INT: Samberg & Crew

Andy
Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone are three friends from

California

who got together for years, shot short digital comedies, and slapped
them up online with the hopes of breaking it big.
Together they were The Lonely

Island

and after a while, people started to take notice.
The trio eventually booked gigs on SNL, Akiva and Jorma as
writers, and Andy as a featured player.
Then LAZY
SUNDAY became an internet sensation, and everything was about to
change. But an internet
sensation is “easy”, right?
The net is breeding ground for sensations, here one day and
gone the next.

What’s
truly impressive about these three boys is that they stuck
around, and delivered fresh, sometimes startling humour over and
over again. If the Natalie
Portman rap wasn’t enough, the trio put out another sensation
that topped even SUNDAY’s popularity, DICK
IN A BOX. Now, after
giving us gold week after week on SNL, the boys are on the brink of
becoming true household names, when their first feature film HOT
ROD is released on August 3rd.

JoBlo.com
had the pleasure of receiving a phone call from the guys while they
were in New York doing sound mixing for the movie, and we got to
chat a little bit about that and what it’s like to be on the brink
of realizing a life long dream, which is ironic, because in talking
to Andy, Akiva, and Jorma, I fulfilled mine. That’s right, I aim high.

Let’s
talk HOT ROD. Tell me
about the movie. What
can you tell us about it for people who don’t know much about it?

Andy
Samberg: It’s about a
wannabe stuntman who’s terrible at stunts, who stages a big jump
to save his ailing stepfather who he feuds with, to get him better,
to kick his ass. It’s
your all-American story. It’s
a pure comedy.

Is
it going to have a more R-rated feel, along the lines of KNOCKED UP?

Andy:
No, it’s PG-13, but it’s got some weird bits in it.

So
no F-bombs.

Andy:
We could get away with one F-bomb.

Jorma
Taccone: Make no mistake about
it. It is in the vein of
ANCHORMAN, or

TALLADEGA

, or BILLY MADISON or HAPPY GILMORE, AUSTIN POWERS.

I
read that the role was originally written for Will Ferrell.

Andy:
Yeah, it was developed for Will.
He actually helped develop it and everything.

And
the script was written by Pam Brady.

Jorma:
Yeah, she wrote The SOUTH PARK movie and TEAM AMERICA with
those guys.

And
you guys took it and did some rewrites?

Andy:
We added some touches.

Jorma:
We had to change it a little just so it didn’t seem like
Andy was doing a Will Ferrell impression, because it was written so
specifically for Will Ferrell, so we just had to make it for Andy a
little bit.

You
guys are known for writing your own comedy, so why did you choose
someone else’s screenplay for your first feature, instead of
writing your own?

Andy:
For two reasons, mainly.
The first is that with the SNL schedule our time was very
limited. The second
being that we really liked the script and thought it was funny, and
the sensibility felt very similar to our own, in terms of, sort of a
silliness, a surrealness, and blind optimism, and the characters.

So
can fans of Lonely Island and all the shorts expect the same type of
humour from this, or is it something new?

Andy:
I think it’s definitely in there.
There’s a lot of bits that are true to what we’ve done in
the past, and I think it also strikes a balance, in terms of…

Jorma:
We gave it our own touch.

Andy:
But I mean like, if you’re someone who’s familiar with
our work, and you see the trailer, and it’s a bunch of crashes,
that’s not all the movie is. There’s
definitely a lot of weirder stuff that’s much more specific and
detail-oriented that we’re into.

And
was a lot of that stuff on the page, or did you come up with it
during filming?

Akiva:
Some of it we definitely came up with during filming, for
sure. That’s how
anything gets done. You
improve bits or you come up with stuff on the day.

Jorma:
It’s a studio PG-13 movie, which a lot of our favourite
movies are like those ones I mentioned earlier.
That was our guideline in which to play, and I think we got
away with a lot. I think
when people watch it, they’ll go ‘for a big studio movie, they
snuck a lot of weird shit in here.’

How
did the movie find you guys? Were
you approached to do it or did you hear about the script and seek it
out?

Andy:
I was initially approached to read the script a few months
after we all got SNL. They send everybody who gets the show out on a
bunch of general meetings and stuff, and I met with Paramount, and
they said that I should check it out in case I was interested, maybe
they’d be wanting to talk to us about it.
I read it and liked it, and had these dudes read it, and then
Lazy Sunday happened and they became much more interested.

So
this was even before Lazy Sunday?

Andy:
Oh yeah. I mean,
they don’t take any chances. I
don’t think they had any idea if we were going to be doing well at
the show or not, but just in case.
We didn’t either.

And
was it hard for you guys, who are so used to making shorts, to all
of a sudden stretching a film out to feature length?

Akiva:
Yeah, I mean just in terms of the work.

Andy:
It’s a different level of stamina that you have to have,
for sure. We were pretty
familiar with single-camera shooting, just because of everything we
had done before SNL and obviously still, at SNL, and Akiva has
directed a lot of it that way.

So
Akiva, on a technical level, was it harder doing this, a big budget
studio picture as opposed to guerilla-style shorts?

Akiva:
It’s some of both. The
part that made it much easier to make a movie is that there’s a
little bit more time, than for instance, a lot of the shorts we
shoot on Friday night, and they’re on TV a day later.
So there was a lot more time.
And all of a sudden a 100 people and they’re all there for
your movie, rather than for a whole show and you’re just one part
of it. And it was harder
on some levels, just because you’re trying to keep track of if
it’s going to stay consistent through a whole movie.
Over days, you have think about things like ‘Oh, two weeks
ago we shot this part, and now we’re shooting this thing, and it
happens right after’, and you want to make sure things feel fluid.

Did
you feel pressure from the studio, or was there complete creative
control, and you didn’t feel like you had to make this for someone
who had their money invested in it?

Jorma:
We did pretty good with creative control, actually.
Everybody was pretty excited about getting behind what we
wanted to do.

Akiva:
And since we didn’t put a bunch of ‘f*cks’ in there… As
long as we didn’t put a bunch of f*cks in there.
We had the assignment of making a PG-13 studio movie and then
that’s about where it left off, and as long as we didn’t veer out of
that territory, we were good. I
think we got away with a lot.

Andy:
There’ll be like 3 or 4 things on the DVD we may or may not
have actually wanted to end up in the movie but for the most part we
were left alone.

Jorma: The
jokes about us sucking each other’s dicks.
That’s for the final cut.

Andy:
That wasn’t even for the studio.
We tried to make it way gayer.

Jorma:
I do have a baby wiener as well.
You can print that.

Oh,
I’ll print it. Our readers are
into that. What about the
stunts for the movie? Did Andy
go all Jackass and bang himself up?

Akiva:
He did every stunt himself.

Jorma:
He wanted to.

Andy: I
wanted to do a lot more than they would let me.
There’s certain shit I wouldn’t have touched with a ten foot
pole. But I definitely
wanted to do more than they would let me, but for insurance reasons,
they wouldn’t let me, because of I got hurt, the whole movie would
shut down.

Jorma:
Yeah which is good, because people did get hurt.

So in
the trailer, that guy making the jump and then falling and cracking
his head, that’s not you.

Andy:
Oh, the mail truck jump.
No that’s not me. Although
it looks like me, doesn’t it?

Akiva:
There are no special effects in that shot.
I will go on record as saying that, because I’ve seen some
speculation from people, some people think it’s a dummy, there are
no special effects, that’s a real dude.
There’s no wires.

Jorma:
Watching that live was horrifying, actually.

What
about the cast? Did you have a
hand in picking them out, or was that out of your hands?

Andy:
No, we were very specific about a lot of the cast.

Did you
want Ian McShane as the stepfather?

Andy:
He was our first choice.

And he
was into the idea right away?

Akiva: We
thought we’d have to meet with him, and really talk him into it, and
he just read the script and called me one day, and I was at SNL, and
I was like ‘Alright, he’s in.’ We
hadn’t even met him in person yet, he just read the script and was
like ‘Sure.’

What
about Will Arnett? He’s got a
role in too.

Andy: Ya,
we wrote the part specifically with him in mind.
We did that with him, we did that with Hader (Bill, from SNL).

Akiva:
You mean we imagined him in the part.

Andy:
Right, right, sorry. When
we were reading the script we were imagining him the whole time.
And when we first read it, we knew that Hader had a
character, he did the bit perfectly, and Parnell as well.

Akiva:
Bill Hader’s part in it, it’s actually him doing an
impression of his friend he grew up with,
and he would do it around the office, and we were like ‘we’re
just going to put you in this movie, and you do that guy.’

Jorma:
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of how crazy
that dude is.

What
about future projects? Do you
have anything in the works? What do you want to do?
Do you want to write your own feature?
Let me hit you with about thirty questions and you choose
one.

Jorma:
I can say first off for your last question that we definitely
want to write our own thing. It
was cool and interesting, kind of adapting something into our style,
but it’d be pretty exciting to start from scratch, although we’re
doing what we kinda wanted to do.
The cool part about being so busy, I mean it’s great to be
busy, and have SNL, and have the movie, and it’s been fantastic, but
we’re excited to do it.

So
you’d shoot the movie on hiatus from SNL?

Jorma:
Yeah, maybe later in the summer, who knows.

Andy:
But there’s nothing lined up.

Nothing
at all? No ideas in the
pipeline? I’m sure you guys
always have ideas.

Akiva: We
have ideas, but we can’t tell you them.
We might not get to write them for 3 years.

Can you
give me one of them and I’ll write it?

(Laughter)

So
what’s it like for you guys now, living in New York and getting
recognized all the time? How
has life changed?

Jorma:
We don’t get recognized that often, me and Akiva, except by
people who already knew the website.

Andy: No,
but people have discovered the website through our involvement with
SNL. You guys have fans
waiting for you outside the show sometimes.

Akiva: Die
hard fans.

But
Andy, is it weird for you?

Andy:
Yeah, it’s definitely weird.

Do you
ever get annoyed?

Andy: Not
really, you know what I mean? I
try not to leave the house if I’m feeling grumpy (laughs).
But in general it’s cool, like any time somebody–I guess
I’ll start feeling annoyed if I leave the house and somebody is
like, pissed off to see me. But
now I’m still anonymous enough that when I get recognized, it’s
because people actually care, and like what we’ve done, which is
always a pleasant experience.

You
never get tired of hearing that.

Andy:
Yeah, it’s always cool to have someone tell you that they
think something you did was funny.

What’s
the writing process like on SNL?

Jorma:
Well lots of the ideas that we write happen at like six in
the morning. There’s a lot of
goofing around until…

Andy:
It happens different ways, too.
Like sometimes you’re told flat out, okay, we have to have
something like this in the next 24 hours, and then you sit there and
you shoot ideas out until you come up with it.
Sometimes one of us will come in and be like ‘hey, I thought
about something in the shower, give this a shot.’
You know, there’s lots of different avenues.

Jorma:
There’s also writing days for us.
Tuesday is the normal writing and idea day, stay up ’til
whenever you’re done, which can be anywhere from six in the morning,
to like sleeping over and leaving the next day at 2 in the
afternoon. And then for
us, if they order a digital short or if we have an idea already for
a digital short, that’ll happen around Thursday, and then we shoot
on Friday, and edit all day until like Saturday morning.

Did all
three of you go to film school?

Jorma:
These two did. I
went to UCLA for theatre.

So is
making a feature film a dream come true for you guys?

Jorma:
I’d say it definitely is.

Akiva:
It is the dream. That’s
why you move to Hollywood (sarcastically).

It’s
that easy, right? You just
move down there and three weeks later you have a movie out?

Jorma:
Of course, it’s always like that.

Is it
surreal at times to think that you have a feature film coming out
this summer?

Jorma:
Just the fact that we’re at the sound place right now, like
we’re still so in it that it’s very difficult to grasp.

Andy:
I would say that like every time I have 20 minutes to reflect
I get a little bit bugged out, have that like, shrooming on top of a
mountain type kind feeling where you’re like ‘oh my god, this is
happening.’

Akiva:
Or whenever you go back to something that we did 2 years ago,
or I’ll go to LA and I’ll hang out somewhere I hung out before, like
for instance going to the Movie Awards as guests, rather than as
writers on it. Anytime
you’re going to something like that as a writer you’re looking up at
the people there as guests, and you’re like ‘One day…’
Then you can go up to them and say ‘Now I did it!’
You know, it’s something you can check off your list.

Jorma:
For me it was when that first commercial aired, on the last
show of SNL, seeing it on TV for the first time, it was like ‘Oh my
God, this is real, everything we’ve been working on is actually
real.

Andy:
We had a cool moment too last week.
Me and Kiv went to Studio City to record the orchestra, the
scoring for the movie, and I used to be a PA working there, and that
was not that long ago. It
was kind of a cool full circle feeling like, ‘And now, we’re
doing the movie!’

Are you
guys looking to promote this as a Lonely Island movie, or do you
want this to be independent of that?

Akiva:
We’d like to get people in theatres.

Jorma: I
think it is that, whether we want it to be or not, that’s a pretty
truthful thing, even though we didn’t come up with the idea, it’s
ours and it’s shared with other people as well, it’s not solely
ours, but it’s still ours.

Andy: I
think we want it to be known in any way to anyone to make them like
it. At first I think all
of us had way more specific ideas of how we wanted to be viewed and
received and stuff like that, but once you put in that much time and
effort on something, you just want it to be received well by
anybody, so hopefully that’ll be the case.

Jorma:
You know how I would want people to go in seeing it, I was
telling Andy the other day, in the Billy Madison way, that you’re
going to see the smartest stupid movie you’ve ever seen.

Well
that’s the thing. You guys can
do the toilet humor thing but you did it in a way that’s clever and
absurd.

Andy:
Yeah, we’re always trying to sorta class up the fart joke.

Akiva:
The movie is standard on the level of comedy in terms of that
it has cliches in it, and every time we get a cliche we try to put a
big wink to the audience, a big moment to let the audience know that
we know we’re doing it, whether it’s a big joke, or somebody being
sarcastic.