Feature Interview
When director David Wain had a chance to team up again with actor-comedian Paul Rudd on a new project, he did not hesitate. The pair who had previously collaborated on The Ten and Wet Hot American Summer were both eager to develop the comedy about two guys who need to grow up. Role Models stars Paul Rudd and Sean William Scott as two slackers who have no other choice but to enroll in a Big-brother type program. Through the program, they have to look after two younger kids (Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Bobby E. Thomson).
Even though the two leads were attached to the project from the beginning, casting the pair of kids did not come easy, Wain says. Bobby E Thomson was so brilliant during the audition that he quickly became an obvious call for Wain. His experience as a protégé comedian and his skill for comedy improvisation clearly made the difference. As for Chris Mintz-Plasse, Wains admits he looked around for a long time and could not find a child that would feel both ‘real and funny'. A screening of Superbad was all it took to convince him that the actor then known as Mac lovin was exactly what he was looking for.
The director was particularly drawn to the story of these two characters ‘who took an interest in a child's life more than their own life.' Wain, a new father, is dealing with that reality himself and can clearly relate to these characters and their emotional journey. Wain joined forces with actor Ken Marino and Paul Rudd on the writing of the script.
Q: What's the genesis of this project? How did it start?
A: The project had been in development with many different studios and sort of bounced around town for a little while. Paul and Sean had been a part of it, then Paul Rudd wrote his own draft of the script because Universal liked his ideas and I came on after that. But at that point, Paul, Ken Marino and I, the three of us had worked together on a lot projects in the past and shared a real comedic sensibility. We stripped the script back to its bare bones and rebuilt it again. We wrote the story and the characters and the script that are in the final film.
Q: Why is now a good time for this type of films?
A: There are cycles. I don't think that it's necessarily the times or what's going on politically; I would say that movies go in cycles. There are huge hits like The 40 Year Old Virgin and it starts to swing things, it becomes a little trend and suddenly a lot more studios are backing that kind of movies until the audience gets tired of it and they move on to something else. Those larger trends, I don't know much about. I made my one movie.
Q: These two archetypes in the movie: the immature guy and the one who has no self confidence, is that a trend as well ?
A: Certainly, there has been a lot of movies in the last few years that have used that model. But I think it's pretty time honored thing for comedy going back to Stripes, where you got the guys that need to grow up and then they do. People in Hollywood can always relate to that. People will always write characters that have a missing piece of their maturity that they need to find.
Q: So, people in Hollywood are not growing up?
A: I hate to be the bearer of bad news but YES. That is the case.
Q: Is there a line not to cross? R rated comedies go pretty far these days.
A: We do go pretty far in Role Models, but we could have gone way further. I don't know if anyone saw my last movie, The Ten, but it went way, way further in many ways. Every movie has its own line and every scene within every movie has its own line. One of the biggest job as a director is to keep an eye on that. You can never fully know where you are until you are editing, even until you're showing your film to the audience. So it's very important to shoot alternate levels of things. You don't want to go too far with things, too dirty or too grouchy, or crude but you also don't want to go too sacral or sentimental. Finding that line in between, that's the whole game, really.
Q: How do you do with kids? You have a 10 year old kid in the movie that's dealing with crude terminology. Do parents have to approve of the script?
A: It's definitely something that we did not take for granted. We have to be sensitive about it. We talked to the parents. We talked to the teacher on set that actually has a state-ordained power to say yes or no to certain lines and what the kids hear and what they say. Now, in our movie there is a lot of improvisation. Bobby improvised a lot and that's a big part of what's there too. In the editing, there are lines that we wrote that seemed OK at the time but maybe we were too over the top in terms of context and in terms of editing, so we cut them out.
Q: In the scene in which they go to the party, the kid is exposed to very explicit lines. Is it OK for ten year old?
A: I don't think that's at all unusual. I'm almost forty and when I was ten that's how I talked. I went to summer camp.
Q: Really at ten?
A: I grew up in Ohio , in the suburbs. But I am not saying that all kids talk like that. These are two kids that we created and they act a certain way. One kid lives in a fantasy world and the other kid has a defense that in part is about his language. I make no presumption to be making any sort of statement about anything or any observations such as this is what kids are like, or this is what life is like. These are just two kids and that's what they're like. They're both heightened a little bit, for comedy. Arguably, someone might be offended but that's fine. I'm not going to try to change anyone's mind about that.
Q: Can you talk about the casting process?
A: In the case of Bobby's character, he was such a one-of-a-kind. What eleven year old has been doing stand ups for six years already? And he'd already been in dozens of TV shows and movies. He was so polished and so funny and so skilled. He came to the audition and blew the roof off and was improvising. Most of what he did he improvised. So we got so lucky to have him. Had we not gotten him, I don't know what we would have done. As far as Chris Mintzen-Plasse, that was a character, we really had trouble finding the kid. We looked all around the country. We couldn't find a kid that felt both real and funny. And then I saw Superbad and I was like “There he is.”
Q: Casting wise, Paul and Sean have totally different approaches to comedy. Paul is a little more dry, Sean has more electricity, it's very mischievous especially when he plays with that smile, like he can get away with everything. How do you play off those two types actors ?
A: You kind of already answered the question…We basically wholeheartedly embraced their differences and the very different places they were coming from. Paul had that much more …verbal… totally different approach to it. And the persona on screen is so different in that way. And we made every effort to fully embrace both of them, putting them together and watching it clash. That's the relationship between Danny and Wheeler and some of the funniest parts for me are when they have so much of a disconnect with each other. You're watching these two guys who are trying to understand what each other is doing. I was very happy to see that we were able to use that difference instead of trying to shy away from it.
Q: Sean was telling us that he was nervous about the naked scene, did you put him as ease or did you exploit that to make it more humorous?
A: When a character is supposed to be nervous, because he is naked or in a sex scene, then you can use the actor's nervousness, but in this particular scene, the character wasn't nervous at all. He was confidently marching around and telling that story to the Martin character. So, it was important for me to do anything I could to make him not nervous and confident and not thinking about it at all and not self-conscious. So we made sure to schedule it so we gave him enough time to know exactly what it's going to happen, where the camera's going to be, and how the lighting is going to look; when someone is naked they're going to feel vulnerable so you just want to make sure that he is comfortable. He has nothing to worry about. He has a great body.
Q: The Jane Lynch character was fantastic, was she improvising a lot?
A: She was. She comes from a second city background and she has been in all those Judd Appatow films. She is one of the very top masters of improvisation comedy on film. It would have been crazy of us not to let her go off. And we totally did. And we were also inspired just by the idea of her and it helped us to write a funny character. And then, once we had it on the page, we encouraged her to throw it away. We had to cut some takes because people were laughing.
Q: Was the hot dog thing her idea?
A: It was originally Ken Marino's idea and then it was my idea on set when I saw the prop. On the last take, late at night, we were all tired and I'm like “Just do one more but do this and push it out” and she was like “OK, Boss, whatever you say.” Nobody realized that it would be used in the film.
|
