INT: David Gordon Green

When you think
David Gordon Green, you are more likely to think of ALL THE REAL
GIRLS or GEORGE WASHINGTON. You
wouldn’t think to associate this guy with a
marijuana-action-comedy. So
how the hell did the man who just made another heavy Indie flick
called SNOW ANGELS get involved with Seth Rogen and THE
PINEAPPLE EXPRESS? Well,
David is not really what you would expect.
He is a small guy who loves watching crazy shit on
YouTube.com and has an amazingly good sense of humor.
While on the set for PINEAPPLE, it was amazing watching him
let loose as a director and hearing how he worked.
If you hadn’t seen his Indie flicks, you’d think this guy
was right out home with weed, comedy and g-strings…
So he claims to have a reason for having them.
Sorry David… had to bring them up. You can read Part 1 of
my set visit HERE.

David
Gordon Green

David Gordon
Green: [Referring to a G-string lying in his trailer] Those are
underwear that a guy who wore a g-string in the movie that I just
finished before this, and the producer thought it would be a fun gag
for them to stage them in my trailer today.

Especially today of all days!

Those belonged
to Nicky Katt and I would never touch them. I would stay a mile away
from those drawers.

What is the project you just finished?

It is a movie
called ‘Snow Angels’ it was up in

Nova Scotia

, a heavy drama, so I decided to come down here to the warmth and
the comedic terrain.

How did you get involved in this?

I just met these
guys and they were working on “Knocked Up” at the time and I
started hanging out on that set a little bit and I don’t know,
they seemed like a good group of folks and they work in a very
similar manner in studio comedies that I do and low budget dramas,
and in terms of style and the way we got to work with actors and
stuff like that. We just thought it would be an interesting
experiment to see what happened if we took some of my team and some
of their team and tried to make a movie together.

After ‘All the Real Girls’ and ‘Snow Angels’ what’s
it like doing a all out comedy action film compared to
those?

Honestly it is a
ton of fun. The easy answer is it is a lot of fun. I needed, just
for my head, after investing some serious level of passion and
emotion in four movies, four dramatic movies, I just felt that it
wouldn’t come from a healthy place to do another dramatic movie
until I kind of, you know, exercised other muscles. You know, you
don’t want to just do curls every day, you want to every now and
then go for a jog, otherwise you start getting weird, you know. Just
trying to even it out, because there is nothing worse than a
terrible drama that comes from an artificial place or that to me; my
least favorite movies are really bad dramas. A bad comedy you can
just have a drink or whatever and watch a little bit of it and have
a snack and zone out on it, but a bad drama is just bad.

Are all your movies this collaborative?

Yeah. They
always have been. On this team there are probably 15 guys on this
crew that I went to college with. Same DP that’s done every movie
I’ve done since film school, same sound mixer, the guy doing the
behind the scenes documentary I’ve known for the past 10 years, so
you surround yourself with enough people you trust and have a
relationship with, and you are able to adapt to the learning curve
that a production like this requires.
And then you surround yourself with people who have been
doing these movies for 20, 30 years. You’ve got enough wisdom and
experience to balance out our somewhat naïve enthusiasm.

So if you bring
both of those, it meets in this pretty amazing creative place that I
think we’re a breath of fresh air in terms of some of the guys who
have been working in the genre a lot more frequently and have more
expertise certainly, but we’re not just punching buttons, we are
trying to reinvent it, we’re trying to do different things and in
a way a lot of these guys we’re going to, even some of the older
guys that we go to, we want this to play like a lot of the 80s
action comedies that I grew up on.

You know, like
“The Blues Brothers”, one of my favorite movies and one of the
big influences for something like this, where it is so outrageous
but it never turns quite into a cartoon, so bringing guys who had
been working in the 80’s on action movies, on comedies was one of
the things we were looking for on resumes, which is kinda cool …
stunt coordinators and special effects guys and bringing that
sensibility to it because it is kind of a timeless movie, you know,
people who play Ataris on flat screen TVs, that’s kind of what our
world is here.

What’s it like working with a guy like Seth who is about to
blow up it seems?

I was telling
someone earlier, it is a perfect time to be working with Seth and
James because they are guys who have a fan base but they can still
walk down the street and live everyday lives like normal people, but
they’re on the brink with “Spider Man 3” coming out and
certainly people are more and more able to recognize these guys and
over the next few weeks when “Knocked Up” comes out, it is going
to shoot that guys star through the roof. So this is the perfect
time because you get the excitement and the enthusiasm and all the
talent of a guy, that you don’t bring the burden and the baggage
of expectation to so we are still inventing him, he’s still
inventing himself.

He’s
introducing himself to an audience because nobody really knows what
to expect. At this point we’re starting to latch on to who Will
Ferrell is, we are pretty damn sure what we are going to get when we
buy a ticket to an Adam Sandler movie. But Seth’s at a great
groundbreaking point where he can say “I want to do this and then
I want to do something totally different over here” and mix it up.
I don’t think he’s looking to do Shakespeare, but he’s looking
to have a good time and do different kinds of movies and every time
somebody was like, well we might not have the budget to do that
explosion he’s like “I want to do this movie, because we get to
do a big explosion so let’s find the money and make it bigger.”

We got a couple
of extra days for the car chase sequence, otherwise, they were
trying to give us the comedy car chase sequence and we wanted the
action movie car chase sequence. So it is cool getting a guy that
people are wanting to invest in right now, but again without any of
the baggage. So you don’t have people banging down his trailer and
he doesn’t have an entourage. He’s just a good guy who is young
and hungry and having fun and at a really amazing moment in his
career.

I noticed online there is a lot of buzz about you doing a
comedy. Do you feel some pressure from your fans and what
they might expect from this?

I don’t know.
I think all the films I’ve made have had a degree of humor in them
and I just felt somewhat monitored by the fact that to a degree
there is a line you don’t want to cross in a dramatic movie and
still be faithful and considerate of the characters and respectful
of the material. Again, bringing so much of the same manner and
sensibility, you know we are doing a little bit different lighting
in this movie because you light differently for comedies.

It is a totally
different tone, and it is ridiculous and over animated sometimes. I
always divide people, people love one movie and hate the next. Hate
all of them, love all of them, so for me personally, it is valuable
to do something totally different and if it sucks or I’m not happy
with it, or audiences don’t respond, it might be difficult to do
it again. Or I might not
be interested in doing it again, but right now I think the funnest
thing to do would be the unexpected.

Seth was telling us a little about your directing techniques.
Can you tell us a little bit about your style and
does it differ from when you are directing a drama?

The great thing
about this entire ensemble is they bring wonderful improvisational
skills to the table so you won’t see me looking through a script
on set. If a scene works… we want to make sure we hit certain
beats and I’ll have the script supervisor say “This is an
emotional point we might want to nail” but we are so unspecific
about it, so that’s kind of how I do all of my movies. Here you
are searching for a laugh; you are searching for what makes it a
little bit different. I think it is a similar bag of tricks and
tools, just trying to do things that are outrageous and throw people
curve balls, because what I try to avoid is people who are so
rehearsed and prepared, and performances that are so designed and
scenes that are so story boarded and kind of prefabricated that it
just feels manufactured. So I just try to make it feel loose and
imperfect, because imperfect to me is a lot more interesting.

So you are ok with them just going and riffing on each other?

I don’t know
who was there for the last take where … you know the scene is done
and just let them see what comes out because you might just find a
button there that you can cut to for the last beat. So the whole
thing is pretty much in that manner. Yesterday we had one set up and
I said let’s get Craig and Kevin who were two kind of side
characters and got this lighting set up, there were going to be some
wardrobe changes for the other characters before they would be ready
and just bring them in and improv a scene and see what happens if
Kevin is eating coos coos here and Craig wants to get him out of
there.

What happens
there when you film them and shout stuff off camera to them, see if
they throw a line. If I’ve got an idea I’ll give it to them and
say “say this” and then they will take that as a cue and go off
on some tangent. This is the first time I’ve ever really had the
value of basically infinite film stock. That’s the cheapest part
of this movie is burning film and you want to capture all those
little moments because that’s what makes this interesting. All the
movies that Judd and the producers are really supportive of in
finding an enormous commercial following is being able to have those
kind of loose and ridiculous actors that riff and improvise and
shoot it like this, which is not so stylized and composed as how I
might approach a drama, but performance wise it is some of that same
energy.

How involved has Judd been? Has he been on the set a lot?

Yeah, he comes
by a bit. He’s got like three movies going right now. He’s
juggling a lot. I have a lot of questions for him and I learn a lot
from him, and as far as having a producer who is supportive of what
you are doing, I couldn’t be in a better situation for making a
studio transition. Everyone including myself look to him for
answers. The studio says how do we make good movies, how do we make
people laugh and how do we get people to buy the DVDs? They look to
him because of his track record the last few years.

I look to him to
see how I might approach something a little more economically in
terms of not wasting time, and getting right to the joke without it
feeling like a set up and a pay off. How do you write a comedy when
you are balancing, you know we have some pretty brutal violence, but
you know I want to make sure it doesn’t feel cartoony. So there is
a lot of value in his experience there. There is always some degree
of some political and financial, not battles but issues that
you’re dealing with, and trying to balance and iron out because
you only have so much money and so much time, and he’s just got a
lot of experience on various scenarios and budget levels so it is
great to have a big brother for sure.

