The Dastardly Dissenter returns as CJ teams with Bernard to bring you this week’s show, in which they discuss their favorite “directorial left turns,” which also happens to be the subject of this month’s Way Too Indie staff feature.

Also, incomparable film essayist and filmmaker Mark Rappaport joins the show to talk about his filmography, which you can find right now EXCLUSIVELY on Fandor! Mark’s two latest videos, Debra Paget, For Example and Max, James & Danielle, are available to stream as of TODAY via our friends at Fandor, so don’t waste another second! Subscribe to Fandor now and discover one of the most singular, fascinating filmmakers working today.

Topics

• Indie Picks (3:50)
• Directorial Left Turns (15:23)
• Mark Rappaport (1:07:49)

Articles Referenced

• The Battery Capsule Review
• Altman Review
• Our Favorite Directorial Left Turns

Subscribe to the Way Too Indiecast

• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Subscribe on Stitcher

On March 18th, Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special hits theaters. The film, which follows a boy with supernatural abilities getting hunted down by various groups eager to study or exploit him, is a major departure from the rest of Nichols’ filmography. With Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, and Mud, Nichols showed an interest in small, modest-scaled dramas about internal (Take Shelter) and external (Shotgun Stories) battles in the Southern United States. Now, Nichols has elevated himself to a different, bigger stage: Midnight Special is a full-on, big-budget (compared to his earlier films, that is) sci-fi that has already received comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s work.

Nichols is far from the first director to make a film outside their perceived wheelhouse, and in anticipation of Midnight Special’s release, we decided to come up with our favorite examples of directors who made a successful shift into new, exciting territory. Read our eleven picks below, and let us know if you agree, disagree, or think we’re missing any directors who deserve to be on this list.

Favorite Directorial Left Turns

Babe: Pig in the City (George Miller)

Although respectable, George Miller’s post-Mad Max fare—such as The Witches of Eastwick and Lorenzo’s Oil—hardly built on the promise of his influential post-apocalyptic trilogy. In the mid-nineties, Miller’s career took an abrupt change of direction, co-writing and producing the surprise Best Picture nominee Babe (losing out to the far inferior Braveheart). The talking pig was a huge success, and a few years later Miller directed the sequel.

Babe: Pig in the City is far darker in tone than the cozy, bucolic original. Miller pulls out all the stops, creating a trippy atmosphere for his menagerie of chatty creatures, including mice, chimps, pelicans and Mickey Rooney. Ostensibly a family film, it has the bug-eyed intensity of his Nightmare at 20,000 Feet segment in Twilight Zone: The Movie and the baroque imagination of Mad Max: Fury Road. Miller’s lengthy excursion into family film continued with the hit Happy Feet and its sequel, featuring CGI dancing penguins. And just when the scorched landscape of “Mad” Max Rockatansky seemed a distant memory, Miller took another turn onto Fury Road. [Lee]

Bernie (Richard Linklater)

Richard Linklater has always been partial to his home state of Texas, but in his 2011 flick, Bernie, Linklater embraced the east Texas legend of Marjorie “Marge” Nugent’s murder. Linklater’s career is marked with a variety of genres from relatable dramas such as Boyhood and the Before Trilogy to airy comedies like Dazed and Confused, but Bernie served as his only venture into a crime-driven black comedy. Yet, Linklater’s expertise in the understanding of the human condition is manifested in his sympathetic portrayal of Bernie and the often insufferable Marge. Bernie combines many of the elements that make Linklater’s films so beloved, but the presentation is wildly unique. The film combines mockumentary with documentary and comedy with drama in a way that is coherent and captivating. And while Bernie stands out from the rest of Linklater’s work, the quirks present in Bernie are exaggerations of quirks from the rest of Linklater’s filmography, and that is what makes the film such a treat. It’s a departure from the Linklater status quo, but it also represents an artistic evolution and a love letter to rural Texas. [Tanner]

The Big Short (Adam McKay)

The ’60s had the Rat Pack, the ’80s had the Brat Pack, and the ’00s have the Frat Pack, with the likes of Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, and Steve Carell in its ranks. One of the key architects of the Frat Pack oeuvre is Adam McKay, writer/director of the Anchorman films, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and The Other Guys. You see the pattern. Going off this previous directorial resume, McKay’s doesn’t suggest very much depth. But with his latest effort, The Big Short, he detours from the usual big-laughs-from-little-substance path and takes on material as dense as one can get for a major motion picture: the bursting of the US housing market bubble, and subsequent global economic crisis, that occurred in the mid-2000s. It’s dry, complicated stuff that is plagued by its own jargon-riddled language. McKay (who also co-wrote) presents his smartest humor to date, but also makes the material easy to understand, keeping the film moving at a brisk pace and making brilliant creative decisions—such as fourth wall-breaking and pop-up tutorials conducted by surprise celebrity cameos. The Big Short earned the accolades it received during awards season, and McKay has earned a spot on the list of directors to pay attention to for more than just silly comedies. [Michael]

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón)

