Dark Night of the Jules

Feeling trapped in America, Jules travels to a foreign land. An existential comedy about tourism — and difficult software.

  • Mike Lars White
    Director
    Düsseldorf, How to Fire Someone (with Jules and Jonas)
  • Mike Lars White
    Writer
    Düsseldorf, How to Fire Someone (with Jules and Jonas)
  • Lanie Lim
    Writer
    Düsseldorf, How to Fire Someone (with Jules and Jonas), Casual, The Thundermans
  • Aleksander Nowacki
    Writer
  • Michael James Wong
    Writer
    Düsseldorf, How to Fire Someone (with Jules and Jonas), The Hard Times of RJ Berger
  • Mike Lars White
    Producer
  • Lanie Lim
    Key Cast
    "Jules"
    Düsseldorf, How to Fire Someone (with Jules and Jonas), Casual, The Thundermans
  • Michael James Wong
    Key Cast
    "Jonas"
    Düsseldorf, How to Fire Someone (with Jules and Jonas), The Hard Times of RJ Berger
  • Aleksander Nowacki
    Key Cast
    "Man on Bench"
  • Paavo Hanninen
    Editor
    What Remains (Short of the Week), I Think I'm Dying (Short of the Week), Ghost Girl (Short of the Week)
  • Masha Lyass
    Production Designer
  • Stef Angel
    Music Supervisor
  • Tuti Rodrigues
    Drum Score
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Genres:
    Comedy, Drama, Travel
  • Runtime:
    5 minutes 44 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    April 15, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    9,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    France, United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Mike Lars White

Mike Lars White is a Minnesota-born director and writer whose comedic voice rose out of trying to make Polish art school graduates laugh. His work has been featured in Vulture, Directors Notes, and NoBudge, and has screened internationally at festivals including Fantastic Fest, Flickerfest, Maryland Film Festival, Hollyshorts, Atlanta Film Festival, and Seattle International Film Festival. His work as an advertising copywriter in Warsaw, Poland (where he lived for five years) has been recognized by the Clios, Cannes Lions, and The One Show. DARK NIGHT OF THE JULES is his third collaboration with actors Lanie Lim and Michael James Wong, who he met at a Groundlings improv class in 2017. Their "Jules and Jonas" short films have been featured in Vulture, NoBudge, Fantastic Fest, Maryland Film Festival, Flickerfest, and Indie Memphis, among others, and their first short "How to Fire Someone (with Jules and Jonas)" won the Audience Choice award for Fiction Short Film at Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. The three are currently in pre-production on a Jules and Jonas feature film—a conspiracy thriller that satirizes big business.

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Director Statement

DARK NIGHT OF THE JULES is our third short film using the Jules and Jonas characters played by Lanie Lim and Michael James Wong. What excited me about this project, besides getting the chance to shoot in a foreign country, was the idea of exploring a new dimension of the Jules character – created and performed by Lanie Lim – where this ordinarily outrageous, boisterous, over-confident character is now going through a very interior existential crisis.

We shot most of “Dark Night of the Jules” in Marseille, France when one of our other short films, “How to Fire Someone (with Jules and Jonas),” was invited to a film festival there last October. Because Michael Wong (“Jonas”) couldn’t make it to the festival due to work commitments, we built a story around the Jules character having a sudden need to escape America—something that draws a bit from my own life experience, as my first office job out of college was especially bleak and I ended up leaving America to live in Europe for seven years.

At the heart of the film is a cameo appearance by an old friend of mine who was once my newspaper editor when I lived in Warsaw, Poland and who performs with an experimental theater group there. For his scene, we tapped into a real problem he was having with a PDF, something I hope resonates with anyone who has ever had issues with Acrobat Reader...

Making these shorts with Lanie and Michael has always been about a voyage of discovery, finding what’s funny and what’s true, and listening to what the story wants to be rather than going in with an agenda or pre-conceived notion. This time, I think the film that we discovered offers the flipside view of international travel, an activity that everyone claims to love and is assumed to be a universally healthy cure-all. Yes, travel is romantic and fun and interesting and exciting, but we’re already bombarded with those marketing points. It can also be banal, which can be really funny, and interesting for other reasons. In this particular case, I think it’s mostly about Jules, and how the meaning of a landscape is determined by the eyes seeing it.