HippoPress -- The Hippo -- Guide to Manchester and Nashua NH

Between them, Gregg Kavet and Andy Robin worked on 12 Seinfeld episodes. Now they are opening a new film across New England on March 30 that they wrote and directed. Called Live Free or Die, it chronicles the adventures of John “Rugged” Rudgate, a petty criminal who fancies himself a real tough guy living in small-town New Hampshire. It will play locally at the Regal Hoyts Cinema 9, 1279 South Willow St., Manchester, and has been making the rounds at film festivals, winning two awards so far.

Q: Do a lot of people recognize the title as the motto of New Hampshire?
Kavet: You know, it’s funny, it gets a very different reaction depending where we show it. In Seattle and Austin, both of which we had a very enthusiastic response, despite people really liking it, I don’t think they had the same feel for what New Hampshire is and what the title means and how familiar that is in New England the same way we got at the Newport [R.I.] film festival. They just would laugh at different things, and they responded a little bit more to the specific location of the film.

Do you think the film portrays New Hampshire and its residents accurately?
Kavet: It’s not really going for realism. I mean, it’s a comedy and the biggest overall condition of the characters is that they’re all stupid. That’s something we enjoy writing and something we’ve done in other settings, so I think that’s more our taste than any reflection of the locale. On the other hand, the locale played a lot into the feeling and tone of the film, the sense of winter coming on and the sense of being in a small town in New Hampshire is very much a northern New England kind of feel. The attitude of our main character, who’s kind of a guy who’s in a sense really insecure and really trying to project a much bigger and more forceful person than he is, for us it represents New Hampshire ... the reason we picked the title is, it’s just such a strident motto, it’s so in your face.

Were there any people that inspired your main character?
Kavet: Yeah, we both grew up in New England. I grew up in Massachusetts and Andy grew up in Connecticut, and we both spent a lot of time in Vermont and New Hampshire. We both had these stories about growing up in little towns and the people we interacted with. I guess no character’s really any one of them, but all the stories in there, or a good number of them, are things that actually happened to us.

How is it different writing a movie rather than writing for TV?
Kavet: The biggest thing is that in TV, especially when we came on Seinfeld, it’s characters that you see every week, that you’re spending hundreds of hours on character development, and they’re established in people’s minds. For us, it’s very much thinking about a quick, interesting, interconnected story that plays off these characters who are already there. The big difference with a movie is, it’s people that nobody knows, and you have to show their personality in a much more complicated story, just because of the length of it.
Robin: Lots of shows strive to have their characters learn lessons in the course of half an hour, 22 minutes. That’s something we avoided at Seinfeld. It felt forced and phony and seemed like it wasn’t in line with the philosophy of the show’s creators ... When you’re writing something that’s 90 minutes long or longer, it becomes harder to avoid character development.

Did each of you have different roles in writing the movie?
Kavet: We’ve always written pretty much together. Some writing teams do split up stuff, but we’ve never really done that. Usually when we’re writing well, we’re sitting across the table or over the phone yelling at each other a lot.
Robin: We’ve tried swapping scenes and then editing each other’s work. We’ve tried writing every other word — Gregg’ll say a word and then I’ll say a word. Or one guy does punctuation, the other guy does words.

You guys filmed in Claremont, right?
Robin: We filmed in Claremont probably 95 percent; we did one or two scenes across the border in Windsor, Vt. Claremont was great. It was kind of the perfect town for us. Lots of broken-down stuff, really helpful townspeople. We had a location guy that we hired who honestly I think knew every single person in town and was best friends with them. He could get us in anywhere. We found one house that we used for Rugged’s house. It was a house that there was some kind of property dispute off the tax bill and the people had essentially fled. We couldn’t track them down, but Nick managed to find them and get them to sign over the rights to the house so we could shoot there.