Speaking of violence are you guys looking at a PG-13 or an R?

I don’t think
there is any way around a pretty hard R.

Good to hear

.

Yeah, there is
some pretty graphic gore.

Oh, fantastic.

There is
unstoppable language and pretty substantial drug use.

Oh, thank God! We need more hard R.

I agree too,
because again going back to the 80’s and things when movies really
could push the envelope a little bit and those are the movies we
look back to in terms of comedy, because they were less fleeting.
Kids today are still watching “Caddy Shack” and
“Meatballs”…

“Animal House”…

Yeah, they just
live longer. I’m trying to make something that doesn’t feel like
it is so contemporary that it is out of style by the time it comes
out. It is different too because I didn’t write this movie, which
is a breath of fresh air in a way, and Seth and Evan being the
writers and producers that are unpossessive of the words, but it is
fun because I get to … I had one impression of it when I read it
and another impression when we started talking about it and
sculpting it, and now the actors, who are there are the characters.
I don’t feel any authorship to it so I get to surrender it to the
actors a lot more so they really do take it in some outrageous
directions.

How much stoner exclusive humor is there here?

I don’t think
any of it is exclusive because I’m not a big pothead and I can’t
stop laughing at these guys, so trying to make something that is not
so genre specific that would only appeal to Cheech and Chong fans. I
did my homework and watched a lot of the stoner movies of the last
decade, and I don’t think any of them are particularly funny.
And I even tried getting high for a couple of them and it
still didn’t [Laughing]… so it has got to work on different
levels. This is a movie that hopefully 17-37 year olds will really
sink their teeth into and be able to identify with some of the
situations.

There is enough
fart jokes to keep the kids happy, but I think it is pretty
subversive and interesting sense of humor that they are bringing
layers to it that it is not too … well you know we are shooting so
much that who knows what will be in the editing room. I’m getting
assemblies all the time and I’m watching sequences, but we already
have three hours of movie edited and it could go in a lot of
different directions and that is another situation I’m unfamiliar
with is what happens when you start test screening it? I want to
make a movie that the crowd likes, because you don’t make this for
yourself. That’s why I’d go make “Snow Angels 2” or
whatever, you make this to have a bunch of college kids rolling in
the aisles and when it is not funny, it is not funny. It is not like
“well, I think it is funny and I’m going to keep it and fight
for it” if nobody is laughing, you look like an idiot. You know
what I mean? So that will be a fun learning experience there. Then
the MPAA, it’s like are we allowed to have 13-year-olds smoking
weed in movies?

This will probably be your first huge DVD too, right?

Yeah, we’re
actually having a whole day where we are having the actors back on
Tuesday to do some crazy things that we’ve designed, and we have
some guest actors coming in to do cameo appearances and some stuff
– it will totally be freestyle improv stuff. Behind the
scenes documentary that the guys there, Darius, he’s here all the
time everyday catching every bruise and chuckle. It is good to have
that kind of a document I think. It would be great if an audience
turns out for the movie. I’ve never had the pleasure of having a
commercially received movie. This seems as primed for that as I’ve
been a part of.

The other good
thing that would be funny is that “Snow Angels”, my last movie,
is probably going to come out in 08 – I would love nothing more
than within a month to have this really bleak heavy winter drama and
this totally ridiculous far out stoner comedy – just to give you
guys something to write about [Laughing]. I’ve also woven in some
minor subtle links between them too, so we’ll see, they are for
totally different audiences, but we’ll see. It’s all a great
experiment and experience. So far there hasn’t been any drastic
drama. Everybody is on the same page. We are all just shooting a
film and having a lot of fun and hopefully that translates to the
audience in the same kind of way.

This is your last night?

Yeah, I’ve
been shooting all night all this week and I can’t sleep during the
day time so I’m kind of a zombie right now. I’m glad we have
that DVD day because otherwise it would be saying goodbye to all
these people, you know, I made a ton of new friends on this movie,
some days we have like 600 people working on the action scenes and
set pieces so it has been huge, and I would hate to be totally out
of it on my salute away. It would be good to get a couple days,
clear head, come back and have a good fun loose day where everybody
gets crazy and then part ways and maybe gather again for the sequel.

You know what I
want to do that will never happen, but would be amazing is to do a
sequel to “Tango and Cash” and “Pineapple Express” at the
same time so you’d get, I like the idea of combining sequels like
“Alien and Predator” or whatever. Bringing two franchises into
the same sequel would be pretty cool. I like the idea of taking the
director of another franchise and he directs his actors and I direct
mine … doing something weird. Try something different. We’ll see
what’s next.

Let me know
what you think. Send questions
and comments to [email protected].