Split Tooth Media is excited to host the online premiere of Yardley Boys, an excellent new feature from site contributor Aaron Bartuska

When I heard that someone made a movie set in my hometown, Yardley, Pennsylvania, I couldn’t believe it. I was just as surprised to learn that The Yardley Boys’ director Aaron Bartuska isn’t from Yardley but across the Delaware River in New Jersey. 

Bartuska, a Split Tooth contributor, has spent plenty of time in Yardley and, crucially, so have the film’s actors. Drew Ferraro and Bobby Decker play Moses and Benson, a pair of lifelong friends who have gotten a little old for their usual routine. Benson wakes up to notes on the fridge from his parents and he spends his days skating and watching TV with Moses and Jake (Jake Singer, playing himself).

Benson’s so comfortable in Yardley that he’ll take a dip in the Delaware. In the closest thing the film has to a narrative revelation, we learn that Moses isn’t quite so content with hitting the skatepark and dining on Wawa hoagies every day. He plans to move into a new apartment on the other end of the state. 

Though the film ostensibly follows the search for a lost cat, viewers will spend less time wondering where Casper ran off to than they will spend wondering why Benson and Moses don’t tell each other how they feel. As Bartuska noted when we spoke recently, his co-leads love one another and skating is, as much as anything else, an excuse to spend time together. 

Check out The Yardley Boys and read my conversation with Bartuska on improvising with his cast, directing a cat, and more.

Bennett Glace, Split Tooth Media: I’m from Yardley. I was kind of surprised to learn that you aren’t. What is your relationship like with this small town on the Delaware? 

Aaron Bartuska: I’m from a couple of towns over. I grew up in Hamilton, New Jersey, and I spent a lot of time going to Yardley. I went to a Catholic high school where I now teach that pulled from a lot of different towns. The majority were either from around me or from over in Yardley. We had Princeton on one side and Yardley on the other in terms of cool towns to go do things in. It had a nice downtown area. It’s close enough to the movie theater. I would always be over there just to see friends and hang out.

Beyond your familiarity with Yardley, what made it an appealing location for the movie? 

My friend Drew Ferraro, who’s in the film, and I were having a conversation. I’ve known him since before high school and he grew up in Yardley. We talked about how he was planning to buy a house in Yardley. And I thought that was interesting because so many of us were trying to get out to cities. Very few of my friends were comfortable committing to staying in a small town, let alone the one they grew up in. He said, ‘this town is a place I love. It’s in the middle of everything I could ever need to get to. Within two hours I could get to two major cities, I could be in the mountains, I could be at the beach. There’s a train station, we’re close to an airport.’ He described it as this hub where there’s not much going on. That really appealed because I’ve always thought of myself as a homebody. I lived in Philly for five years for college and lived in Brooklyn for a few years, and then I moved back home to start teaching at my alma mater. I related to him and that’s where the idea for the film sparked. It’s got charm. There’s a lot of great people. People obviously feel comfortable spending their lives here. It seemed like the only place I could set this film.

‘Based on characters by’ is an unusual title card, or at least an uncommon one. Tell me about that credit and what it says about how the film came together. 

My friend Will DiNola and I wrote a feature in early 2022 called These Are My Friends that is yet to come out. We shot it in the summer of 2022. It’s a party movie that follows 14 characters over the course of one night. Coming out of the pandemic, I wanted to make a film that would bring us all back together again and to convey an experience we had all neglected for a couple years, going to a party. I was also getting a lot of college friends back together again. Bobby Decker and Drew Ferraro, who play the leads in The Yardley Boys, are in that film as well, playing these same two characters. Yardley Boys was born out of my experience on that film. Making that film took a lot of planning and a lot of getting people together in the same place. I think the total cast is around 50 people and the total crew is around 30 people. It was a lot of things to balance. I described it as almost playing director rather than directing. I was almost running a summer camp rather than actually thinking about what I wanted to say or why I was even doing what I was doing. I’m still proud of that film, but I didn’t even know what I had ended up with. I got this idea for Yardley Boys. Instead of 80 people on the set, let’s get down to under 10. Let’s go back to fully improvising our dialogue rather than having a script. I’m proud of both of those films, but they are two different sides of the directing coin for me. One was very stressful and very rewarding, but very expensive, and it took a lot out of me. And this one, Yardley Boys, was let’s get down to brass tacks. Let’s remember why we Iove doing this.

So do you think your characters see skating as a means of artistic expression, or are they just passing the time? 