Alfonso Cuarón wasn’t necessarily a stranger to children’s film when he took on the third Harry Potter franchise film, nor to Warner Brothers. He’d directed 1995’s A Little Princess, also a darker toned tale of a child orphan making their way in the world. So while Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban may not have felt like a left turn for him, for those who think of Y Tu Mamá También when they hear his name, the jump from a horny coming-of-age road trip film to a beloved magical series was jolting. But it isn’t really if one thinks about it. Picking up where Chris Columbus left off in the first two films, Cuarón picked the perfect film of the series to take on. This is where Harry’s journey gets remarkably dark, with his family’s past and secrets he was formerly too young to grasp finally get revealed. He has to choose to face the threats that heretofore came looking for him, AND turn 13. Scary stuff. Cuarón gave the film much needed relevancy, having characters wear modern clothing and letting them interact more with the non-magical world. He gave the Harry Potter series the backbone it lacked and a magic that felt more enticing, simultaneously pleasing book fans and pulling in those who’d previously written the series off as kid stuff. Cuarón knows how to get hearts pumping (Gravity) and feelings flowing (Children of Men), and his approach was a huge success for what is now among the top five film franchises in history. [Ananda]

Hugo (Martin Scorsese)

Roger Ebert opened his review of Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film with the line, “Hugo is unlike any other film Martin Scorsese has ever made.” As a director who’s known for his gritty gangster films (Goodfellas, The Departed, Gangs of New York), Scorsese threw a curveball at audiences by making a big-budget family film. In his extensive filmography, the director has only made a handful of PG-rated films, and none (that I can recall) featuring young children as lead characters. But the main reason why Hugo marked such a huge departure for Scorsese was that it was filmed in 3D, a medium often thought to be gimmicky, especially for a filmmaker who is such a strong advocate for preserving traditional film. But it’s easy to see why he made Hugo considering it’s a love letter to cinema, featuring storylines involving early pioneers of film like Georges Melies and the Lumiere brothers. Scorsese shows how those directors experimented with special effects during the early years of film, and it suddenly dawns on you why he decided to make Hugo in 3D. And to top it off, he adds a great message about the importance of preserving film. It’s rare that a filmmaker can make a film like this; one that’s so close to their heart, so much different than their previous work, and yet be easily accessible to every age group. Hugo is that film. [Dustin]

Li’l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont)

Early on in his career, Bruno Dumont was labelled as an enfant terrible for several reasons: showing unsimulated sex scenes in his films, using sudden, brutal violence, a rigid form that can drive people mad or put them to sleep, and an ability to generate provocative questions about hot button issues like religion and spirituality. Since 2011, after his underrated Hors Satan flopped with critics and audiences, he underwent a bit of a change. His follow-up, Camille Claudel 1915, starred Juliette Binoche, a surprise given his preference to work with unprofessional actors. But it wasn’t until 2014 that Dumont would make his biggest shift yet with Li’l Quinquin, a TV miniseries about detectives trying to find a serial killer in the French countryside. The series marks Dumont’s first attempt at making an outright comedy, and it works like gangbusters (some sequences in here are so unhinged it’s impossible not to choke from laughter). But the biggest surprise of all was that Li’l Quinquin turned out to be Dumont’s biggest success to date, smashing TV rating records in France and getting renewed for a second season. While it’s a definitely left turn for the director, it’s the furthest thing from a compromise, and Quinquin will hopefully mark the beginning of a new, more exciting phase in Dumont’s career. [C.J.]

Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)

Before the release of the star-studded and fluidly structured Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine wasn’t well-known to general audiences. His filmography had been comprised of works like the deeply strange Gummo, the minimalist but bigger-budgeted Mr. Lonely and the chaotic, dadaist Trash Humpers. Korine wouldn’t go on to direct another film until almost half a decade later, and when he would, he wouldn’t be returning to execute Spring Breakers with the deceptively simple formal qualities of his previous three features. Instead, he hired Benoit Debie (primarily known for his collaborations with Gaspar Noé) as his cinematographer, gathered composer Cliff Martinez and popular dubstep artist Skrillex to work on the score, and cast household celebrities such as James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens & Ashley Benson to co-star alongside his wife, Rachel Korine. The end result is a pure sensory overload, constituted by a rich color palette, a free-flowing camera and editing style, and some of the sharpest social commentary to emerge from the American film scene in years, if not decades. [Eli]

The Straight Story (David Lynch)

David Lynch has cemented himself as one of the most idiosyncratic filmmakers of our time, tainting our eyeballs with visions of severed ears in the grass, people-sized rabbits doing chores, and Dennis Hopper spitting and spluttering like a loon. Lynch’s films are about as weird as they come, but when asked, the director called his G-rated 1999 heartland drama The Straight Story his “most experimental film.” While it sounds strange at first listen, in the context of the nightmarish sprawl that is his larger oeuvre, the assertation rings loud and true. Nearly every aspect of the film is antithetic to the core concepts of his other works: instead of smashing Americana to pieces, he celebrates it; rather than delivering shocks of violence and sex, the movie is squeaky clean and has no artsy tricks up its sleeve. Richard Farnsworth, in his Oscar-nominated final performance, plays Alvin Straight, an aging man who travels 320 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin on his John Deere (only in Lynchian context is this part bit considered “not weird”) to see his dying brother. Lynch’s broodiness is eschewed here, his visual flair instead working in support of a sweeping road story of love and devotion set along the cornfields and foothills of the good ol’ U.S. of A. Surprisingly, the film has Lynch’s fingerprints all over it despite the conventional tone and narrative. For a one-time affair, the wavy-haired madman plays it straight, and it works astonishingly well. [Bernard]

