THE SECRET ART OF HUMAN FLIGHT – Pam Grady interviews H.P. Mendoza, Grant Rosenmeyer and Paul Raci (exclusive)

A work for hire turns personal as director H.P. Mendoza and actors Grant Rosenmeyer and Paul Raci unlock the secrets behind The Secret Art of Human Flight.

There are special effects in H.P. Mendoza’s The Secret Art of Human Flight, opening in theaters on July 5, but when pigeons land on star (and lead producer) Grant Rosenmeyer’s head, it is the real deal. The actor laughs and shudders at the same time, remembering his up close and personal encounter with rats with wings.

“Those frickin’ birds!” Rosenmeyer exclaims in a recent video call with director Mendoza and costar Paul Raci. “I had claw marks. You can actually see that. At one point, the talons were sinking into my head. It was awful. I don’t advise, ever. I had to go on a roof. I was in a coffin. I had spiders crawling on me. The birds were the worst.”

“It literally went on his head,” Mendoza adds. “Out of respect for Grant, I made sure that didn’t go in the deleted scenes. That’s the part of acting that I don’t envy – you end up being a total shithead.”

What made the bird, the roof, and the rest endurable for Rosenmeyer was the strength of Jesse Orenshein’s screenplay that captivated him the first time he read it. Poignant and funny, The Secret Art of Human Flight is the story of Ben Grady (Rosenmeyer) whose wife, a children’s book writer, Sarah (Reina Hardesty) dies of anaphylactic shock. Inconsolable in his grief, he pushes his sister Gloria (Lucy DeVito) and her partner Tom (Nican Robinson) away. Instead, he reaches out to the web, finding online a manual that promises to reveal the titular secret. The pamphlet does not arrive alone. Its author, Mealworm (Raci), a kind of hippie guru who may or may not be a grifter, enters Ben’s life. He promises that if Ben follows the steps he’s laid out – including getting birds to land on his head – Ben will be able to fly.

Rosenmeyer read the script for the first time on a plane. It was during COVID, so the airline maintained space between passengers for safety. He had the entire row to himself as the story made him laugh and cry out loud. He read it again and reacted the same way.

“The same moments got me again. It’s so rare to get a good piece of material like that, where it’s everything. It’s the characters. It’s the story. It’s the moral of the story. It just found me when I needed it,” he says. “I just thought to myself if every time I set out to do something, if I can make people feel something, if I can give something to people that maybe they didn’t even know they needed, I just wanted this movie to exist for whoever needed it.”

The actor decided that The Secret Art of Human Flight would be the second film he would produce under his Florida Hill Entertainment production company. The first was Richard Wong’s 2019 comedy drama Come As You Are. And now as he sought a director, he turned to another of Wong’s collaborators, Mendoza, who wrote the screenplay and music and starred in the director’s first feature, Colma: The Musical (2006), before going on to forge his own writing/directing career with Fruit Fly (2012), I Am a Ghost (2012), Bitter Melon (2018), and Attack, Decay, Release (2021).

“I needed a director who could really make people feel,” Rosenmeyer says. “It was the films and then our conversations that made it so obvious to me that this was the guy who could make me feel whatever we needed to be feeling, regardless of genre or tone. I just wanted to make an H.P. Mendoza movie. As a fan, I wanted to go on that ride with him. I’m always looking for a filmmaker who can take me on that ride and unearth things from me that I didn’t know I could do.”

For Mendoza, The Secret Art of Human Flight initially seemed like it might be a nice escape from the personal work that comprises his oeuvre, particularly from Bitter Melon, a semi-autobiographical drama about a Filipino American gay man who returns home for Christmas and finds himself sucked back into a family situation long marked by domestic violence. This new work would also take the San Francisco native away from the hometown where he’d forged his career, clear across country to Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Although Jesse Orenshein wrote the screenplay, over time The Secret Art of Human Flight became unmistakably an H.P. Mendoza film.

“It happened so organically, everybody involved was like, ‘Dude, make this yours,’” Mendoza says.

“What’s funny is I never really thought I need to see anything of mine to be seen as mine but when people start saying, ‘I see your stamp all over this,’ I get really emotional, like ‘Good, that means I have a personality.’ Even more importantly, I feel okay, well that means I have an impact. I think that’s one thing that will always mean something to me because, you know, I’d like to be able to do things my own way. I don’t ever want to feel like I’m just a cog that can be replaced, and I think every one of us on this set felt the same way.”

The Secret Art of Human Flight is a project that Oscar nominee Raci felt strongly enough about that he came on board as an executive producer as well as star. Mealworm is a slippery character, one that even Ben looks askance while still following his wacky instructions. But whether he is on the level or not, Mealworm’s empathy is unmistakable.

“What do you consider success and what do you consider failure in the competitive world we’re living in?” Raci says. “There are ups and downs and something may seem impossible but if you’ve got some heart, you can never give up. My whole career is based on never giving up to get to my late success in Sound of Metal. I still get emails from people saying that’s inspirational to them because they don’t want to give up, they want to keep being an actor. Even if you’re getting that pearl of wisdom from a bullshitter like Mealworm, he’s still looking for an answer himself, and he’s hoping maybe if I can’t do it, this guy can. You got to prove it to me. We’ve got to prove it together. That, to me, is very poignant.”

In helming his first ever adaptation, Mendoza had another revelation besides the reveal that there is no escape for him from personal filmmaking, and that is about the nature of creation. “I kind of feel like this was the realization that everything I do will only ever be an adaptation of something else,” he says. “You know I think about Attack, Decay, Release [a sci-fi hybrid triptych starring Mendoza and his husband Mark Del Lima as astronauts navigating a fraught, post-pandemic world], how much of that was based on Japanese folklore? How much based on Popular Mechanics from the ‘50s? How much of that was based on ‘70s sci-fi? Everything I do is going to be like an act of synthesis. When someone tells me they watched The Secret Art of Human Flight and says that they could see my fingerprints all over it, when I watch it, I can see Paul’s fingerprints on it. I can see Grant’s fingerprints on it. It just kind of makes me feel like this thing that we’re all seeking, which is connection, really exists and that we are making all this stuff together.”