How Drake became a character in this Sundance mockumentary of the music video industry

"It's gonna be a movie."

Those five magic words, delivered enthusiastically by a confident director, are guaranteed to put any anxious artist at ease on a music video shoot. At least, that's the advice Pasqual Gutierrez, a successful director who's worked with everyone from the Weeknd to Madonna, imparts to an eager newbie in his directorial debut, Serious People. 

Those same five words also popped into Gutierrez's mind when he woke up from a strange dream about a year and a half ago. At the time, he was dealing with "a lot of anxiety," he tells Entertainment Weekly. His wife, Christine, also a director, was pregnant with their first child and going through a "difficult first trimester," and his work was keeping them apart more than they would've liked. "It was really hectic and tough to be there," he recalls.

One night, his subconscious dreamt up a solution.

"It was a very vivid dream that was essentially the thesis of what Serious People is, which is that I saw myself hiring a doppelgänger from Craigslist to look like me and fill in," he says. "I still remember it. I woke up in a sweat at 4 a.m. and told Christine the idea, and I was like, 'What do you think about this?' She's like, 'Do it.'"

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So, Gutierrez called one of his closest friends, filmmaker Ben Mullinkosson, and pitched him the idea for what would become Serious People, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this week and is seeking distribution. Blurring the line between documentary and mockumentary, the film stars Gutierrez as a heightened version of himself who gets a job offer he can't refuse: directing a music video for a hotly anticipated Drake song. The only catch is that the video needs to be shot on the same day his pregnant wife, Christine (played by his real pregnant wife), is expected to deliver.

He first asks his directing partner (played by his real-life directing partner, RJ Sanchez) to do the job solo, but when Drake's team insists on hiring them as a duo, Gutierrez comes up with the wild idea of hiring a lookalike to stand in for himself on the shoot. Since Drake and his team have never seen him in person, Gutierrez figures no one will notice. Plus, he argues, Sanchez can easily do the job himself. The doppelgänger just needs to look the part and learn some basic lingo. And if Drake asks him any questions, all he needs to say is, "It's gonna be a movie."

Miguel Huerta, an aspiring actor and part-time security guard, plays Gutierrez’s double. In the film, he lands the job after beating out his fellow Craigslist doppelgängers in an audition and quickly forms a bond with Gutierrez, who thinks he has what it takes to be a real director one day. But Sanchez, who has been against his partner's scheme from the beginning, quickly clashes with Huerta, seeing him as a loose cannon capable of destroying their reputations.

While much of the cast, including Huerta, plays heightened versions of their real-life selves, if you look closely, one character stands out as an imposter: Drake. Initially, Gutierrez considered tapping into his connections in the music industry to cast a real artist in the part. "Ultimately, it was a creative decision," he says of landing on a lookalike to play the "God's Plan" rapper. "What we were talking about was, if we bring in X, Y, or Z artist and it's actually them, then suddenly the film becomes more about them, or that becomes the thing that people see."

Instead, he and Mullinkosson chose a double to play an artist they felt epitomizes the idea of a music icon. "He's so humongous that he can, in my opinion, represent the industry," Gutierrez explains. "He's so big that literally there are people that impersonate him online." (Funnily enough, the actor they cast to play Drake actually participated in a recent Drake lookalike contest, where the rapper awarded a $10,000 prize to the winner.)

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As for whether the Canadian superstar is aware he's a character in the film, Gutierrez says not yet, but he's hopeful he'll see it one day and appreciate the homage. "We would love for him to watch the film. We're very excited about that. I hope he watches it. I hope he enjoys it and gets a laugh out of it."

"We're really big Drake fans and excited for him to see this, and I think he can appreciate our criticism of the music video industry and the film industry in general, which we love," Mullinkosson adds. "When audiences watch this, we hope they will recognize that it's not actually Drake; it's a doppelgänger of Drake, just like how Miguel is a doppelgänger of Pasqual. It's like this uncanny valley of what's real and this meta element, and it's all a commentary on the replaceability of people in this industry."

That "uncanny valley" feel even extends to the music behind the music video. Throughout the film, we hear snippets of this new Drake song — and if you didn't know better, you might think what you're hearing is really Drake's voice. In fact, the song was created "completely from scratch" by a composer who did the on-set sound mixing and recording for the film. To mirror Drake's distinctive vocal style, Gutierrez says the composer "was filtering his voice a lot, but he was also practicing his cadence and his delivery and the whole thing. I mean, it was pretty wild. He was really going for it."

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Without spoiling too much, suffice it to say Gutierrez's plan doesn't exactly pan out, but in real life, things are looking up. He and Christine welcomed their baby girl, Echo, a year ago next week, and, in small part, thanks to the film, his anxiety over his work-life balance issues is abating. Asked if he feels starring and directing Serious People was almost a form of therapy, he agrees "a hundred percent."

"I really wanted to have these sit-downs, but it was difficult to do so," he explains. "But when it was wrapped in this facade of a semi-fictional film, it almost allowed us to have these therapeutic conversations."

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While the film provided a safe outlet to have tough talks, its central issue, the seeming impossibility of maintaining a work-life balance in a creative industry, remains a near-insurmountable obstacle for many would-be filmmakers. "Our industry is very sought after and very competitive," Mullinkosson notes. "If Pasqual ever said no to a Drake video as a director, there would be another director readily available."

But with a year of fatherhood now under his belt, Gutierrez is finding that his concept of a work-life balance has evolved. "A lot of the trepidation that my character has in Serious People, a lot of the things that I was nervous about, they did happen," he admits with a laugh.

"But when you have a little one…your life changes in such beautiful, giant ways, and it becomes difficult to remember the time when getting up and going for coffee and all those things were part of importance," he says. "It feels so far away, and it hasn't even been a year."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly