9 Qs With Adam McKay and Neal Brennan
Take the guy behind Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, pair him up with the co-creator of Chappelle’s Show, throw in a hefty dose of Entourage star Jeremy Piven and what do you get? A damn fine recipe for comedy, that’s what. It’s called The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, and it’s barging its way into theaters this week to cram a fistful of hard-R laughs down the throat of a mirth-starved nation.
Yesterday we caught up with The Goods director Neal Brennan and producer Adam McKay for an exclusive chat in which we discussed the finer points of casting sympathetic bigots, dressing up Will Ferrell as Abraham Lincoln, and turning James Brolin into a gay sexual predator. We also got some choice tidbits on Anchorman 2, The Other Guys and the return of Eastbound & Down:
This movie doesn’t waste a whole lot of time with such superfluous elements like setup or character development. Neal, is that a product of your sketch comedy days?
Neal Brennan: Adam actually had to make me put time back in the movie. I’m such a sketch guy. It’s counterintuitive, but you actually can take your time more with a movie than you can with sketch. Sketch is just like, “Go, go, go. Joke, joke, joke.” Whereas with this, it’s like, “Take your time. Go with an establishing shot.” ... So as fast as it begins, to me it starts at just the right [pace]. At no point was I like, “Hey, maybe we should wait a couple of minutes before Napier calls the lady a bitch.”
Adam McKay: He actually presented a cut movie that was four minutes and 50 seconds at one point and told us it could play after “Update.” It’s back way up from that point.
NB: Yeah, they put 85 minutes back into it. I was not allowed on the lot or anything. But man, you gotta come by my hotel room and see that four-minute version.
Virtually every salesman in The Goods’ ensemble exhibits some sort of reprehensible trait. Charles Napier’s character is a bigot, Kathryn Hahn’s character is an aspiring statutory rapist, etc. What’s the secret of making these folks likable?
NB: I think a lot of that has to do with the people playing them. I think me and Adam both like warm people to be on camera ... and also, their jobs stink. They’re always on the road. As much as they’re trying to rip people off, they’re sort of in a weird way trying to help them. They’re trying to help the dealers, the people that own the dealership ... so I think that’s relatable.
AM: I think also that, always, the best comedy has unlikable characters. If you look at, on paper, any of the characters Ferrell has played, they’re all pretty lousy people. But that’s also the trick of it. People are more complicated than just a likable character and an unlikable character; everyone has crappy traits and great traits.
The great James Brolin has one of the more memorable performances as a closeted family patriarch who makes a particularly aggressive play for David Koechner’s character. Was he game for that from the beginning? He seemed to be having a good time in the role.
NB: He was very game. In fact, he wanted to play it way gayer, and we had to kind of reign him in a little bit.
AM: I was impressed with him. He really got the joke. He came in getting the joke. Because the only way to do it is to get it. I think it’s some of the funniest stuff in the movie.
NB: I just hope that all of our NAMBLA pop-up ads pay off. We did a huge buy on the NAMBLA website, and I just hope that people will take the time to go to our website and get into this movie.
Will Ferrell enjoys a funny cameo in The Goods as a Lincoln impersonator who attempts to skydive onto a used car lot. Adam, is there a process for determining when and how Will appears in movies you guys produce?
AM: Well, what happened here was that we had the script by Stock and Stempson. Chris Henchy and I did a big re-write on it, and Will read it and loved it ... it happened very organically. He was just like, “I wanna do something in this. I really like this script a lot.” And that was a very natural cameo. We sort of expanded it a little bit once we knew he was gonna do it. I dare say I think it’s one of the funniest cameos he’s done.
Adam, news surfaced recently about a possible sequel to Anchorman. Is that for real?
AM: That is real. We actually have an idea. We’ve figured out what we want to do. Now it’s all about scheduling, because there’s a lot of actors to bring together. Obviously Will and I are doing this new movie The Other Guys with [Mark] Wahlberg ... the drag of it is that it takes so long to make movies that it’s probably, realistically speaking, like two-and-a-half years off. But we have it, we’re excited about it, and we have kind of a crazy idea. It is going to happen. The good thing is that his character ... he can’t really age out of that character. If Will was 50 and he did it, it would still work. And everything else would kind of play. So in that sense, there’s not such a rush.
NB: Isn’t Burgundy like 50 anyway?
AM: Yeah. Well, the joke about Burgundy is that he was 50 when he was 10 ... I don’t know if Burgundy was 50 in Anchorman, but he was definitely over 40 and in that range. You know, Tom Brokaw was never young.
Will it still be set in the '70s?
AM: I don’t want to give too much away on it. We have kind of a specific idea on that as well. All I can tell you is, it’s an aggressive idea. You sort of know coming into it there’s no way it’s gonna be as good as the first one.
NB: I bet it can be weirder.
AM: That’s kind of our take. It’s like, if we’re gonna do it, you know you’re gonna get the “letdown” response. So we’re just gonna make it ... the idea we have is so kinda strange and aggressive that people can call it a letdown, but it won’t be boring, that’s for sure.
There isn’t a whole lot of information out there on The Other Guys beyond a few loglines describing it vaguely as a “buddy cop comedy.” What’s it about?
AM: Basically, the premise is: There’s the star cops of New York City, like kind of iconic, Bruce Willis-type cops who rule the town and get into all the car chases and get all the girls. This is the story of the guys in the desk next to them. We’re in the middle of re-writing it right now and we’re out in New York and we’re casting. I’m excited. It’s the first kind of post-Madoff crime movie. Suddenly stealing like a million dollars or selling a million dollars in drugs means like nothing when a guy stole $70 billion.
Can you update us on the status of the HBO show Eastbound & Down? Will there be a second season?
AM: We got picked up for a second season. The scripts are being written. They’re talking about shooting and starting to roll film in January or February, and we’ve already talked with Danny [McBride] and Jody [Hill] and they have a crazy story arc for this season. As a fan of the show, I can’t wait.
Its status seemed iffy for a while.
AM: I guess HBO did a giant “War in the Pacific” mini-series that cost like a fortune and there was a little moment where they literally had no money. And even though the show had become kind of a cult hit, there was an issue of whether they could actually afford to do it. But it kept doing well on DVR and DVD sales, so they were like, “All right, we gotta make this happen.” So we’re gonna do eight episodes for the second season, which is great because I felt like six was too few.
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard opens Friday, August 14, 2009.
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Photo(s) by Paramount Vantage- © 2009- All Rights Reserved