The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki)

Hayao Miyazaki, the creator of films such as Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro, is best known for his beautiful depictions of fantasy and ability to bring imaginary worlds to life on screen. Therefore, The Wind Rises comes as an unusual project from the Japanese animator, acting as a realistic piece of fiction whilst enfolding historical events into its narrative. It’s a fictional biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of the Japanese Zero fighter plane in World War II, and yet it focuses mostly on Jiro’s dreams of flying, rather than the grim realities of his creations. From its terrifying rendering of the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923 to its frequent references to Japan’s involvement in the Second World War, the film is never unaware of its exact place in history. However, The Wind Rises never allows this history to overshadow its message about inventions and possibilities. All the more interesting is the film’s place as Miyazaki’s final feature film, inevitably creating a parallel between himself and the young Jiro, both of whom are artists at their core; men with creative aspirations, but whose works are bound to be consumed in ways they did not intend. Reviews suggest that The Wind Rises is not critical enough of a man who designed machines for war, and yet Miyazaki’s films—often considered children’s tales—have always had a moral message. It seems his final film is a reminder that, once a creation leaves its author’s hands, its fate is as much our responsibility as it is theirs. [Pavi]

The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky)

Prior to 2008, Darren Aronofsky had established a consistently heady, kaleidoscopic aesthetic in his work. From the Lynchian surrealism of Pi to the hyperkinetic chaos and visceral impact of Requiem for a Dream to the ambitious, centuries-spanning spiritual epic that was The Fountain, one might’ve thought they had him pegged down as a filmmaker. However, while The Wrestler certainly carries a few subtle hallmarks of Aronofsky’s style and thematic interests, it’s a more stripped-down, genuinely gritty picture than anything the director has attempted before (or since).

A tale of has-beens and former glory is concentrated in the figure of Randy “the Ram” Robinson, a once-famous professional wrestler who has fallen into obscurity. He lives in a trailer, works a menial, unfulfilling job and only finds consolation in his small-time weekend wrestling gigs or in the sympathetic arms of a similarly broken-down stripper. Such a familiar type of story is imbued with refreshing nuance by Mickey Rourke’s unflinching, honest performance and Aronofsky’s neorealist approach. If there was any doubt that the director could make a film expressing unglamorous realities and raw human truths without the stimulation of technical dazzle and flamboyant flourishes, this movie surely puts those concerns to rest. Despite it being a bit of an anomaly in Aronofsky’s career, The Wrestler might just be his greatest work to date. [Byron]

X-Men (Bryan Singer)

Since Jeff Nichols’ latest studio venture has inspired this feature, I’ve chosen another all-American director, who was also in his mid-30s when he made the quantum leap from small scales and modest budgets by hitting the sci-fi switch. Bryan Singer’s big break came with cult classic crime thriller The Usual Suspects in 1995 where an award-winning screenplay and unforgettable performances bolstered the director’s work enough for 20th Century Fox to have a meeting about it. The character-driven student-teacher Stephen King drama Apt Pupil came next in 1998, but Fox had reportedly already approached Singer for X-Men. He turned it down, made Apt Pupil instead, was courted again—this time by good friend Tom DeSanto—only to finally sign on and set the course for the modern film age of superhero dominance we’re currently (suffering) in.

For the first time in his career, Singer worked with special effects, a budget of $75 million, and in the Sci-Fi sandbox where comic book fandom reigns. And boy did he make it work. It’s near-impossible to measure the magnitude of the aftershock this movie created, after grossing over $200 million at the box-office. Hugh Jackman became a star, studios realized that comic book property was a gold mine they could finally tap into, and Singer made such a triumphantly left turn from chamber dramas to splashy blockbusters, he’s never hard to turn right again. By no means the best superhero film, X-Men is still a perfectly entertaining spectacle that turned its director into one of the best comic book helmers working today. I very much doubt Nichols will make the same impact. [Nik]

2015 is wrapping up and looking back on the year there have been a fair amount of films that have been emotionally provoking, but The Big Short is in many ways at least equal to Mad Max in blood-pressure-raising cogency. The nearness of so recent a catastrophe combined with Adam McKay’s blended fact-driven drama and absurd-because-it’s-true comedy, ensures a righteous resentment. The film moves quickly introducing a lot of people and breaking the fourth wall often to explain terminology and provide a high level of self-awareness as characters explain when the film is being truthful and when it’s taking liberties for the sake of moviemaking. This candid storytelling builds a level of trust that feels akin to watching a documentary. The roller coaster ride of not being sure when to laugh at the preposterousness and scope of the events unfolding, or when to cry whenever the realization of their truthfulness sinks in, by far makes for one of the most peerless filmgoing experiences of the year.

