
“I Grew Up Playing Nintendo”: Albert Birney on OBEX

Albert Birney has been busy since 2020. On top of releasing 2022’s Eyeballs in the Darkness, a second feature in his series about a pair of 8-bit inspired animated best friends, Tux and Fanny, in, after releasing a video game incarnation of those characters the year before, and premiering his second collaboration with Kentucker Audley, Strawberry Mansion, Birney has now completed his first live-action film as a solo director. OBEX started its humble, black-and-white production with resources Birney had on hand: his house, his bulldog-chihuahua-pug mix (what he calls a “Bullchug”) Dorothy and his affinity for the ‘80s technology of his upbringing.
Set in the Brood X summer of 1987, OBEX follows the day-to-day routines of shut-in computer artist Conor (Birney), which mostly consists of him feeding his dog, watching TV, getting groceries delivered by his neighbor Mary (Callie Hernandez), making typeset portraits by mail-in request on his Apple 1 and ending the night by doing some karaoke in bed to lull him and Dorothy to sleep. While the ever-present sound of cicadas creates an oppressive, claustrophobic outside world, Conor is able to carve out comfort through media consumption. That is, until he orders a strange video game called “OBEX,” which purports to use “state of the art technology” to “insert you into the game!”
When OBEX finally arrives, Conor is disappointed to find it’s just a sprite-graphiced RPG with seemingly little functionality. He quickly deletes OBEX off his computer, but strange things start to happen as reality begins to blend with the game. When Dorothy goes missing, Conor journeys into OBEX to save her.
I got together with Birney over Zoom to talk about OBEX ahead of its premiere this Saturday at 2025’s Sundance Film Festival. While our conversation was recorded before David Lynch passed away on the 16th, our talk naturally wandered to two Lynch staples: his debut feature Eraserhead, as well as his and Birney’s greatest shared influence, The Wizard of Oz.
Filmmaker: This is the first live-action film that you solo directed. What got you to make that leap?
Birney: Kentucker [Audley] and I are still collaborators—we have a couple of scripts, but one we’ve been working on for a few years, it’s closer and closer to getting made. OBEX began in that space of wanting to do something quick and the way that I made films in the past, where you get together with whoever’s around and whatever you have available. It wasn’t ever, “I’m gonna make this one by myself!” It was more just, “This project is gonna be made with Pete [Ohs], who is filming it. We’re gonna start in the backyard and do it that way.”
I had come off of making the Tux and Fanny video game in 2020 and 2021. I was fired up, like “I wanna make another video game, but a video game that’s also a movie.” I thought on that for a couple weeks and realized I didn’t even know what that is, but I did know I could make a movie that’s about a video game. Next thing you know, we were filming.
We did it in chunks, so it was like “Oh, I got a year now to grow my beard out” and prepare for the next section of the movie. All the while, Kentucker and I have been writing and getting the funds together—we’ve done casting recently, which is exciting. It’s our third film together and the most ambitious of the bunch, and with a more ambitious script there’s a lot of other things you need. This’ll be our first movie with what would be considered a real budget, considerably more than our last two.
Filmmaker: Does some of OBEX come out of the pandemic? It takes place in 1987 but feels very 2020s in a lot of ways. Part of it is the cicadas, which are a cyclical thing. But it’s also that the first part of the movie is so shut-in, just this guy who basically interfaces with the world through media.
Birney: When I first moved to Baltimore in 1987 as a child, I remember the cicadas from then. Then I remember them again in 2004; 2021 is when we had the same 17-year cicada. OBEX basically started in the backyard. I was taking the trash out and there were cicadas in my trash can, and I grabbed my camera. The footage you see in the film is the footage I shot that day. The movie has cicadas in it, so I can set it in those three years: it could be a 2021 movie, a 2004 movie or a 1987 movie. Around that same time I went to a junk shop in town and found two old Mac computers, so I bought those for ten bucks. Next thing you know, those are the computers in the movie. It’s pre-internet, but you have this character who’s very linked-in, in a way that’s kind of ahead of the time. All these things start talking to each other.
This movie never had a real script; it was just an outline that I wrote with Pete in the backyard when he was visiting, with his movie, Jethica, playing at the Maryland Film Festival. He came over for iced tea in the backyard and I said, “Hey, I got this idea, I got this cicada footage and these old computer monitors…” We had a dog at the time, too. So Pete and I just sat down and wrote 20 story beats, then he came back a couple months later and we filmed them.
It’s hard to avoid the way 2020 changed our lives—even the fact that we’re talking on Zoom right now really came out of 2020. The first part of the film is responding to that. Another reason the movie is all contained is, I had access to my house. It was very intentional. Yes, I have access to all this stuff, but there’s a fun story to tell here. Being inspired by Eraserhead and The Shining, which are very claustrophobic movies, I wanted to try my hand and show that even though this character doesn’t really leave his house, there’s all these worlds he can travel to through screens, just being there with his dog. There’s a big part of me in Conor. I’ve never acted before like this, where I’m not wearing a mask—I’ve done a lot of mask acting. But I felt like I could do this one because it’s not too far removed—that’s really me, feeding my dog in the space where I feed my dog, on the sofa where we sit most of the time anyways.
Filmmaker: That seems like a recurring theme in your work. Of course you’ve got Conor in OBEX going into a kind of real world within the video game, but then there’s also Abraham doing that in The Beast Pageant, where he gets consumed by his TV-like thing, or Preble in Strawberry Mansion where he puts on the device and can go inside people’s minds.
