Bob Odenkirk has never lacked an unmistakable comedic voice, but he'll admit that he's struggled to find the right place for it since he and David Cross finished with the sketch comedy of Mr. Show. It's been a treat whenever Odenkirk has popped up at all over the past nine years; he's taken small parts in TV shows and movies, directed several films that didn't satisfy him or his audience, and successfully mentored Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the creators of Tom Goes To The Mayor and the new Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Odenkirk recently told The A.V. Club why he thinks he's ready to rally with projects like Derek & Simon, a new series debuting May 16 on superdeluxe.com, and The Brothers Solomon, a film due for a fall release.
The A.V. Club: You said Derek & Simon is the thing you've enjoyed the most since Mr. Show. Why?
Bob Odenkirk: I think I know it really well. I'm writing it with them. There's a confidence to it. It's kind of new and fresh, and it's very silly and fun. It's what I want to be doing. I've made a couple movies, and they're very hard and long, long processes, and I didn't write any of them. It's very hard to get through that stuff sometimes. As much as you're doing your best, you're just wondering what you're doing. But with this, I know what I'm doing. I know that it's funny, it's making me laugh, I'm proud of it. I think the guys are great.
AVC: Since you've got such a writing background, it seems like it'd be pretty hard to get used to directing something you didn't write.
BO: Well, when I worked at Saturday Night Live and on Mr. Show, I worked with a lot of material that other people wrote, and I helped people develop pieces that they wrote, so I've looked at directing films that I didn't write in a similar way. "Look, I think I get your idea here, is this what you're going for? Well, I'll try to do that. I think I know how to do that." The problem is that when you're talking about sketches, it doesn't take so long to do, and it isn't so much pressure, and whether you fall short or not, you finish up and hope the writers are happy. That's how I feel about it. With a feature, to find yourself working as hard as you work and going under the stress you go through, and then going, "I didn't even write that, I'm only trying to help this be good. It's not necessarily something I would have done."
Obviously, if I had my way, I would've spent the last few years of my life doing a Mr. Show sketch movie, and doing my adaptation of The Fuck Up, or my movie [Kanan Rhodes: Unkillable Servant Of Justice] that I wrote with Scott [Aukerman] and BJ [Porter] and all that stuff. But to make my way into the feature-directing world, I have to make it any way I can. The first film I made was called Melvin Goes To Dinner, and it was a small movie that I co-financed that Mike Blieden had written, and I had a really good idea of how to shoot it, and had a great experience doing that. Still, again, nothing measures up to Mr. Show, even though I'm very proud of that and think I did a great job.
But in a lot of ways, I felt like I took someone else's vision and helped them to make it happen in a really strong way. And then I made two films that other people financed that they were auditioning people to direct, and I got those jobs: Let's Go To Prison and The Brothers Solomon, which comes out in September. I've gotten a lot out of those. To me, they're like film school—learning about running a set, learning about everything, and learning about the most important thing, which is dealing with the studios and the producers and the money people, and making a project go, and what makes something go for the business end of it, so that you can get to make the movies that you write.
AVC: So you're still learning to control the process.
BO: Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to features, if I have to do one to just make a living, I'll do it, but if I don't, I'm gonna try to do TV until I can find a movie that I think is extremely good. Either written by someone else or written by me, where I just really believe in it as much as I believed in Mr. Show or anything. I've done my service now. I've done my learning.
AVC: Why do you think it's been hard for you to find an experience as satisfying as Mr. Show?
BO: It took me a long time to learn how to do sketch comedy, too. [Laughs.] I think I'm a slow learner. You should've seen the first sketches I wrote in Chicago, and the first sketches I wrote at Saturday Night Live. I've actually done with movies something I did when I was at Saturday Night Live. A few weeks into working at Saturday Night Live, I took out a sheet of paper and I wrote down, and I don't remember the list, but I wrote down, "use the women, something that was in the news, use the host, one set"—a list of things that, if you do them, you have a good chance of getting something on the show. And that, of course, killed creativity for about two years. [Laughs.] You start going, "Well, that doesn't do this, well, that won't fit that." But in the course of staying there a long time, your brain gets re-wired so that you start to just naturally mutate your instincts and your ideas into things that fit into that world.
By the end, I was a more effective writer, and I was getting things on, and I'd learned a lot, and it wasn't this tortuous process of "How do I twist my sensibilities to fit this venue?" And I think the same thing is happening with movies. It's just like going, "Oh, right. There comes a point where they have to make a poster and they have to have this kind of idea to do it, and they have to know…" There's just so many levels of things you've got to think about fulfilling to get a movie made.
I learn things in a backward way. I learn all those limitations, and slowly my brain soaks them up, and if things go right, you just, in an organic way, translate your ideas into those templates. That's the way I perceive the process happening. It's not without precedent. I love that people give me so much credit for Mr. Show. I did Mr. Show when I was 31. I'd [already] done The Ben Stiller Show and Saturday Night Live and shitloads of sketches back to when I was 18. I never thought about the real mechanics of features until about 10 years ago. I love sketch comedy so much that it's all I wanted to do.
AVC: You worked with several of the same people on Let's Go To Prison and The Brothers Solomon. Did that help with this learning process?
BO: No, I just like those guys. I think they're all good actors, I think they were all fantastic in Let's Go To Prison, and I think they're really great in Brothers Solomon. The Let's Go To Prison experience taught me about a certain level of comfort with the comedy of the movie and what it's about. You have to have that, and you can't stretch yourself that far, that you're doing something that you wouldn't come up with on your own, even if you can sort of say, "Well, I get how other people might like this." There's got to be some level of connection to the very basic point of view of the material. I basically got lost in the thicket there.
Brothers Solomon is something that I think is a lot sweeter and funnier and closer to the kind of humor I've done. Will Forte wrote it. It's absurdist and it's very lighthearted and silly. But again, it's something someone else did, and I just hopefully helped make it come to life. I know that Will Forte's happy with it. I know Tom [Lennon] and Ben [Garant] are real happy with Let's Go To Prison. I guess I made two people happy—two people I think are very important, the writers.
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