Based on Michael Lewis’s bestselling nonfiction book of the same name, the focus of this expose is on the unlikely people who not only predicted the collapse (or bursting, if you will) of the credit and housing bubble that led to the crisis of 2008 and contributed greatly to the longest recession in U.S. history, but who also profited greatly when it happened. There’s the awkward Asperger’s-savant hedge fund investor, Dr. Michael Burry played by Christian Bale, who crunches the numbers and predicts the future, pretty much to the month the collapse will happen. He starts investing his clients’ money, betting against the banks, who happily take it thinking such a thing could never happen. His clients are understandably unhappy with the risk.

Word spreads of his crazy actions and soon Wall Street banker Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling doing what he does best, faking a New York accent and being as shmarmy as can be) catches wind and wants in on the potentially huge earnings involved, he manages to enlist outspoken hedge fund manager Mark Baum (Steve Carell) and his team. Baum operates under the umbrella of Morgan Stanley but actively despises the practices of big banks. After doing his research—part of which hilariously involves interviewing strippers on their financial practices in Florida—Baum realizes the truth of the housing bubble and invests. The remaining morally ambiguous underdogs are small timers Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) and Charlie Geller (John Magaro) who started an investment firm out of their garage and are looking to get into the big leagues, without any clout they have to get retired investor Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) to do the deals for them. He also agrees out of spite for corporate America and the rest of the film is watching the wool unravel as the banking world parties and denies that anything bad—at least, related to mortgages—could ever happen to them.

It would be easy to focus on the moral ambiguity of the individual men who gained from America’s huge downfall, but the spotlight of The Big Short can’t help but fall on the banks and governmental entities who tried (and in almost every way succeeded) to deny their fraud and negligence. McKay highlights the deceptive nature of the industry even as he pokes fun at it. For instance, the complicated lingo of the banking industry, while possibly useful to those on the inside, is beyond confusing to the layperson, especially when reduced to acronyms. McKay brings in celebrities playing themselves to break down these terms and provide visual explanations. Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez, and a naked Margot Robbie explaining terms like “CDO” and “subprime mortgage rates” is as entertaining as it is informative. That said, a film like this would require multiple viewings to fully grasp the full extent of the economic and fiscal theory playing out and the sheer mathematics that explain all that happened. But this isn’t a documentary, and it’s not meant to be viewed as such.

McKay seems to respect that viewers know how this story ends and that as wrapped up as we get in the characters’ schemes to make it rich off of the evil banks, rooting for them is, in fact, rooting for the failure, financial ruin and catastrophic misfortune of the American people. Any criticism of the film would have to be that very little time is spent focusing on what that misfortune looked like for people. Only one shot depicts a family, met earlier in the film, now homeless and living out of a van. But this seems a smart move as the point isn’t to focus on the sadness invoked by such imagery, but instead to hang on to the infuriation that bubbles up as the full extent of awareness and collusion of the banks and the government is revealed. It’s an unprecedented circumstance in American history and the film spells out just how few consequences there were for those responsible.

The star power of the film is overwhelming, even with Pitt providing the least amount of screen time. Carell is the most impressive, proving once again he has depths barely yet tapped. He brings to Baum all the social disregard of The Office’s Michael Scott with the intensity of Foxcatcher’s John du Pont and adding a moral anger that ties it all together amazingly. Christian Bale—never one to go halfway on any character—combines aloofness with the burden of genius to make his detached character perhaps the most sympathy-inspiring. But the real star is by far the director, who almost retroactively makes his comedies like Talladega Nights and Step Brothers seem even more astute now that we’ve been given such a clear example of how deftly he can comically reflect on true-life drama.

It’s easy to dismiss the complicated mess of the housing crises and collapse, shaking our heads at the math and economic intricacy, and McKay seems to know that his film isn’t going to incite retroactive punishment or propel a revolution. The significance of a film like The Big Short isn’t just a much-needed reminder that we the people should always take the time to understand and reflect on how hardships like this occur, but that comedy is a sharp weapon in shaming those who deserve to be called out.

In a drastic, surprisingly smooth departure from his typical work directing major studio comedies, Adam McKay tackles the dense subject matter of The Big Short, a screen adaptation of Michael Lewis‘ best-selling book about the devastating financial collapse of the mid-aughts. A heavy drama boasting an all-star ensemble (including Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, and more) playing men who watch the world burn to ashes around them from a credit and housing disaster only they saw coming, the film operates in a dark world of complex real estate jargon and impending Wall Street doom. Nevertheless, the film is imbued with a crackling, unpredictable energy a filmmaker with McKay’s comedic and improvisational background naturally brings to the table.

We spoke to McKay in a roundtable interview about the film, which opens this Friday in select cities and expands wide on December 23rd.

As a filmmaker, how hard or easy was it to maintain the balance of making sure your audience understands all of the Wall Street terminology while also being entertaining?
I think what we did with breaking the fourth wall was inspired by Lewis’ book. If you look at his book, he does a lot of footnotes where he says, “You’re still keeping up with what I’m saying. You deserve a gold star.” He kind of talks to the reader a little bit. That inspired us doing that in the movie. I just felt like the movies had to be inclusive. One of the ways the banks get away with ripping us off is by making us feel stupid or bored by financial talk. I wanted to open it up in a fun way because, once you get it, it’s a really energetic, exciting world. I figure if a college dropout who directed Step Brothers can understand it, the rest of the audience can. That was my operating premise. This isn’t that hard—it’s just moving dead money around and giving it weird names.