Birney: What do they say? “You just keep remaking the same movie over and over.” A lot of it also goes back to the number one movie of all time, The Wizard of Oz. Whether you grew up watching it or watched it later in life, it’s in all of our DNA. One of these days I’ll figure out another way to tell a story. But for now I love what happens to a character when they’re in a routine and something forces them on a journey.
Filmmaker: With The Wizard of Oz, when she goes into Oz for the first time and it goes from black-and-white into Technicolor, it’s almost that land is more real than the real world. It’s similar to your stuff, where you go into these digital spaces and it becomes all-consuming. There’s interjections you put in there, like 8-bit graphics will come in and you’re reminded that this is a thing that is happening on a screen. But the way it feels is completely real.
Birney: I grew up playing Nintendo video games. As a kid, they feel so real. Like The Legend of Zelda, the original on Nintendo—it’s these simple 8-bit graphics but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re lost in that world and on an epic quest. I would draw maps from the game. I would put so much energy and time into these maps. They were just for me, but I wanted them to look like they were put out by Nintendo or the official strategy guide or something. So, I think that’s what’s really exciting to me: you can seemingly make a digital or fake world feel very large and very real, very Technicolor and alive, and drop little hints here and there that it’s still just a video game, or just a dream that someone’s watching through a helmet. Of all the movies I’ve made, this is the one most inspired by video games, like Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy, King’s Quest, Space Quest. Certainly Tux and Fanny, the aesthetics are inspired by those games. But this one, I really wanted “What’s it feel like to go out on an adventure, a journey, and fight the big boss at the end and rescue the loved one?” Instead of a princess, it’s your dog.
Making a video game was really inspiring to me. But also, during lockdown we got a Nintendo Switch in our house—I hadn’t played video games in years, but there wasn’t a lot else to do. There was a period of rediscovering my love of gaming and playing through a lot of new games, but also revisiting old ones. It’s the first time I was like, “I’m inspired by animation and films my whole life, but there’s this whole other chunk of my soul that came to be because of these games.”
Filmmaker: You’re drawn to really analog electronics, and it seems like it’s more than just the aesthetics. You give them a physicality. In OBEX, when he makes the computer portraits, the sound of the keyboard seems so important to what he’s doing.
Birney: I’ve always loved electronics and grew up with the biggest, clunkiest electronics— big computers and keyboards with huge clackety-clickety keys. Visually, on camera, on film, the bigger, clunkier things just excite me. If you do that on a modern keyboard, they’re just not as fun. You don’t hear the same sounds. One of these days I’m gonna set a film in the present and have people interfacing with an iPad. Maybe when I get off the Wizard of Oz story beats I’ll be able to figure that out.
When I first fell in love with computers, they looked like the computers in OBEX. When I first fell in love with video games, they looked like the video games in OBEX. I love the old games, or throwback games that are modern but inspired by those old graphics. So, when I’m seeing a computer on screen, it just excites me to see that computer as a big, clunky Macintosh, or the camera like an old VHS camera. I have friends that get the newest iPhone the day it comes out, and I’m trying to make my old iPhone last for a decade. The way I look at making movies is: put the things you love in there. And I just love the old stuff, so it makes its way in there.
Filmmaker: It’s easy too, because it’s so much more visible than modern technology, which tries to make itself as small and interfaces as see-through as possible.
Birney: Kentucker and I thought about this a lot with Strawberry Mansion. You’ve got the Black Mirror thing where they just put a little dot on someone’s temple and that’s what they’re looking at to look at dreams. And we were like, “Let’s go in the other direction and put on this huge, clunky helmet that’s so ridiculous.” Some people like the small Black Mirror thing, and that’s fine. But the people I think that we’re making movies for want more big and outrageous and colorful. We’re trying to make a future that’s not sucked of all color. We like the big pink rooms and green fields. Maybe there’s a little bit of campiness to it, but we’re really sincere about all this stuff. If I’m looking at a room, do I want to look at a gray room or a pink room? The answer is always gonna be the pink room for me.
In the past, when I was decorating for a film I would want to put as much on [the walls], just fill the wall space. But with [OBEX], it was a little like, “What happens if Conor lives in a more spare house?” Sure, he’s got his wall of VHS tapes, which is where it all explodes, but I don’t see him as someone who’s gonna put up framed pictures on the wall. He’s more interested in what’s on the screens.
Filmmaker: What was the decision to make OBEX black-and-white?
Birney: I’ve been so inspired by Eraserhead over the years. I don’t think OBEX necessarily has too much overlap with Eraserhead, but in my mind I was like, “Maybe this will be my Eraserhead. I’ll set out with that in mind.” The second half of the film was inspired by Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Eraserhead and Dead Man were the two biggest films for me in my early 20s. There’s something about black-and-white where you can just get away with more—you don’t have to do as much art direction, it all can flatten together. Also, knowing that OBEX was going to be a bunch of VFX—when we were filming I didn’t even know how we were going to do them yet, but I knew that black-and-white would benefit us.
Something about the movie felt black-and-white. VHS tapes, the static is black-and-white. Cicadas somehow feel black-and-white to me. All these things were going that direction. I remember Pete going like, “I could film this in color and we could make it black-and-white later.” And I told him “No. Change the camera to black-and-white. I don’t want to go back on this later. I want it to be the only option we have.” Even the word “OBEX” at some point felt black-and-white.