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| Albert Birney and Dorothy as Conor and Sandy in Obex |
Albert Birney has been making strange and unusual films for over 15 years. In 2021, he had something of a breakthrough with Strawberry Mansion, which was a big festival hit and went on to become available to general audiences around the world. Now he’s back with something every bit as distinctive. Obex is a black and white fantasy film about a solitary man forced to go on a quest inside a computer game when his beloved dog is kidnapped.
A smaller, more intimate production than its famous predecessor, Obex developed organically in the space between other projects, Albert explains when we meet.
“Strawberry Mansion was a bigger film. I co-directed that with Kentucker Audley. We had a bigger script, lots of moving parts and characters and things. And he and I are working up on our follow up to Strawberry Mansion. We've been writing that and it's even bigger than Strawberry Mansion and we're trying to get that made. But because it is bigger, it's been taking years. You've got to get funding and actors and things attached. So Obex really kind of grew out of that period of waiting and trying to get this bigger thing made.
“In the meantime, what can I do that's very small? You know, I’ll film it in the house where I live. My dog will act in it. There's no barrier to entry to the movie. You can just start making it. And that's why I contacted my friend Pete, who has a camera and who has made movies this way, and said, ‘Pete, you know, if you come here to Baltimore, I think we could just start filming tomorrow and make something fast and cheap and ultimately very fun.’
I tell him that I saw the film when it was sent to me for awards consideration, and that it was a pleasure to watch something so different in the middle of the lengthy awards viewing process. Did he expect it to be put forward for that kind of thing?
“Oh, no,” he says. “I mean, that's fun to hear. I think when you set out to make one of these things, you don't really think about what's going to happen when it's out or when you finish it. It's very much chasing this feeling and this desire just to make something with your friends, for the sheer joy of making it. When we started this, Pete and I weren't even sure what it was going to be. If it was going to be a feature film, if it was going to be a short film, if it was going to be an art installation. So, yeah, it's great when people can watch it and connect with it, and then maybe it is up for some sort of consideration. I have no dream or wish of winning anything. That's not why I make films. And so if anything ever happens, it's just, I guess, a strange little detour or something. It's not anything that I think about, really.”
Is it first and foremost about the process?
“Oh, yeah, definitely. I think that's a lesson I learned years ago when I was making my first feature film, The Beast Pageant. This is back in 2008, 2009. It was one hundred percent just the joy of creating with my friends. We were making papier maché. We were finding props in the garbage. And there's just nothing better than that feeling. Then you go out and you share the film, and that can be fun, but it's not quite the same as the process of making it. You're already kind of missing the joy you had when you were making the thing, and you're dreaming of getting back to that spot. Obex was very much a deliberate attempt to get back to that thing.
“When you're younger and you're just making stuff with your friends and you're making each other laugh, it's the closest, I think, to feeling like a god that I've ever experienced. You're all gods together. You're all locked into this strange world of the film that you're making together, and the outside world almost doesn't even exist for a couple weeks or a couple months or however long you're working on it.”
Here that strange world comes from a certain set of old computer games. Was he a fan of those games himself? Did he have any favourites?
“Yeah,” he grins. “Oh, I love those games. The first one I really remember was playing Dark Castle on my friend's Macintosh, which I think was, you know, 1987 or ‘88. I was five or six years old. And then of course, the Nintendo. On my seventh birthday, my grandmother gave me the original Nintendo. And Legend Of Zelda, of course, was hundreds of hours just wandering that map, finding secrets. So those two, and then a little bit later, the Final Fantasy games were big ones too.
“Those early computer games were special, I think, just because at that point, I had never seen a computer in someone's home before. You know, we had a computer lab at school, but it was very much for educational games, and then all of a sudden to go to my friend's house and they had a computer and we could just play games whenever we wanted. And they were black and white. You know, they were very simple. But I think when you're five or six years old, you don't think about that. You're just kind of lost in these adventure lands and going on these quests. They made a very big impact on me.”
Is that why the film is black and white?