The balance is a different question. Ultimately I felt like this movie had to be driven by those characters. That’s what drove me through the book—Dr. Michael Burry, Mark Baum, Jared Vennett, the young guys. That’s the meat of this story. They’re us. They’re the people that the rest of the banking world doesn’t respect—they’re obnoxious, they’re weird. There’s also the big question of why they saw [the crisis] when no one else saw it. In the edit room, that was a big thing we looked at, balancing, trying to get the audience to have enough information so that you can go for the ride. But sometimes I’d have to stop the movie and go, “What the fuck is a synthetic CDO?” For the most part, the audiences really love it and feel like it pulls them into the movie more. The only people who have been bitching about it have been super stodgy film formalists.

You come from a theater/improv background where addressing the audience is quite common. Why do you think it’s considered such a radical idea in movies?
There’s definitely a snobbery about it that I’ve noticed. It’s a film school thing. In film school they teach you “show, don’t tell.” They literally do exercises with it. Friends of mine who were in film school talk about how you’d get in trouble if you’d tell and not show. I think it’s become this sort of unspoken rule. But some of my favorite movies of all time involve breaking the fourth wall or using narrators, like 24 Hour Party People. That’s a movie that I love. There’s such an energy to it. American Splendor. Scorsese’s done a bunch—Goodfellas, Casino. You freeze the frame, you talk. That new show, Narcos, does it a lot. I think it’s kind of changing. Early on, there was a power to film in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s where they’re showing. They’re showing a lot. I think now, because there are so many mediums going on, we can blur it a little more. I’m less precious about it. I find it really exciting to [break the fourth wall].

You worked with four A-list actors on this movie. How much direction does each of them require, and are there different techniques you have to use with each of them?
You kind of dial into each actor and what they need. In the case of Bale, he comes to set and he is the character by the time he arrives. But he’s sort of internalized all of the guy’s physical tics and emotional outlook, but we’re trying to find the right pace for it and how much [he] lets out. Do you want to see a full tour de force of what the guy is in every scene? He and I worked a lot on when to use different aspects of the character. We were constantly having a discussion about that. Occasionally, the real Michael Burry’s voice will just get loud for no reason when he’s talking to you, so we talked about when to use that. It’s a constant checking-in with Christian. He’s completely grounded in the guy, but you try to find the right times and places and make sure it feels real.

Carell is very different. Carell almost hunts down the truthful moment like he’s got a pack of dogs. When he doesn’t have it, he gets very pissed at himself. He’s just chasing it and chasing it. When I do comedies with him, it’s not like that, but with this I realized my job was to be like his hunt-master. The two of us would just chase it down. You’re just nudging it and pushing it. When you get there, it’s very cool because he’ll never say “we got it,” but then suddenly, he’s silent. I’ll say “we got it,” and he won’t say anything and we’ll move on. He’s really, really hard on himself in a great way.

Gosling had an odd role in this movie. He’s both inside the movie and outside the movie. He can talk to the camera. So he was closer to a writer-director. The way we’d talk was closer to the way Will Ferrell and I talk. He’s a super collaborative, funny guy. Brad Pitt just came in with this fully formed character. He had the hair, the beard, the look. He knew exactly who this guy is. I was like, “Hey, I want to do this scene in the kitchen.” He was like, “Yup. I want to talk about saving seeds in Monsanto.” Melissa Leo lands, gets off the plane, smokes the scene in fourteen takes, says goodbye, gets on the plane and leaves. It’s like, “Where did that come from?!”

Coming from the world of making really big studio comedies, how easy or difficult was it to pitch yourself to take on a very different project?
You’re one hundred percent right. I’ve tried to make other movies. I tried to make Garth Ennis’ The Boys at one point, and I couldn’t get anyone to make it. That was a case where I went to all the studios in town and I could feel when I was pitching it [them thinking,] “Oh, he’s a comedy guy.” It was a tricky, ambitious project, but it didn’t help that I was a comedy guy in their eyes. In this case, I got very, very lucky. The company that I went to, Plan B, are the coolest people in the world. Really open-minded. The second I pitched my take they were like, “Why didn’t we think of this? This is perfect.” They were one hundred percent behind me from the beginning. And at that point, you have to put up or shut up about the script. When Paramount got the script, they actually liked it. Then we got this incredible cast, so we were good to go. I give all the credit in the world to Plan B for being open enough to talk to me about this. Not only open, but excited to talk about it.

How deeply involved were you with Michael Lewis in translating his book to screen?
Basically, I had lunch with him before we were going to get going. He said to me, “The book was my baby. You take the baby to college now.” He really loved the script. The greatest moment was when he saw our third-to-last screening and just went on and on about it and effusively loved it. Of course, we all reacted like giant geeks!

