“He definitely wasn’t thinking I’m gonna breed directors,” Benny says. “He was thinking, I need to cover up the bad stuff with this amazing stuff, so that they’ll remember the amazing stuff.”



“Everything was full volume all the time,” Josh adds. “The records, the TVs, the amps. Everything was turned all the way up all the time.”



In high school, the brothers drifted apart. “I was gonna be a physicist,” Benny says. “I became obsessed with dark matter, and what happened before the Big Bang. I was like, ‘How can you define existence if you don’t know what happened in the beginning?’ It got to a point where I was like, ‘I’m gonna figure this out.’”



Meanwhile, Josh was developing habits that would serve him so well later as a filmmaker — namely, befriending interesting strangers. “I met this women at some thrift store and she was way older and kind of androgynous,” Josh recalls. “She was like ‘We should hang out’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, cool, whatever.’” Through her he met all kinds of characters, hopped-up twentysomethings who called themselves artists and showed him victimless ways to steal luxury cars for joyrides. “I would like, go out all night with these strange people.”



By their late teens, they came back together. Josh was already tinkering with shooting videos, and he needed an editor. “iMovie had just come out,” Josh says, of the first time he commandeered his little brother’s abilities. “Benny had always been much better than me at computers.” They’d go on to shoot QuickTime videos, strange bits, and post them online in the days when having a well-trafficked video meant paying extra for your website’s taxed bandwidth. They were working through how to work together, sussing out what each brought to the relationship.



“Benny’s a very solid thinker,” Ronnie says. “He takes his time to form opinions and then he locks those in and it becomes very hard to body check him out of those. Josh is like, constantly taking in the world faster than he can digest it and constantly shitting it out. No project ever really begins or ends. It’s like jumping on an escalator that’s constantly going to infinity.”

You can see the juxtaposition in their personal aesthetics. On the day I meet them, Benny’s in sensible slacks and a dress shirt, his hair trimmed neatly; Josh is in Ben Davis work pants and a thin gold chain on one wrist, his hair longer and wilder. You can immediately tell they’ve spent a lifetime together, too. Josh can be a voluminous talker, and it’s hard for Benny to break in sometimes. But he has years of training in waiting for an opening: Benny never gives up the thought he was trying to communicate.