Dan Abramovici, actor/co-writer, "Ben's At Home"

Actor Dan Abramovici has found work in his native Toronto, but not the success he wanted. After starring in television commercials and a spot on the CW's "Beauty and the Beast" series, Abramovici decided he wanted more. He eventually teamed up with director Mars Horodyski, and the duo began work on the project that became "Ben's At Home," of which he is the star, co-writer and producer. The quirky comedy follows a 20-something man who decides after a bad break-up to just not leave the house.

Abramovici spoke to The Film Yap about his film, Ben's decision to stay in and the Canadian film scene.

How did you become involved in "Ben's at Home"?

Both me and my writing partner/film director, Mars Horodyski, got to a point in our respective careers (me the actor and she the director) where we were tired of waiting around for the phone to ring with a job. We both have a background in creating our own short films and found success with that on the festival circuit, and when we met one day on the set of a Canadian Film Centre short that I starred in and Mars directed, we found a kindred quirky, weird, driven spirit in the other person. We collaborated on a strange little short called "Passages: TOLLER" that reenacted the crazed ramblings of figure skater Toller Cranston and found that we shared a comic sensibility. A little while after that, spurred by an indie screenwriting challenge in our hometown of Toronto, we set about writing our first feature film in just one month. Why one month? We put together this amazing team that all agreed to work for free and got all this support from the indie film scene in our town — the only catch being that we had to shoot in August and it had to be done within 12 days of filming. So Mars and I wrote "Ben's At Home" in just under a month and went to camera right away.

What drew you to writing and acting?

I started out as an actor and my first love is acting, but what I realized after appearing in a few dozen television commercials and having various parts on film and TV is that it wasn't just acting for acting's sake that I wanted to do, but to actually get to appear in something good. I wanted to be an actor because of the amazing feeling I get when I watch a great play or a great movie, and after too many years of waiting for the phone to ring with an audition, I decided that it wouldn't hurt to try and create my own work. It initially started off with sketch comedy. I had a troupe called Awkward Silence that performed around Toronto. After that, I went and put together a few short comedy films that found some legs on the festival circuit.

Tell us about Ben as a character. When we meet him he's in a place many 20-somethings are familiar with, just having broken up with a girlfriend.

Ben is dealing with something that many, many 20-somethings are dealing with: being on the wrong end of a breakup in a long-term relationship. Everyone has had to face that horrible dip back into the cold pool of dating and, especially after a breakup, it all feels so forced and difficult. You spent the last four years of your life baring your soul to someone and now you have to make small talk about work with someone you barely know? Just because they're attractive? Yeesh. So Ben went and did what many people want to have done, which is just to take his ball and go home. He decided to just not deal with any of the pain and instead take this decision as a challenge for himself and make the best of it. And in busying himself with making it work at home, proving his friends wrong, and then dating and working he manages to (sort of) forget about his ex and all that pain. He is charming, smart, self-sufficient, but also very deluded.

Online dating or, more specifically, online hookups, are a rather large part of "Ben's At Home." The Internet is a big part of his ability to stay home and is something many people lament as the drawback of being online — the lack of human interaction. Is this something you share?

I am pretty much the opposite of Ben when it came to that, and that is a part of why the idea was interesting to me. I would go crazy without any real interaction with people. My ideal would be to live in the "Cheers" bar, where I am constantly surrounded by friends and everyone greets each other by name. I absolutely think social media and smartphones are a problem to many people — the fact that now we often have face-to-face meetings interrupted by texts and status updates from virtual people or that people's sense of self worth can be impacted by what they see on a relative stranger's Facebook home crawl. I do think online dating is great, though.

The central theme of the movie is Ben staying at home and never leaving. Can you tell me about this as a theme. It's not an agoraphobic thing; he just makes this choice and stays with it. It reminded me a bit of Peter from "Office Space" just deciding he didn't care about his job any more, without the hypnosis.

We love "Office Space." That film, along with works by Lynn Shelton like "Humpday" and the Duplass movie "The Puffy Chair," were big influences on our writing and our structure. We really wanted to make a naturalistic comedy that built organically and where the humor was derived from the characters and situations rather than setpieces. We wanted characters that talked the way people actually talked.

It's not an agoraphobic thing, and Ben doesn't even acknowledge to himself that he's running away from his problems. For him, it's about taking a different way to make sense of life, love and loss at a weird time in life where you feel like you should have things figured out and you find your friends all changing and growing up and apart around you. He uses the challenge from Craig ("You're not gonna go through with this because you're a bitch") and the convenience offered him through the wonders of the Webternets as a sort of excuse to disconnect from his troubles and try this sort of grand experiment.

Tell us a little about the Canadian film scene. Obviously we know Hollywood does a lot of filming up there, but can you tell me about the state of Canadian-made movies?

I'm definitely no authority on the Canadian film scene. "Ben's At Home" was really our first step into it. What I can tell you from my own experience is that the Toronto indie scene is incredibly generous. We made this movie out of favors and thanks to the kindness of incredibly talented professionals who agreed to waive their usual fees to make something they believed in. Taking the producer hat off for a bit, what I can say is that I get a sense from a lot of people in Toronto that they feel like they have something to prove: There are incredibly talented people here that are starving for the opportunity to show what they can do, and having a day on the set of another sci-fi show that makes Toronto a stand-in for New York doesn't satisfy that itch. Filmmakers like Ingrid Veninger and Sarah Polley have shown us that Canadians can be heard if the work and passion is there, and we hope to follow in their steps.

Ben is an online movie reviewer. What was his Top 5 from last year?

Movies that he watched in the past year but didnt necessarily come out in the past year: "Moon," "Spring Breakers," "Safety Not Guaranteed," "Before Midnight," "Melvin Goes To Dinner."