Friday
Oct172008
Friday, October 17, 2008 at 3:37PM The Big Picture Interview with 'Sex Drive' Director Sean Anders
A few years back,
Sean Anders
made a local film here in Phoenix called Never Been Thawed. That movie
helped get him noticed in Los Angeles, where he worked on a few scripts before
being hired to adapt a book called All the Way. Anders and his writing
partner, John Morris, had their own ideas for the adaptation, and when
negotiation to write the screenplay, Anders was also handed the keys.
Yep, three years from local filmmaker to his first Hollywood movie. That movie is, of course, Sex Drive, which opens in theaters today. Anders recently sat down with The Big Picture in an old coffee shop to talk about getting there from here.
I'll try to tell the whole story. The movie got us the agents and the managers and whatnot, and we had written another script that was more story-driven and that got people to say, "Oh, OK, these guys can write." We spent a year, couldn't get arrested, hearing from people, "Yeah, the script is funny, but it's not the kind of thing we're doing right now."
So we wrote another script called She's Out of My League and we sold it to DreamWorks. That was our first big sale. And it's crazy: Overnight, you go from a class-A numbnut in Hollywood to all of a sudden - "Oh...who are you guys?" The script got on something called The Black List, which I didn't even know existed, which is a list of about 100 scripts and everybody in the industry reads these scripts.
That led to this book called All the Way that this movie is loosely based on. I read it and liked the characters but the book isn't really the sort of thing we do, so we went to (the producers) and they said, "What would you do with it?" We told them what we were thinking and they said, "Yeah, we like that. Do that."
So you're a first-time "Hollywood" director and you're working with a very young cast, so that had to present a few more problems on its own.
By far, it was an advantage. I'm sure there were problems, although I can't think of any. The best thing is, you know, they're not big movie stars that have lists of demands. They're not jaded. They're young people who are super excited to be in this movie. And they'd literally come hang out on set on days they weren't working. They would just come to see what funny things their friend would do. So it had almost a college vibe to the environment.
And really, going into it, I didn't go to Hollywood thinking, "Oh, I want to be John Hughes. I want to make teen comedies for the rest of my life." But I would certainly do more. There was something really energizing about the young cast, that they're having such a fucking blast.
Did you know early on that Clark Duke was going to be kind of the breakout star of this movie?
Uh...we were fans. (laughs)
It looks like that maybe that role isn't as big when it's written as it is on screen.
He definitely got some more one-liners than were in the script because he's so brilliant and funny and he had these great improvised lines that we couldn't live without.
Lance was originally written to be this chiseled, blond, studly guy. And we were reading guys for it and they were all douchebags. I was like, "We don't even have a movie here if we can't find Lance." And I was showing a friend of mine the Clark and Michael stuff (the series written by, directed by and starring Clark and Michael Cera), and then I'm thinking, "There's our guy right there!"
He was a tough get as far as his deal and all that stuff, but he was interested in the part from day one. He had gone to a Halloween party about two years before as an Amish guy, and we got an e-mail with that photo, and we'd written this sarcastic Amish guy...it's perfect.
And you're a big movie geek, so you understand the need to essentially make this movie twice, once for theatrical release and once for DVD. Are we going to get some extra goodness on the DVD.
Oh yeah (laughs). Oh yes. The thing is, nowadays, there's this lame expectation that every comedy aimed at young audiences has to have an unrated version on DVD. And you have to do it, because it's something like 22% of the DVD sales. If you don't do it, you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
And usually what it means is they take a few extra scenes that they cut out for time and put them back in and make it seem like it's wild and wacky. But we decided to make ours legitimately unrated. It's going to be ridiculous. We had ideas that got the kibosh put on them because there's only so far you can go (or) huge retailers won't sell them. The guys from Harold and Kumar tried to put a live sex show on theirs and they got slammed down on that one.
Our unrated DVD will be a send-up of unrated DVDs, of how stupid those things are. But it's really funny. Yeah, DVD is a major component in all of this...but right now, we're thinking theatrical (laughs).
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