As a moviegoer, Steve Carell continues to surprise me as his career goes on. He’s always revealing new layers to his gifts. You’ve known him for years—has he always had these dimensions to him or is he really evolving with every project?
I think he’s definitely evolving. He’s got a little bit of Peter Sellers to him in the sense that he’s very meticulous and mathematical in the way he goes about comedy. It’s all very small, precise choices. I always knew he was a very detailed technician. But I don’t think I started thinking, “Oh, wait a minute—he can play these other ranges!” until Little Miss Sunshine. He was pretty frickin’ good in that, but then I thought, “Alright, he’s a good actor, but I’ve always known he was a good actor.” But then he did The Way Way Back. That was the first time I thought, holy shit—this guy’s really good. There’s this anger there and all these emotions. And then, of course, Foxcatcher blew me away. That’s how I ended up casting him in this role. I thought, son of a bitch, I think he can do this. He’s got the anger, he can transform enough. I was knocked over by what he does in this [movie].

What’s it like not working with Will Ferrell?
I can say this: Life is twenty percent less enjoyable. He came and visited us for, like, three or four days on set just because he wanted to hang. We had the best time with him. I always miss him. He’s the best! But I think it was good that we did something separate, you know? I actually was talking to him about doing a cameo, and he was like, “McKay, go do one without me!”

Talk about the pressure cooker of working with Paul Rudd on Ant-Man to craft what that movie became.
I gotta tell you—it didn’t feel like a pressure cooker. It felt like I was in heaven. I grew up on Marvel comics. I met with Kevin Feige and I could tell, “This guy gets it.” Sometimes you meet with these executives and it’s like, “They kind of get it…” The bummer of that is when you write something really cool and they don’t get it. It was so much fun knowing that, if we wrote something cool, Feige was going to get excited about it. We just had the best time, man. It was Rudd and I holed up in a room for two straight months, writing giant action sequences. Everyone assumed I was just doing the comedy, but we rewrote huge parts of that movie. [We got to write] the whole Falcon fight at the Avengers [base]. It was so much fun. I told Feige afterwards, “Any time you need me, give me a call. That was a blast.”

Here’s a no-brainer for you: Take Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell, two of America’s funniest and most popular comedians, find an excuse to put them in a bunch of scenes together, and let them go. Tickets will be sold by the millions, people will laugh, checks will be ginormous, and a good time will be had by all. Get Hard should have been great, but the material is so off-base and dated it’s a wonder Hart and Ferrell, two of the most in-demand actors in the industry, didn’t take one look at the script and toss it straight into the trash.

Everything you’ve heard about Get Hard—that it’s unforgivably racist and homophobic—is pretty much true, though I found it much more unfunny than offensive. Race and homophobia are sensitive subjects that have been mined for comedy for decades, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The truth is, as a country we’re still tragically insecure and anxious about gay people and minorities, and humor is a great way to address those issues and acknowledge the absurdity of it all so that we might further the conversation and amend our ignorances. That sort of comedy takes a deft hand, though, so as not to seriously offend anyone, and in this sense, Get Hard fumbles hard, landing flat on its face.

Ferrell plays James King, a rich, gifted hedge-fund manager whose affluent upbringing has molded him into a walking pile of prejudice and entitlement, oblivious to the world outside his bubble of mansions, fast cars, and tailored suits. He’s an expert at white things, and a bumbling idiot when it comes to poor minority things. When he’s arrested for fraud and embezzlement, he hires his black car-washer, Darnell (Hart) to get him prison-ready in thirty days. In reality, Darnell’s a pansy family man who’s never been to and doesn’t know the first thing about jail, but the idea of a law-abiding black man doesn’t exist in King’s bubble. The rest of the movie plays out like a protracted training montage, with an inconsequential storyline about James trying to clear his name thrown in because…plot.

Director Etan Cohen, Jay Martel, and Ian Roberts wrote the script. Yes, they’re all white dudes, but surely they can’t be as insensitive and clueless as James, a character of their own creation, right? Right?! To answer this question, let’s examine an atrocious scene about halfway through the movie. James is in a bathroom stall of a gay establishment getting ready to perform fellatio on an impatient stranger (comedian Matt Walsh) as one of Darnell’s prison survival exercises. James looks frightened, and we see glimpses of the stranger’s dick. It’s clearly meant to be shocking that we’re seeing Ferrell’s face inches away from a dick, but the only thing shocking is how clumsy and unfunny it is, and the only dicks of consequence are the dicks who wrote this damn thing. Are we not past the point of finding gay sex yucky? It’s a question of taste, really. If you find rape jokes funny, boy, are you in for a treat with this movie; asses get stuffed and unstuffed aplenty. If that’s not funny to you, um…don’t see this movie. Can’t make it any clearer.

The saddest thing is, Hart and Ferrell are better than this. Ferrell is a natural when it comes to playing dimwitted, confused white guys, and Hart’s manic, firework energy is a perfect complement. These guys are really, really funny, and the fact that the writers felt they needed to resort to dick shots, rape humor, and stale race jokes to make audiences laugh is senseless and desperate. Hart and Ferrell have been making millions and millions of people laugh for years and years. They don’t need help! Hell, even the height disparity between them is funny! There are a few scenes in which they get to flex their comedic muscle, like a showcase in which Hart plays three types of thug in a prison yard exercise with Ferrell reacting like a scared little boy. These improvised moments work because the stars feel like they’re playing off of each other freely, unimpeded by the poorly crafted script.