“That's one of the reasons, yeah, because those early Macintosh computers were black and white also. I'm just a fan of black and white films. You know, David Lynch's Eraserhead and Jim Jarman’s Dead Man were just two films that were swirling around in my head. They're always swirling around in there just because they're films I saw at a very informative age in my teens and early twenties, when I was discovering cinema. Two films that shifted something in my brain; the fact that those are black and white. And also just knowing that I was going to be doing all of the special effects and visual effects myself, you know? Black and white is very forgiving. I knew I could get away with a lot more.”
There are a lot of films from that period about people getting trapped in games. Was he conscious of that existing lore when developing his own?
He blushes slightly. “You know, I honestly have never seen the first Tron. I know that it's the big one in terms of getting stuck in a game.
“When Pete and I started filming, we had an outline and originally the game that Conor gets, Obex, was going to be really great, and he was just going to be sitting there playing it for the rest of the movie. And we realised this was not going to make for interesting cinema. So when we set out to make this, it wasn't really even decided that he was going to go into the game – that was just the natural progression of where the story was going.
“I think part of it, for me, always goes back to The Wizard Of Oz as well, where it's like you have characters at home and then all of a sudden they're transported through a door to this magical land. It's like adding something like that to this story where you've got this video game, and you've got this dark wood behind the house. What's in there? Let's have him go in there. And that's him entering into this other land.”
The kind of story that he maybe loved as a kid, but that adults don't spend enough time enjoying?
“Yeah, definitely. It's all stories, too. You know, it's like this quest. You leave home and you go on this adventure and you come back – like the Odyssey. I think it's very deep in. In our DNA.”
Was he wanting to talk about the way that Conor is trapped in his house, or was that something that came about for practical reasons?
“Probably a little bit of both,” he says. “This movie was first conceived in early 2021, so we were coming out of that period of a lot of us being stuck in our homes. I'm also someone that enjoys being at home. I have all of my screens and my games and all of my toys and everything. So yeah, I think that's just pushing that a little further. Conor's even further in his world and can't even go to the grocery store, where I can go. I go to grocery store every day. But yeah, also, like you said, practically, it's cheap to film in one location, and especially the location I have access to. I wake up here, I go to sleep here. This is where I live. So it was very easy to just turn the camera on. And my dog lives here with me. So it's like, okay, we've got our co-star now, in this dog.”
The dog’s name is Dorothy. I ask if that was inspired by The Wizard Of Oz, and he admits shyly that it was. I congratulate him on her performance and ask how he directed her.
“It's funny because everyone says ‘Oh, you should get her to act in more things,’ he says. “I tell them I don't think she would be very good at that. She's not really well trained. But what were asking her to do is very close to her daily routine anyway. Sitting on the sofa, staying by my side, you know? She's one of those dogs that wherever you're going, she's going to follow. We would give her treats, and I think she naturally fell into the rhythm that Pete and I adopted for that week of, you know, we're filming, we're taking a break, we're going on a walk, all the usual stuff she'd probably be doing anyway.”
How did they plot out the quest that we see in the film, with its various events? He tells me that when they were making the first half of the film, they had no idea what was going to happen in the second half.
“It was a full year later when we filmed the second half, so in all that time, ideas would just come out of thin air, the way ideas has come. A big chunk of the second half came on a long drive I was on. It was an eight hour drive. The stereo doesn't work in my car, so it's kind of silent. There’s something about just driving on the highway, you know, it's like you run into ideas on the highway; they just kind of present themselves in your brain.
“Growing up playing all these old RPGs and being a fan of these types of adventure movies, it just kind of started to take shape. It was a fine line between what is maybe too much a trope or what can we change a little bit to make it our own, adding more characters. Now it's not just me and Dorothy. We got a couple more characters I'm interacting with, increasing the scope of it, trying to make it feel a little bit bigger than the first time.”
One of the best parts, he says, was actually making the monsters.