I think they see it as a form of expression. I’m not sure if they see it as a form of artistic expression. I’m not a skater at all. I tried skateboarding and I broke my shoulder, but my friends care about it. And they express themselves through it. Bobby, and Drew, and Jake, the stars of the film, make zines about skating or skate videos. And that’s artistic. I think that these characters and my friends see skating as this link to their youth. It’s something that they’ve been doing since they were 10, 11, 12 years old, probably before that. In the film, it’s a mode of transportation and it’s a way or an excuse for them to be with each other. There’s a scene early on where they’re at the skatepark and everyone else there is a 12-year-old kid. That was happenstance. There were a lot of happy accidents in this film. It further emphasized how they were holding onto their past. I can’t say the same is true about my friends. I think they just love skating, and I think they’re super passionate about it, and I think it’s a great way for them to bond and express themselves. It’s kind of crazy that I’ve made two films that heavily involve skating now because I think people are going to start having the Jonah Hill response to me.

What do you mean by that?

Every time I mention Mid90s (Jonah Hill, 2018) to Bobby, Drew, and Jake, they’re like, ‘ugh.’ I know he skates, but I think a lot of people see him as a poser. I’m fine with Mid90s.

What’s it like directing an actor who’s playing themself? Does that differ from your typical approach?

Jake plays himself, but with Bobby and Drew it was important that they not play themselves. Early on in the writing process, and I use writing loosely, we had a seven-page outline, Bobby and I were talking about flipping he and Drew’s relationship with home. Bobby lives in Brooklyn and Drew, like I mentioned, was comfortable staying at home. Flipping it gave them both a challenge and made it more like acting than it would’ve been. We sat down and talked about their characters, but the fact that they were three lifelong friends who had grown up in Yardley did a lot of the work for me. I like to cheat when I’m making films. I like to use as much of the real-world circumstances as I can. At the same time, it can be tricky directing your friends. If you try to get too serious or tell them to do something differently, half the time they’ll be responsive and half the time they’ll say, ‘fuck you, man.’ I can never direct them the way I direct someone I didn’t know. It can’t feel like directing or else it won’t work.

Tell me about the logistics of shooting skateboarding sequences. Did your DP ride a board, were you in a car? 

I shot the film with my friend Matt Herzog and we more or less split the work. For those sequences, Matt brought his pickup truck down from Long Island and would drive and I’d be in the back with CJ Bruce, our sound guy, and usually Jake, who was taking photos for a zine that he made about the film. It’d be three or four of us in the back of the truck, Matt driving, Bobby and Drew skating. I’d be on camera just getting as much as I could. We probably went around the same Yardley block 30 or 40 times just to get enough footage of skating. I was the most nervous about shooting the skating and then it was the biggest relief because I think it all turned out pretty well. I was worried about it being shaky or not being able to hear the dialogue. There are loud and shaky parts, but I think that works. That’s what it feels like and sounds like to skate. You’re with them skating. And there is stuff in the credits that’s actual footage of them as high schoolers that Drew shot. Some of that stuff was filmed from a board.

Did you have any trouble directing a cat?

That was probably the most complicated thing, but, again, so much easier than we expected it to be. We planned all of Casper’s scenes around when he would usually be fed. He was hungry so he was down to act. He’s a much more expressive cat than I had realized. The hardest shot to get was Casper leaving out the door when Bobby had left it open. We had one person on one side of the door nudging Casper out and another shaking some food outside. We had to stitch that together a little. Maybe a reason why the shoot seems like it went over so well was because there was a lot that we ended up not doing. We were going to do a whole B-roll day with Casper walking around town that we’d keep cutting to. We decided against it. First, because we just ran out of time. We put a hard five-day cap on the film. Second, we just didn’t think we needed it.

Though your characters are in their mid-twenties, it’s also a film about growing up. Were there any other ‘late coming of age’ stories you were inspired by or that you discussed with your actors? 

We tried to start something fun where every night after wrap we’d watch a film. We were all sleeping at each other’s houses during the shoot. It only lasted for two nights, but the first film we watched was Gus Van Sant’s film Gerry (2002). Watching that the first night was a huge tonal shift in how we wanted to film these guys. It’s a lot of walking and skating and there’s only so much you can do to make that look interesting. Gerry really helped us, specifically the side-profile shot of them skating next to each other in close up. In terms of the writing process, I’m a big Frances Ha (2012) fan. That captures the post-collegiate, ‘what am I doing with my life?’ I’m a big Superbad (2007) fan. That’s not a late coming-of-age film, but I think it’s the most mature of those [Judd Apatow-produced] films. Even though they’re talking about dicks the whole time. Especially at the end, Michael Cera and Jonah Hill just lying on the floor and saying ‘I love you’ to each other. That’s really what we were trying to capture with this film. It’s two guys who don’t know how to communicate their love to each other.

Watch The Yardley Boys below:

Watch more of Bartuska’s work on his Vimeo page
(EDITOR’S NOTE: We recommend The Amityville Quilt Store!)
Read Bartuska’s writing for Split Tooth here
Consider reviewing The Yardley Boys on Letterboxd

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