This week on Kaleidoscope, host Juliet Fromholt spoke with the Thiele Brothers ahead of the premier of their debut feature film, Sofa, So Good, at The Neon on September 7, 2023. Kyle, Eli, and Cole Thiele spoke to Juliet about making the film, which tells the story of two cousins moving their couch across Dayton, Ohio. The film was written in 2019, and shot in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the interview, the Thiele Brothers talk about the personal experiences that inspired the film and discuss the artistic inspirations for the work.
Kyle, Eli, and Cole started making short films together when they were in middle school, growing up near New Lebanon, Ohio. The brothers maintained their creative partnership even while they attended different colleges in different creative fields, they told Juliet.
“We always knew we were going to work together. We've always done that, even when we were at separate schools going to college… Post-graduation, we decided we want to do it as a team. It’s more fun that way, and I think we bring out the best in each other and there’s a lot of respect creatively. We really value each other’s words, but also want to push each other to make something that we’re all proud of and want to share.”
The inspiration for Sofa, So Good arose when the brothers bought a couch from North Carolina for their Dayton apartment. “The main point of the film really got conceived when we moved this giant couch up to our apartment, which was on the second floor of a historic home,” the brothers said. Fitting the ornate couch around the tight angles of the building’s stairwell proved exceedingly difficult, and the brothers found that many of their friends had experienced similar couch-moving horror stories. They decided to write a script based on the experience.
The film depicts two cousins, Jake and Red (played by Joseph Jeffries and Yahel Pac) transporting a used couch across Dayton, without a car. Along the way, the cousins encounter an array of obstacles and interlocutors. To determine the aesthetic direction of the film, the brothers studied debut and sophomore films by iconic directors like David Lynch, Cohen Brothers, David Byrne, David Linklater, and Charlie Chaplin. Many of the films were produced on a limited budget, yet they were able to convey a powerful sense of momentum by depicting characters struggling to complete a strenuous task. “A lot of it was visual; visual storytelling, having their actors do a physical feat,” the brothers told Juliet. The physical feat, in Sofa, So Good, was to transport the couch across Dayton.
The brothers also talked about the constraints of shooting the film in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to adhere to public safety guidelines, the film was shot with a skeleton crew consisting of the Theile Brothers, the actors, and sound engineer Rusty Pietrzak. All crew members apart from the actors wore masks at all times, an exception made possible by the size of the couch. The brothers explained, “The couch was a little over 6-feet in length, so our actors were always spaced out when carrying the couch. Which worked out perfectly.” Shot during the COVID lockdowns with a limited cast, the film conveys a sense of isolation:
“We were very intentional about wanting it to feel isolated... The theme of the film we wanted to create was a Western, and we wanted everyone they encountered to feel dangerous. And The timing of our release plays into that feeling, because once we hit 2020, everybody was dangerous-feeling, there was an unknown element to them. That’s an element we were already trying to incorporate into the film. We were joking that it’s a ‘Mid-western’ film.”
Sofa, So Good premiered on September 7th at The Neon in Dayton. The original screening of the film sold out, and a second screening was added to accommodate demand. A trailer to the film is available here:
