Azazel Jacobs & Creed Bratton Nurture TERRI

Director Azazel Jacobs and actor Creed Bratton were positively ebullient when discussing their film, TERRI. It’s a bittersweet comedy about small-town high school outcasts, good hearts, bad hearts, and the subtle shift in mentoring that takes place between the lonely, ridiculed, but oddly self-sufficient, pajama-wearing title character, played by Jacob Wysocki, and the school principle, Mr. Fitzgerald, played by John C. Reilly, that takes him under his wing. Or is it the other way around? Creed Bratton co-stars as Terri’s only occasionally lucid Uncle James, Olivia Crocicchia as Heather, the golden girl who falls from grace, and Bridger Zadina as Chad, the kid with issues, external and internal, that prompts a momentous evening‘s revelations. Jacobs directed from a script by Patrick DeWitt on which he collaborated. His previous work includes the not-autobiographical MOMMA’’S MAN, in which his real life parents played his screen parents, and THEGOODTIMESKID, a consideration of theft and of identity. Bratton plays the another version of Creed on NBC’’s The Office, a version with a rich and peculiar past, not to mention present. The conversation covered the art of directing, the serendipity of location scouting, and using humor to get to pathos.  I started, though, by asking about Bratton’s musician past and how it informed his pesent performance.