AVC: What's the ratio of stuff that gets filmed to what makes the final cut?
BG: On the show, we were scheduled last year to shoot 20 episodes, and we turned in 27. There's still a kill-board of stuff that doesn't make it. Like when we walk up to Big Mike, who's played by Toby Huss, we know he's stealing newspapers, so me and Tom arrest him for stealing newspapers. So then we say "Cedric, Carlos, you go up and arrest him for something." We don't really plan it. Usually we're ahead of schedule. And then me and Tom will go up and arrest him for something else. So we have Toby there to shoot one sketch, and I think last year we got seven. Same with Patton Oswalt. Throughout the course of the season, we've learned to shoot extra runners, extra plot pieces, because we know we're going to end up with extra episodes. For the movie, we accidentally shot twice as much as we needed. [Laughs.] The DVD is going to come with we call "the lost version." It's like an hour and 12 minutes, and it's not different takes; it's totally different everything. It's got a whole scene with Oscar Nunez that's not in the movie, and a long dinner scene with us and Patton Oswalt and Mindy Sterling, who plays his mom. It's all hilarious, but we couldn't have a Kill Bill Parts One And Two Reno movie. [Laughs.]
AVC: Ben, you directed the film. How much new ground did you have to cover?
BG: I think I aged a year during the movie. There was one point where we were on a bridge, and there were two explosions that were going to happen, and a helicopter had to be coordinated to come up. We had all these different departments we had to run it by: Homeland Security, Harbor Patrol, Miami Police, Miami Beach Police, and the Coast Guard. I've never really felt that much pressure, with that many people looking over my shoulder, and knowing if the helicopter hurts somebody, it's 100 percent my fault… We've never tried anything that big before. My hair is going grey, and I'm losing it. I knew making a movie would be stressful; I had no idea it would be as stressful as it was.
AVC: Reno has an ensemble method, so how does it work being both part of the ensemble and the person who has the last say?
BG: There has to be somebody on set people know to go to for an answer, because if you go to three different people, it's really confusing. I think with any movie, directing is more in the preparation. You just have to prepare for everything that's going to happen. Because after we start shooting, every actor, especially the guest stars, gets an equal vote in how the scene's going to turn out. It's not like we start a scene, and the director comes in, and I say, "No, you need to be more angst-filled. Everybody's not getting the point of the scene." We don't really know what the point of a scene is until the camera starts rolling. So it's fun. I think all movies are very ensemble, but none of them are nearly as ensemble as Reno. We bring in the Toby Husses and the Oscar Nunezes so they can do whatever they want, and not so we can tell them exactly how to do the joke. Which is great, which is fun. I think we get really good performances out of people, because nobody asks them to do that anywhere else.
AVC: You've done a lot of punch-ups for movie scripts, from Starsky & Hutch to The Pacifier and Taxi. Does working on scripts open up doors for you elsewhere?
BG: Working on scripts really opens up doors.
TL: Everybody hated Taxi, but Ben Stiller read the script of Taxi, and it got us the production rewrite of Starsky & Hutch, so it's like your credibility in one affects the other a tremendous amount. People don't have to guess what our sense of humor is like; they can watch Reno. So even when I think we've survived in the movie industry a Taxi, a Pacifier, a Herbie Fully Loaded, it's because you can look and see our sensibility. It's on every week—what we meant is on every week.
BG: Sometimes when you do a whole script, you hand it off and it gets rewritten by a bunch of people, and people don't really get that much of a sense of how funny you can be. But when you do punch-up work, you're sitting around a room, always with a director, usually with the producer, and sometimes the star who demanded that the script be funnier. So it's a good chance to really show people, "Oh, okay, now I know Lennon and Garant's voice." We didn't do as much rewriting the past couple of years as we have previously, just because we've been too busy, but it was a really good way to get us established.
AVC: Do you enjoy doing that? Is it tougher working within a script's framework?
BG: Oh no, it's great. Thinking up jokes is easy; it's thinking up characters and plot that's hard. [Laughs.] When you're just there to think up jokes, it's great. I think we have a big advantage over a lot of writers. There's a lot of writers who've never had anything produced. This town is full of writers who never got to really write a joke and then get on a set and direct that joke and see whether it works—and it's very informative. It's very difficult to be funny if you've never actually seen one of your jokes performed, so I think it gives us a good insight on how to censor ourselves, especially. We've seen a lot of jokes fail. [Laughs.] I think a lot of people are much more confident in their material because they haven't had a cable show and watched their jokes land like fucking lead balloons for 10 years.
AVC: How hard is it when you watch a script you worked on turned into something else entirely, like Herbie Fully Loaded?
BG: The first time we saw Herbie Fully Loaded, it was really painful. As much as people on the Internet hate that movie, Tom and I hate it worse. Our script of it was so good. We wrote a script that was greenlit off the very first draft, and it was great. Then they hired, I think, 24 other writers after us to change it, and God, our script was good. Then when we sat and watched it the first time, other than being amazed at how great Lindsay Lohan's boobs were, we were just cringing that they got every single joke wrong. And every single scene was the opposite of the way that we had intended it to be. Aw, man. We wrote a really funny movie that I think kids would have liked, but I think State fans would have loved. It is what it is, but we ain't writing novels. It's always painful. It's why we do Reno. In Reno, if something sucks, it's 100 percent our fault, which we totally accept, and it's not nearly as painful as handing your stuff off to someone else to fuck up.
AVC: Do you worry that the reputation will follow you, though? Like "Oh, those are the guys who did Herbie Fully Loaded," even though what you did isn't what they saw?
BG: We're getting more and more used to that. Depending on who's writing the article, they'll either say "It's the guys from Reno 911!", or they'll say, "It's those two turkeys who wrote Herbie Fully Loaded." Now we're used to it. I think that's fair that people like some things that we do and don't like some things that we do. I think that's totally okay. I really don't expect every single person in the world to love Reno and Night At The Museum, and I don't care. I'm just doing my best here.
« Previous | 1 | 2
- Comments