Alison Brie plays James’ greedy fiancé, and Craig T. Nelson plays her father, who also happens to be James’ boss. They show up whenever the plot needs to move forward, and are otherwise inconsequential. T.I. surprisingly emerges as the film’s breakout performer, playing Darnell’s thuggish cousin. Despite the role being staggeringly stereotypical, the rapper somehow manages to make his character the most believable and authentic in the entire movie.

It’s hard to be truly insulted by a comedy when it’s this moronic and misguided. I can understand if people find Get Hard offensive, but pitiful seems a more apt word to me. There are some chuckles to be had here, because with such gifted and reliable talent that’s pretty much a given. But the vehicle that houses Hart and Ferrell is so scummy and poorly crafted it isn’t worth anyone’s time.

It’s been nearly a decade since Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy introduced Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay’s (then a newcomer) absurdist brand of humor to the masses, a brand of humor that earned the film the biggest cult following for a comedy since perhaps Caddyshack and lived on in McKay’s subsequent (mildly less successful) films Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys (all starring Ferrell). In Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, McKay and his now-way-more-famous cast return with a bigger, broader, less memorable chapter in Burgundy’s story. The laughs still hit hard (I was bowled over quite frequently) and the wonderful cast is as sharp and witty as ever, but multiple, needlessly inflated, disposable plotlines drag the film down, and the novelty of McKay’s unfettered randomness has all but worn off in the last ten years.

It’s 1980, and happily married newscasters Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) and Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate, as beautiful and quick as ever) arrive at an impasse when Veronica beats Ron out for a coveted position at the news station and their boss (Harrison Ford) rips Ron’s job away (in Ford’s signature callous growl). Brimming with jealous rage, Ron leaves his wife and son (one of the worst child actors I’ve seen this year) and tracks down his old news crew to start a new career path at GNN, a news network in New York, where they help to pioneer a revolutionary concept called “24-hour news” (yuck yuck).

Returning are Steve Carrell as weatherman Brick Tamland, an extreme representation of McKay’s affinity for random dialog; Paul Rudd as reporter Brian Fantana, the embodiment of faux, cologne-collector machismo; and David Koechner as sportscaster Champ Kind, an ambiguously rape-y pervert with a hilariously uncomfortable affection for Ron (long, dick-to-dick hugs). Ron and his brigade are met with fierce hostility in New York, dished out by rival hot-shot anchor Jack Lime (James Marsden, surprisingly very funny) and their alpha-female station manager (Meagan Good). With everything stacked against him (including a miserable 2am time slot), Ron stands stubbornly determined to out-career Veronica, and finds his path to success in the form of the trashy, nothing-news we’re now oh-so familiar with in 2013 (in a stroke of “brilliance”, Ron reports on a car chase and sticks with the pursuit until the perp is caught, earning him sky-high ratings).

The satire is half-baked, laid on thick, and isn’t handled with nearly the deftness of the small, zingy, hyperbolic moments Anchorman is adored for. Narratively, the movie is a mess, with a tangle of plots and sub-plots that are so conventional and uninteresting that they bog down the film’s free-flowing, improv-is-king spirit. Veronica finds a new man (Greg Kinnear); Ron’s career focus has made him an absentee father; Brick’s found a love interest (Kristen Wiig, who merely mimics Carrell’s character, disappointingly); Ron’s success gets to his head and shuns his friends; etc. It all feels too conventional and schematic, and McKay spends an inordinate amount of time fleshing these story lines out, when all we really want to see are the gags. The crowded narrative feels restrictive, barring the talent from letting loose as much as they want to.

The good news is (yes, I said it!), the funnies are as tangential, out-of-left-field, and irreverent as the first film’s, if not more. You won’t find many über-repeatable one-liners here, but there are some scenes that absolutely kill. In perhaps the most interesting narrative thread in the film (really), Ron and his family befriend a shark named Doby and sing a 2-minute-long tribute musical number in his honor that had me rumbling so hard my throat was on fire (no one else in the theater found it as found it as funny, but hey…different strokes). McKay’s sense of timing is excellent; in one scene, Ron and his team begin laughing uproariously at a throwaway joke, and then McKay awkwardly cuts–right in the middle of their guffawing–to them standing in utter silence. Again, it’s an unquotable moment, but it’s funny as hell.

McKay takes the most bizarre, out-there scene from the first film–the incredible news anchor gang fight–and recycles it here (with the expected parade of super-celeb cameos). What’s fascinating is, now that we’re so familiarized with McKay’s comedic style, the scene feels safe, redundant, unsurprising, and dull, though it still has baseline entertainment value. I wouldn’t say Anchorman 2 is an unnecessary sequel–it’s still a lot of fun to watch these guys flex their comedic muscles–but it simply doesn’t measure up to the legendary (yes…I said it!) stature of its predecessor. Unfortunately, if this sequel is an indication of a downward trend in quality for the franchise, the forecast for Ron Burgundy’s future (okay, now I’m just being stupid) looks pretty cloudy (sorry).

