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‘The Mattachine Family’s’ filmmaker husbands discuss our gay dad obsession and their movie’s real-life parallels
Andy and Danny Vallentine made a movie about their dream to start a family. Shortly after production wrapped, their daughter was born.
Tonight may be the closing night of San Francisco’s Framline47—the Bay Area’s premier LGBTQ+ film festival—but the fun is far from over.
Beginning today, a selection of fest titles will be available to stream virtually, no matter where you are in the U.S., via Frameline’s digital screen room.
Among the exciting crop of streamable features is one we’ve had our eye on since its first announcement: The Mattachine Family, which tells the story of a loving couple whose lives are thrown for a loop when the foster son they’ve been caring for the past year suddenly returns to his birth mother.
Nico Tortorella (Younger) and Juan Pablo Di Pace (Mamma Mia!) play Thomas and Oscar, respectively, the thirty-something partners who are now left to grapple with what it means to make a family and what they want out of their lives.
Thankfully, they’ve got a supportive friend group—a chosen family, if you will—around them, including expecting mother Leah (Schitt’s Creek‘s Emily Hampshire), her partner Sonia (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘s Cloie Wyatt Taylor), and the carefree Jamie (Single Parents‘ Jake Choi). And the cast is rounded out by a few more LGBTQ+ icons: The Princess Diaries‘ Heather Matarazzo, Hacks‘ Carl Clemons-Hopkins, and Teen Beach Movie‘s Garrett Clayton.
For filmmaker husbands Andy and Danny Vallentine, The Mattachine Family is an incredibly personal story, one borne out of their questions about family and fatherhood—with some heartwarming parallels to their own lives. Directed by Andy with a script from Danny, the sweet dramedy is the first of what they’re proud to call “A Vallentine Family Film.”
After its world premiere last month at the Seattle International Film Festival, the film had a warm reception last week with Frameline47 at San Francisco’s historic Castro Theatre. And, as was just announced, the Vallentine’s will soon bring the film home to Los Angeles, where it will play in the 41st annual Outfest on July 22.
Ahead of Outfest, and with the film streaming now through July 2 via Framline digital screening room, we caught up with the Vallentines to learn more about the birth *wink, wink* of the film and to hear how their feelings about the film have evolved as their own lives have gone through some major changes.
QUEERTY: Congratulations on The Mattachine Family‘s big San Francisco premiere at Frameline47—it sounds like it was warmly received, and I’m sure it’s an odd feeling to share with some many considering it’s such a personal story inspired by conversations you’ve both had about fatherhood.
Can you tell us about when and how you began talking about all of this as a feature film?
DANNY VALLENTINE: When Andy and I got married, after that we started talking like, “Okay, what are our next steps? What do we want to see our life look like together?” And, originally, I may have been more in the “I’m ready to jump into children as soon as possible” [mindset,] and Andy was more like, “Let’s see where our life leads us.”
At the time, I didn’t have like that same urgency that Thomas has in the film, but it was an interesting thought: With straight couples, I’m sure, before they get married, they often have these conversations about like, “When do you want children? Do you want children?” And it wasn’t really top of mind as we were planning on getting married, it all kind of just happened so quickly.
When I accepted the fact that I was gay in high school, I think part of that acceptance was letting go of marriage as an idea and letting go of having a family as an idea. So, when we could get married, then we started looking around us, and we were like, “Okay, well, having a family is also something that is a realistic option now.”
And then, the journey that Thomas goes on throughout the film, he has experienced talking to Oscar who was a foster child himself, looking into surrogacy, looking into adoption, and talking about all these different ways to make a family. It was kind of the same journey that we eventually went on. And so a lot of that was taken from our life, as well as people we talked to—the experiences of the characters in the film are the experiences of our friends and people we reached out to.
That’s interesting—and, of course, understandable—to hear you say you let go of the idea of having kids when you embraced your queerness. So was fatherhood something either of you knew you wanted for yourselves, even at a younger age?
ANDY VALLENTINE: No, and I think that when I accepted I was gay—what were the gay people that I had even seen in small-town Michigan? I knew about the gays who lived in New York and San Francisco, and the life that I perceived them to live: they were going out, not in relationships. You know, it was wild and fun and it looked like exciting at the time, but it looked very different from what I was used to growing up in like a small town.
It was this idea of “being queer is different,” right? So, maybe we accepted ourselves as being different from everybody else, but once we got marriage equality, it was like, “Are we losing a little bit of our queerness? Because we’re assimilating back into what’s perceived as like ‘straight culture’?” So that’s a theme that, when Danny [voiced it to] me, I was like, “Oh, that’s super fascinating,” you know? It was something that hadn’t necessarily been told yet.
Knowing how personal this story is for the both of you, what can you tell me about bringing your core cast together. It’s not that they’re playing versions of you, but I’m starting to see they clearly reflects parts of your lives.
ANDY: We had a great casting director, Scot Boland, who I’m still amazed wanted to work on our film—and he ended up producing it—he’s like [Robert] Zemeckis’ go-to casting director. So he started putting together a list of actors and, for the most part, everybody that ended up in the film was on our list—that was somebody that I had admired, or was interested in.
Of course, all of the actors who like participated in this—it’s an indie film—they’re not getting paid a lot of money. They are doing this because they are passionate about the story usually, and they have some sort of personal connection to the story that they can relate themselves to those characters.
So, once we found Nico and Juan and started chatting, once we started doing our little Zoom meets at the beginning, we were like, “Okay, well, we found it!” It was a really nice contrasting relationship, you know?
