{"id":520535,"date":"2026-06-27T02:35:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T02:35:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/520535\/"},"modified":"2026-06-27T02:35:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T02:35:17","slug":"tonis-pill-talks-about-blending-stand-by-me-and-border-in-frank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/520535\/","title":{"rendered":"T\u00f5nis Pill Talks About Blending ‘Stand by Me’ and ‘Border’ in ‘Fr\u00e4nk’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tA grim, personal real-life case inspired T\u00f5nis Pill\u2019s directorial debut, \u201cFr\u00e4nk.\u201d When the director was a young boy living in a small Estonian town, a person with an intellectual disability died after tragically falling under a train. A rumor quickly spread that a gang of boys, used to bullying the man, was responsible for pushing him onto the rails. \u201cThat gruesome detail was my main motivation to tell his story,\u201d Pill tells Variety after screening the film at the Raindance Film Festival<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tA moving coming-of-age, \u201cFr\u00e4nk\u201d is inspired by Rob Reiner\u2019s \u201cStand by Me,\u201d Jonah Hill\u2019s \u201cMid 90s\u201d and Ali Abbasi\u2019s \u201cBorder,\u201d and follows 13-year-old Paul, who arrives in an unfamiliar town after a serious domestic violence incident. Struggling to fit in and wrestling with a rebellious streak, the teen makes one bad decision after another, with his downward trajectory changed by the titular disabled man, played by Oskar Seeman.<\/p>\n

\n\tPill came up in the industry as an assistant director, with his second-ever feature film credit being as an AD on Christopher Nolan<\/a>\u2019s Estonia-shot \u201cTenet.\u201d Asked about what he learned on those major sets that he could then apply to his own, the director says that \u201cmajor big-budget sets usually carry a lot of financial burden, which usually translates into quite aggressive and unfriendly sets.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWorking on these big sets, I mostly learned about how you should always be kind, regardless of the film set hierarchy,\u201d he adds. In the end, we are working as a team, and nobody should feel bad for just doing their work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKindness and patience were extra important in \u201cFr\u00e4nk,\u201d given that the director was dealing with a cast largely comprising children and young teens. Pill underwent a two-month casting process, going through over 500 candidates. \u201cIt was a really enlightening process,\u201d he recalls. \u201cThere was also a six-month gap between the short film and acquiring the final funding, and we were very afraid we might lose some kids to puberty, but the movie gods were with us, and all the kids we had still fit the final movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAsked about tackling disability on screen, the director says they have tried to approach it with two things in mind: \u201cFirst of all, respect for the actual person the character is based on and secondly, we tried not to emphasize too much on the fact that we have an outcast character with a disability, but rather that we have this super empathetic, joy-filling and all around inspiring person who we want to show to the world and hopefully inspire someone.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u201cFr\u00e4nk,\u201d courtesy of Raindance Film Festival<\/p>\n

\n\tPart of this process was working closely with Seeman to develop the character. \u201cWe had extensive chats and, after that, we started to figure out the physical and vocal side by putting him in costume, roaming the streets and letting him stay in character. It was actually quite a tense experience, since we discovered that a large amount of our society is actually afraid of people like Fr\u00e4nk and we actually got into several minor conflicts which needed de-escalating.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFr\u00e4nk\u201d is also a film about male friendship and the mental health of young boys, a topic currently massively popular due to misogynistic movements such as the Manosphere and the Red Pill movement. \u201cI\u2019m happy these sensitive topics are recently getting more and more attention,\u201d says the director. \u201cA thing I missed as a kid was a good male mentor, and this is even more relevant now. With all this recent [Andrew] Tate worshipping, I believe we need to show better and positive examples of men. We have to introduce positive mentors, and we also need to show how these misled children or adult men could still change for the better.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs for the recent growth in his home country\u2019s film industry, Pill says getting more and more major productions into Estonia is \u201cvery helpful\u201d to the industry and crews, but there are still significant financial barriers keeping the Baltic country\u2019s cinema from flourishing. \u201cWe have a decaying pool of talented directors who are financially struggling because we don\u2019t actually have that much money to make Estonian movies,\u201d he says. \u201cIn a country with a population of 1.3 million, we can only make four or five fiction features a year with the general budget we have, with many directors starving until they finally get the chance to make their movie. I truly hope it gets better soon, because otherwise we are going to lose a lot of stories.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A grim, personal real-life case inspired T\u00f5nis Pill\u2019s directorial debut, \u201cFr\u00e4nk.\u201d When the director was a young boy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":520536,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[50678,93,61,60,270,198206,221925],"class_list":["post-520535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-christopher-nolan","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-raindance-film-festival","tag-tu00f6nis-pill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=520535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/520536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=520535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=520535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=520535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}