\u2019s not who do you \u201cwant,\u201d but who do you \u201clike\u201d? There\u2019s something about Captain Midnight that captures the boy\u2019s interest. The father explains \u201codds\u201d to him and that Captain Midnight is a bad bet (10-1 odds). The boy insists. It\u2019s his money, he can do whatever he wants with it. Captain Midnight, it is. From there, the boy and his father fall into the trap that is the story of many gambling addicts, and we start to wonder if maybe these two are better off if they lose everything.<\/p>\n

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Director Bennett Watanabe.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Something about \u201cStooper\u201d reminded me of Richard Linklater\u2019s \u201cBoyhood,\u201d where again, the father gets his son on weekends and maybe doesn\u2019t always make the best choices of where to go and what to do, and the boy surprises him by how wise and thoughtful he can be when it comes to real-life problems. Of course, Emile Hirsch\u2019s character does not want to hear about what he and his son should do with their money, even though we know damn well the boy is right. We stay with them on this journey to see who will make the smarter choice and who will ultimately prevail.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Watanabe knows how to build suspense that lasts throughout the film without compromising the more important aspects of the story. Of course, it\u2019s not about whether or not they go home with a big bag of winnings, but whether or not the boy can ever truly look up to his father as a role model. Watanabe is smart not to labor this point with a confrontation between the two, but with a final moment that will linger in both their lives forever. The boy might not respect his father, but he can help him. The father is too desperate to look at the bigger picture of what he\u2019s trying to do with his own son.<\/p>\n

\u201cStooper\u201d is a terrific father-son story with two outstanding performances at its center. Casting a real-life father-son duo, especially one as strong as this, may make it a more interesting curiosity item, but maybe there\u2019s something going on here between the two that we\u2019re not privy to. Emile Hirsch has always been a fine actor with a great career. Maybe he\u2019s trying to tell Valor, who shows much promise with this debut role, to be careful how you handles success. You can lose it without even knowing it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Q&A with director Bennett Watanabe<\/strong><\/p>\n

How did this story come about?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d been wanting to do something at a horse track for years. It always felt like such a fascinating place to explore in a short film. After tossing around some ideas for a story, I remembered a photo I took a while back of a young kid kicking a ball around at a racetrack while his dad watched the horses. And that kinda sparked the father-and-son thing.<\/p>\n

Tell me about the casting. Did you know Emile and Valor Hirsch already?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know Emile personally before \u201cStooper,\u201d but I\u2019ve been a huge fan of his work for a long time. \u201cLords of Dogtown\u201d was a fundamental part of my childhood, having grown up skating and surfing in Venice Beach. So, when we started thinking about casting, he was our dream choice. And then I saw a picture on his Instagram of Emile and Valor, where Emile was wearing a funny \u201cOnce Upon A Time in\u2026 Hollywood\u201d T-shirt. And they were just the perfect fit to play these roles. One of our producers, Eliel Ford, was able to track down Emile\u2019s information through a friend, and we sent him the script. He responded well to the material. That led to a meeting with Emile and Valor, and a few months later, we were at Santa Anita Park shooting our little movie.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

This is Valor\u2019s first film. Can you tell me what it was like for him to act alongside his dad for the first time?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think he had a blast doing it. I mean, it\u2019s gotta be really fun to be allowed to yell at your dad without any repercussions, right? But it definitely helped Val a lot to have his dad around to show him the ropes and make him feel at ease on set. They rehearsed a lot, and we all spent time together workshopping the characters and the lines, so it felt really organic for Val. Before we went into production, the three of us went to the track as a kind of research trip. But that quickly devolved into all of us betting on the horses. Valor ended up hitting like three or four races in a row purely off picking horse names he thought were funny. And he won a couple hundred bucks. Talk about life imitating art!<\/p>\n

Did you have a lot of experience in the world of horse racing and betting at the track?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, I really got interested in the racetrack as a teenager just from watching older movies like \u201cLet It Ride,\u201d \u201cCalifornia Split,\u201d and \u201cThe Killing.\u201d And then in college, while living in New York, I\u2019d take the subway out to Queens and check out Aqueduct Racetrack. I never had much luck betting, but it was a fascinating place to people-watch. You just sit there for hours watching every type of human emotion play out in public. It\u2019s endlessly entertaining.<\/p>\n

It seems like there could have been several different possible endings. Were there any other drafts where the ending was different?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

For a long time, we had the more trope-y, expected ending you might get out of a gambling movie. But then I got some feedback from a writer friend who kind of pushed me to think outside the box a bit more. And then one day, while putzing around the house, the ending as it stands now just kinda came to me. It felt right to give that father-and-son relationship a glimmer of hope. It also added another layer of meaning to the title, \u201cStooper.\u201d A stooper is a type of gambler who walks around a racetrack sifting through the discarded tickets looking for a forgotten winner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019re working on making a feature-length version of \u201cStooper,\u201d but with a tonal shift into something that\u2019s much more gonzo than the short. And then I\u2019m deep into the writing phase on a period piece about boxing promotion.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bennett Watanabe\u2019s \u201cStooper\u201d tells the story of a boy (Valor Hirsch) on his tenth birthday. Presumably, his mom is at work (or out somewhere) while he waits for his father (Emile Hirsch, Valor\u2019s real father) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/educationenigma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/educationenigma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/educationenigma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educationenigma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educationenigma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/educationenigma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/educationenigma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educationenigma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educationenigma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}