DANNY: I mean, Nico and his partner were trying to have a child, and Nico reached out to us during the casting process and was like, “I saw myself in Thomas, in what Thomas is going through, and we’re trying to build a family.” I think that that really spoke to us, hearing that he had such a personal connection to the story.
ANDY: And we were looking for actors who were in the [community.] They didn’t have to be LGBTQ+, but that was a bonus right for us. So it ended up working out that the majority of our cast was LGBTQ+—and a bunch of them are LGBTQ+ icons. Like, Heather Matarazzo—when she signed up for this, we couldn’t believe it. And then Carl Clemons-Hopkins from Hacks—thanks, Carl, for coming out to do our little indeed! And then, of course, Emily [Hampshire]—when we found out Emily was available and interested, I screamed, because she is a great gift for our film.
Another way this film reflects your own lives is that you’re fathers now—congratulations! As I understand it, your daughter, Florence, was born shortly after production wrapped, correct?
ANDY: Yes, Florence was born like four weeks after we got done filming.
Wow, so you were just finishing up your film baby, and then: A real baby!
DANNY: Yes, and, a weird coincidence: In the film, Thomas gets the call on New Year’s Eve about the baby. When we found out we were going to have Florence, her original birthday was January 1. We were like, “What? How crazy!”
ANDY: Yeah, she was born a couple weeks earlier, but still!
Congrats again—that’s wonderful. Since you two wrote this film at such a specific time in your lives, I’m curious: As you watch it back now at festivals, with theaters filled with audiences, does it mean something different to you now? Have the ways you two view the film evolved now that you actually are fathers?
DANNY: Definitely looking at it retrospectively, from thIs side of being a parent, a lot of the things that Thomas says, especially in his voiceovers, are big questions that I had about life, about fatherhood and parenthood. And, being on the other side of that train track now, having our daughter, and thinking back, it is really powerful. I still find it like it really moving, and kind of unbelievable!
ANDY: And it’s like, Danny wrote this and then I directed this at a time when our surrogate was pregnant, so we were soon to be fathers. We just fell very in line with Thomas’ motivation of wanting to be a dad, so that was not lost on us on [as we’re] filming this movie about wanting to be dads, and there’s this incredible woman carrying our child 10 miles away, you know?
I look back now at some of the scenes and I’m like, “Oh, I would have done that differently,” because I now know how I’ve taken care of a baby. When we got Florence, it was like a big learning curve of, “How do you become a dad? What do you do?” When we were filming, I didn’t know all those logistics, but now I do so.
There was definitely a moment in the editing bay—you know, I’ve seen the movie now like a thousand times, so I’m not saying that I’m crying every time I watch it. That’s not happening. But there was a moment that was, you know, two months after, in the post-production process, when I had Florence and I was sleep-deprived and exhausted and we’re editing with the editor. It was that last little bit where [Thomas] is talking about family and the importance of family and having this daughter—that hit me like really hard. I was like, “Holy sh*t!”
Because this is our first film, right? Like, I hope there’s lots of other films or TV shows for us to come. But this is something that our daughter will be able to look back on in 20 years and be like, “This is like something that my dads made sort of about me, and about wanting to become dads.”
DANNY: And also, something else that I wasn’t expecting to be my so moving and powerful, is watching Thomas come into fatherhood alongside his friends, his chosen family. Because we don’t really have any family here in LA, so we’ve really relied on our best friends, our chosen family, inbringing up Florence. And so that’s something that, seeing that borne out, too, and seeing how that comes together for Thomas and how that’s come together for us has been an enormous privilege.
I’m reminded of a specific scene that really makes me laugh where, while out at a party, Thomas meets Garrett Clayton’s character Jake, and they joke that everyone’s obsessed with gay dads. Well, here we are interviewing two gay dads who made a movie about gay fatherhood… there really is some truth to that!
ANDY: Yeah! [Laughs.] I think that that was a joke because I directed a lot of, like, influencer stuff—so, every YouTuber back in the day, I’ve directed all their music videos. So that was that fun joke. But also at that point, we were obsessed with gay dads. We were watching all of their stuff on Instagram and Tiktok. It was like, “What do they do? What do we need to know? There’s so much you have to buy before the baby arrives!” So, in that moment, we were like, “Oh, did you catch this video or this Instagram post?” Because that’s where we were learning a lot from, because we obviously we saw ourselves in all of that.
So, before we’re out of time, what can you share about what’s next for the film? And what’s next for yourselves?
ANDY: Next for the film, we’ll be playing in a few festivals coming soon, and so announcements will be made in the coming days and weeks [about] where you’ll be able to catch The Mattachine Family. The Instagram is @mattachinefamily where we’ll post all the news about it.
And then next for us is… we’ll see! We’re working on—you know, we say in the movie, it’s “A Vallentine Family Film,” because we really are creative partners, and we have other stories that are written and are ready to be told. So I think that we’re hoping that we can build out a little production company and make a bunch of fun and dramatic and queer content.
“Fun, dramatic, and queer”—my three favorite words!
ANDY: Right?
Well, congratulations again! We can’t wait to see where the movie takes you next. Thank you so much for sharing it with us!
ANDY: And we have thank you at Queerty for being champions of the film. You know, we’re very fortunate that we have Zach Braff’s name on it, and he helped us with the script, but we are very independent and we don’t have distribution yet, so all the love that you give our film—and also the short I did last year, The Letter Men, with Garrett Clayton—we appreciate it.
You can purchase virtual tickets to stream The Mattachine Family via Frameline47’s digital screening room now through July 2. Next, the film heads to LA’s Outfest on July 22, and will also be available through the fest’s virtual screening program between July 24 – 30.
Stay tuned to The Mattachine Family Instagram page for more updates.
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