Q: If you scrub away all of the laughs and all of the F bombs and all that, there’s some good social commentary here. Was that in the script or was that something you guys brought into it during the production?
CD: I’m sure that there was something in the original draft there but it was something that was very important to both Richie and myself that the movie was anchored on… which is, I think essential to any kind of comedy, especially comedy where you want to be edgy or occasionally outrageous. If it’s not anchored on some positive message then it really just feels like shock value for the sake of shock value. And we’ve been doing that for twelve years on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I think we would have been a one season show if each episode or the majority of the episodes weren’t rooted in some message… I hesitate to say what they are but for people to watch and make them think just a little bit.
RK: Yeah–
CD: It was important to us.
RK: I think we felt like, first of all, we don’t have the answers but we do… we all can agree no matter what you think about politics or anything that we need to look at the education system. It’s just not working the way it once did. And I wanted the film to feel like a prison riot movie. I felt it was the prison guards versus the inmates. You’ll never see two students going at each other; that was deliberate in the movie. And the way I shot it, I wanted to open in that prison yard, that courtyard. I didn’t open it from the school or from where the flag or the brick wall are and even in the way I tried to light it, you know, the cinematographer I hired did Copland he did To Die For he did My Own Private Idaho I didn’t hire the guy– I mean, he’s done commercial movies but I wanted it to have that feel of like– the school I picked was rusty and crumbling and so it was important to all of us that– we’re not a hard message film; we wanted to be the most outrageous comedy of the year but–
CD: It’s a very pro-teacher film, too.
RK: Absolutely.
CD: I think it really shines a good light on the difficult situation that teachers are in these days both with their lack of ability to discipline kids and their lack of resources sometimes. And I think Cube’s character would have been really one dimensional if we didn’t give him a great philosophy as to why he wanted to have this fight… beyond the fact that I got him fired.
Q: There’s a lot of intensity in this movie. There’s a lot of characters who are right on the edge of losing their sh*t and as I’m watching it, it reminded me of this story I read a long time ago. Bruce Willis, one of his action films, before each take, would get psyched up… throwing chairs around and such. I was wondering if you or any of the other actors had any little routines you ran through before each take to get into that mindset.
CD: It depends on where in the movie I was. Certainly, in the beginning of the movie where it’s just me talking to my students I probably wouldn’t do too much before but if I was supposed to be especially agitated, I would do a little bit of jumping up and down and pumping my fist. It’s something an actor once told me he saw Tom Cruise doing and uh, as a joke we started doing it on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and now I love to do it. I just feel like it gets the blood flowing. Or sometimes even, and I learned this one from Danny (DeVito), I’ll start just saying a few lines in character, either to somebody else in the scene or to nobody, just right before we roll the camera but… there’s little tricks you can try.
RK: I will say, I don’t think you’ll mind me saying this, in the scene where Charlie finally tells off the administration… he did it one time. Perfect. I shot it a second time just in case the camera messed up. I was sure I was going to be there for hours. I mean, it’s this passionate scene and this monolog and it was just… (He thinks) …he was so– by the point of the shoot, when we had gotten to that point, he was so ready for it. Umm… just in terms of the tension that is something we added, ultimately, in the script when Charlie and I started working on it. It was important that the fight have meaning. It had to have a cathartic experience for everyone so we added these crazy senior pranks that the principle’s going through because I just kept thinking, when I cast Dean Norris, seat Charlie between an angry Dean Norris, (Hank from Breaking Bad), on one side and Ice Cube on the other, I really felt like that is a no win situation. What do you do? And to watch him try and finesse that and just– Yes, he did it but he had a reason and so… I’m glad you picked up on that because we wanted all the teachers… Tracy Morgan getting pranked, and everyone. We just wanted to feel that by the time we got to the fight it was gonna be–
CD: And there were great pranks in the script, in the original draft, but we definitely wanted to make this such a terrible day for Andy Campbell that by the time he finally says, ‘I’m gonna go down swinging no matter how hard you hit me,’ that you can kind of justify that he gets to that place.
Q: The world has gotten a little bit more absurd lately. As someone who deals with absurdist humor, how do you catch up to a world that’s just getting crazier and crazier? Do you use your free speech to ridicule things that are going on or do you go in a different direction?
CD: It’s really interesting. I think, certainly Sunny, has thrived in that era and we’ve been around a long time. When we first started the show, I think Bush was in his first term, maybe his second term. So, that was an interesting time if you remember… [sic] we were in Iraq and then, of course, it’s not to say the Obama years weren’t interesting times, too, and, of course, now it’s very volatile and out of volatility comes great comedy. I think it’s our job to just point out our flaws, no matter what side of the political line you’re on. I think both sides deserve a good comedic lashing and umm, you know, I don’t think anything’s ever going to change in terms of that with comedy. If the world gets to such a tame place that we can’t have any sort of satire any more than maybe that won’t be a good thing… who knows.
Q: Kinda lookin’ like you might not be able to make fun.
CD: Yeah, that’s true. It’s definitely getting harder for people to take a joke. I think humor is necessary in times like this. I think the greatest thing that could happen right now is for a movie like this to come out so people can just go laugh and relax a little bit and they can watch people punch each other if they feel rage and want to punch somebody. I think movies that have something intelligent behind the humor will survive. It’s tougher to make senseless jokes and it should be tougher to make senseless jokes but if there’s a good intelligent reason behind the joke telling, I think it should hang in there.