“I really love that aspect of it. I'm trying to figure out, like, ‘Okay, what are the costumes? What are the characters going to look like? What are the special effects? If Conor gets stabbed, how are we going to do that?’ For that particular one, the stabbing, I went to a hardware store and got a tube and run it under my shirt. You blow fake blood through the tube under the shirt so it looks like you're bleeding. And because we had the whole summer, I had a big checklist, and I was just kind of going down the checklist and making notes on what kind of costumes I still needed to find.
“I went to a thrift store and found an army jacket for the cicada soldiers to wear and a hat for Conor to wear. I asked friends and built it up bit by bit. It was a very small team of us doing it – honestly, just me most of the time, and Pete some of the time. But it's fun, you know? It goes back to just the joy of making something and not waiting for anybody to give you the go ahead. It's just whatever you can dream of, you can figure out a way to make it a reality.”
The cicadas are a great device, both as monsters and, in their ordinary form, as a factor contributing to Conor’s reluctance to leave his home.
“The biggest reason [for them] is just because in 2021, when the Obex idea was forming, it was one of those summers,” he says. “Every 17 years in Baltimore, where I lived, they come out of the ground. It just happened to be that summer, June of 2021. I would be walking Dorothy down the street, and they'd land on you, and they’d swoop down at your face. You’d just look out the window and you’d see them flying through the air. And actually they were in our trash can. I grabbed my camera and filmed them in there, so that footage, that's in the movie, was the very first footage filmed for the movie. I didn't know at that point what it was for.
“I was just like, ‘This is every 17 years so I’d better capture it now, or else I’ll have to wait another 17 years.’ And then, yeah, just in my own life, I remembered every time they've been here. 2004 was another year. And then when I first moved to Baltimore in 1987 was another year. So they had Just been this kind of constant throughout my life. You look back at your life and think about it in these cicada years. So it just felt like a nice thing. And also for Conor, he, in a way, is stuck in his little shell. They're trying to get in from the outside. It's like the outside world trying to break in. And Conor, kind of the same as a cicada sheds their own outer layer, needs to maybe do that as well and pick up a sword and go on this adventure. So for many reasons, it just felt like this was the correct kind of image and metaphor to have in the movie.”
There were other monsters he thought about including, he says, but he didn’t want to overload the film.
We talk about the ASCII art that Conor does to make a living in the film, and which Albert says he’s always loved.
“It's a little bit of movie magic. I love that way of illustrating using keyboard characters, but for these in the movie, I found some websites where you can upload a photo and then it would give you the characters, so then I would copy those and bring those onto my computer and then basically screen record myself deleting it so that played it in reverse. It looked like it was typing out, which is a little bit cheating, but that's movie magic. And I like to think there's someone out there in the world who could actually illustrate this way, by typing super fast and making an image from nothing.”
I tell him that it seemed to me like an appropriate thing for him to do for a living, because it's not only keeping him in his house, but it's quite isolating in terms of the way that he has to focus when he's doing that. Today, if you're stuck in your house, the computer is a means of connecting to other people and reaching out. But back then, with that and with the games, it's very much keeping him in his own little world.
“Yeah, yeah,” says Albert. “And that's something, developing this character, trying to think about ‘Okay, what does it look like if you don't leave your house in 1987 – how can you make money?’ This is right before the internet became widespread. It just felt like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is something.’ It's a little bit of connection to the outside world, advertising in these computer magazines and making portraits. And also, I love the idea that he was using the computer in this artful way, not as it was intended, but thinking outside the box, a little bit like a tool or something. You know, these computers in our homes are super powerful machines and it's easy to just use them for games or for entertainment, but they're also very powerful art-making tools.”
He and Kentucker are always developing new ideas, he says.
“We have a couple scripts together. There's a kind of spiritual follow up to Strawberry Mansion that we’re working on, but we have some other scripts as well. And then also I'm animating the third in my trilogy, the Tux And Fanny movies. They're animated films I do. They take time, but I'm chipping away at it whenever I have a moment.”
Obex is in US cinemas from Friday 9 January 2026.
