Domhnall Gleeson Voiced Animated Short ‘Retirement Plan’ Interview

Who among us hasn’t dabbled in a little wishful thinking about the future until they’re shaken to the core by the uncertainties of it all while covered in cold sweat? In the Oscar-qualifying animated short Retirement Plan, writer-director John Kelly and co-writer Tara Lawall have perfected the art of the multifaceted existential crisis. 

The seven-minute short follows Ray (Domhnall Gleeson), a man of retirement age, as he ruminates on all the things he wants to do after he retires. While Ray is mostly optimistic about the future as he thinks about simplistic things like, finally being able to clean off his desktop or catching up on decades worth of books he’s been putting off reading, he also has moments of great cynicism and anxiety, like claiming he will learn to love hiking and camping, and then detesting the latter as quickly as he’s thought it. Another bit of humor sneaks in when Ray vows to be open to alternative life experiences, only to find himself in an orgy where he may have bitten off a little more than he can chew. As Ray goes through the motions of retirement, he has to find the beauty in the unexpected moments of life as he ages. 

Retirement Plan has received both the Grand Jury Award and Audience Award at SXSW earlier this year. Additionally, Kelly took home the Best of Fest award from the Palm Springs International ShortFest and the Comedy Award from the Indy Shorts International Film Festival. The short is also currently available on the Oscars screening platform. 

Here, Deadline speaks to Kelly about sadness in comedy, casting Gleeson and the many ways one can dream about their end-of-life plans.

DEADLINE: How did you and Tara Lawall come up with this short film idea? 

JOHN KELLY: I basically made a panic attack into a short film. I was on an airplane, and I thought I’d get some emails done, and then I suddenly realized my flagged emails list was 4,000 emails. My inbox was at 70,000 emails. I started thinking about all the lists, my Netflix list, my Spotify list, and a very quiet panic attack. It just anthem me like a freight train. I felt like I was prioritizing the future at the expense of the present. Tara is an old friend, and we’d worked together before on ads and stuff like that. She’s a copywriter and she’s just totally got it. I gave her my brain fart idea with the very rough beginnings of the script and then she made it 100x times funnier. Then I would make it sad, and then she’d make it funnier and then I would make it sad again [laughs]. 

DEADLINE: How did Domhnall Gleeson come to this project?

KELLY: Though he lives near here, I’d never met him. Dublin’s very small. I sent him a video that explained the project and had a little introduction. Internationally, he’s known as a dramatic actor, but in Ireland, we know him for his early comedy work, also. He’s really funny. I didn’t know if he’d be interested, but I knew he’d be really good at that tonal fine line between something that was really sad and then really funny and then being able to see how closely we could jam those two things together. So, I sent the video to his agent, and he was interested. We did a recording session, and he was really generous with his time and really just went for it. I imagine he wasn’t shifting gears for a low-budget short, animated film, but he was giving everything that he had to it, just like his bigger studio films. 

A lot of the lines are his suggestions as well. He did some lines where he wanted to go off on it and just say whatever came to mind. A lot of that was in the script, but it was kind of improvised like jazz. There was so much good stuff in that because he’s a great writer as well as being a great actor. 

DEADLINE: Was it always the plan to capture this man’s life at the start of his retirement, or were there conversations to encapsulate his whole life? 

KELLY: We did think about how to portray things. But, in my head, the final film and maybe what originally was just, I imagine, the narration that he’s talking about is this list that all just happened in his head in the space of three minutes, like a zip file idea. So, it’s him imagining all these things, and then there are possibilities. We did at one point think, “OK, what if his imagination is a different multiverse version of him? Does he look different in each of these imaginations?” But then that just became way too complicated. It’s so easy, especially with animation, to overcomplicate stuff like that. So, we kept the narrative super simple, or otherwise we’d never get finished. 

DEADLINE: What were the time constraints for this? 

KELLY: It’s funny because we got funding from Screen Ireland, which is the state film funding body here. And in the interview, the woman there, named Pauline, said, “This is the first time I’ve seen a 15-page script for a five-minute film.”  But there are chunks that we had to sacrifice. There was a whole knitting section and a bit where he goes to a record shop and has a freak out and starts breaking records. This is about someone going on a bit of an ego trip, but we did want to make him likable. So that was the tonal fine line to not make him a complete asshole. He can indulge in himself, but we still want to feel for him in the end. A big part in trying to make that the goal comes from his simple character design, because his eyes are just two dots. So, I think you’re able to project onto it a little bit more in what you’re thinking about yourself. 

DEADLINE: Retirement Plan has won awards at SXSW, Palm Springs International ShortFest, Irish Film Festa, and quite a few other circuits. What do you think people are responding to? 

KELLY: I think it’s that thing of making something really personal and then somehow it becomes universal. Initially, I thought, “Oh, I’ll set it in America.” Because you can set an animation anywhere, and I have lots of cinematic American references I could use. But then I was like, “No, no, no, I’ll set it in Dublin. He’ll go to the swimming spots that I go to. He’ll want to drive the airport trucks that I’m dying to drive [on the tarmac].” Some of [the desires] are just ridiculously specific, but it’s weird. I’ve been getting such lovely emails, messages and Letterboxd reviews, and I think people see themselves or they see their family or friends and go like, “Oh, I see my dad who’s struggling a bit in retirement.” 

I also think we’re drowning in choice at the moment. Anything’s possible today for our generation compared to previous generations, but instead of that being liberating, it’s actually completely paralyzing. And I kind of thought, oh, people who relate to it who are my age, who were 40s or older, but actually the weird thing is a lot of people in their 20s really relate to it because they’re the ones that are exposed to the most amount of choice and algorithms, and they’re being bombarded in a way that I’m probably not.” So yeah, it’s really unexpected, the reaction, and it’s been really lovely, but totally surprising. 

Also, we submitted the Oscars paperwork, so it’s going to be in the screening room, which is bananas. 

DEADLINE: What would you like people to take from the film? 

KELLY: My favorite thing about the reception is that people have been getting completely different things from it. And so, I almost don’t want to answer that question. I think it’s a bit like I’ve been to gigs where I’ve loved the beat, and then the creator says, “Oh, this song is about blah, blah, blah.” And you’re like, “Oh no, I can’t really listen to that anymore.” So, I don’t know. My wife’s training to be a psychotherapist, and one practice of psychotherapy is called pluralistic psychotherapy, where you come at things from a million different angles. And so, she talked about this film being a pluralistic film because you’re just approaching a subject in innumerable ways. I would hope that people feel something, anything from it. That’s the dream. And maybe it stays with them for a little bit and maybe it gives them a bit of pause. That would be nice.