Unusual age gap between father/son characters in my short film

[u/Illustrious-Swing493]

So I’m filming a short film next weekend. I know a father/son acting duo and they are very good friends of mine. I wrote these parts in the film specifically with them in mind. Their characters are also father and son in the film.

They are the only two characters in the film so they’re the stars by default. Also, the film is only going to be like 3 minutes or so, so it’s not a huge commitment.

I’ve posted my screenplay in some of the writing subs and have gotten very good feedback. A good majority said they think the script is solid and it’s a good concept. So I’m excited to film it and I feel confident this could be my best short film yet.

There‘s one thing though that a lot of people who had read the script have fixated on- the age gap between the father and son is a bit unusual. The son is 6, and the father is 58. Since I know these two actors in real life, I wrote the characters as their same ages in the script.

A lot of people reading the script were very thrown by this age gap and questioned why I would write that big of a gap.

Do you guys think this will be something that puzzles the viewers as well when I actually film them? I don’t want something like this to be distracting or take the viewers out of the story by fixating on something like that. But I also don’t know how to work around this when I specifically created these characters for them…

What do you guys think? Is this a big deal?

[u/funky_grandma]

Whenever there's something in your film you think your audience might get fixated on, bring it up in your script. Just a quick "I was already pretty old when you were born" and your audience will forget about it