Nearly a decade after its release, one of the most popular and beloved comedies in recent memory, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, finally gets a follow-up, with Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. Set in the early ’80s, Ron (Will Ferrell) finds himself at odds with his wife, Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), when she beats him out for the coveted spot of nightly news anchor at the station. He leaves her (and his son), gathers his old news crew–Brick Tamland (Steve Carrell), Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), and Champ Kind (David Koechner)–and heads to New York to change news as we know it forever.

Director Adam McKay (The Other Guys, Step Brothers), after years of his original Anchorman cast growing in popularity exponentially since that first film, had to jump through a lot of hoops to give fans the sequel they’ve been clamoring for for years, but he got it done (and even shot enough alternate footage to release an entirely different cut of the movie!). Retaining all of the absurdity-based humor McKay and his cohorts made famous in the first film (and sprinkling on top of that celebrity cameos galore), Anchorman 2 is sure to please the droves of fans who have been waiting years for new Ron Burgundy quotes.

During a visit to San Francisco, McKay spoke with us and a small group of journalists about why it took so long for the sequel to see the light, he and star Will Ferrell’s writing process, why he likes randomness so much, replacing nearly every joke in his alternate cut of the film, and more.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues opens nationwide this Wednesday, December 18th

How did you and Will approach making the sequel?
The reason we didn’t do it for so long was that we were just like, “Why do a sequel?” They usually feel kind of perfunctory, or like a cash-grab. But then people kept asking us, “What about Anchorman 2?” It suddenly became intriguing. We looked at what makes sequels work and what doesn’t make them work. The ones that work continue the story [from the first film], and the ones that don’t just repeat it. The key at that point was, “Is there another chapter to this?”

We spent an afternoon kicking around ideas when we realized, “Oh my god–24-hour news started in 1980”, and that’s not that far from when the first one took place. That’s even bigger than “the first female anchor”. Once we had that, we knew we had a movie. That is a different story to tell, and it does put them through different paces.

Your brand of humor is so tangential and wild, exploring corners of comedy that very few other films have the balls to approach. With this movie, was it difficult to one-up yourself and go top places that were even more absurd?
I think, fortunately or unfortunately, that we could do that all day long. If you gave us 300 days to shoot, we could give you 300 days of tangential comedy. That’s never a problem. If you give us the most straight script in the world…if you gave us Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, we could fill it with comedy. Our background is improv–Ferrell is Groundlings and I come out of Second City. The key is [having] a good story with enough emotional beats you can hit, and that engine is working and holding it up enough–we just want [a story] that holds it up enough. Once we knew we had that story of them coming to New York and all this change, we could do the comedy forever.

And it’s also because of your cast.
Yeah. The fact that you have four go-to point of views for comedy, you can always, in any scene, throw it over to Rudd, throw it over to Carrell, Ferrell can become the straight man, or he becomes the guy doing the messed up thing and Rudd’s the straight man. It’s never-ending with that sized cast.

You said you were kicking around a couple of ideas for Anchroman 2. What was it narrowed down to? Could you share three of the ideas?
Keep in mind–the other ones were bad ideas! (laughs) One was an “Irwin Allen” idea. I think it was still about 24-hour news, but the guy who owned 24-hour news built an underwater hotel, and the news story was that the glass they were using was faulty and Burgundy covered up the story because he didn’t want to lose his job. The end of the [film] was this crazy, 1970’s, Irwin Allen, underwater thing with the glass cracking, water flooding the room, those bad Towering Inferno shots. We actually wrote and ending with that, but we could see it getting a bit boring.

Another one was as dumb as this–they go to space, somehow. Ferrell was like, “I don’t know what this is, but somehow we’re in space.” You could justify it! You go to the space shuttle, you could have it be that this is the first reporter to go up. I was wary of those action-y third-act endings, where it’s like, you’re in a comedy, so you’re doing action, but not quite as well. It can get a little boring. Ultimately, we stuck with the characters and made it about [Ron], his wife, his son, the news, and staying in that pocket.

You still have an explosive climax in the movie.
We do. You’re talking about the gang fight?

Yes.
We kind of knew that somehow it’s crazy, since in the first movie, [the fight] is operating within the logic of that movie. Somehow, it became somewhat of a conservative ending, as crazy as it is! We weren’t going to do it at first. We said, let’s not repeat anything from the first movie. We were going to be really strict about it, but we said, “We’ve got to do another gang fight!” It would be too much fun, and now that we know how to make movies a bit better, we could do stuff we didn’t do the first time.

How easy or difficult was it to secure some of the cameos for that gang fight?
It was pretty crazy. We drew up a wish list of all the people we wanted, and what we ended up with was basically our wish list. It’s never happened before–usually, when you do your dream casting, you get 30%, 40%, only one of the people. In this case, they all said yes, and it was insane. When they all said yes, I thought, “Should we try crazier ones?” So we actually tried Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was an immediate, decisive “no”. Oprah’s person was like, “You never know!” There was an hour where we thought, “She might do this!” But then [they said] no.

The Barack Obama one was crazy–we had a semi-connection in the White House, and the connection was like, “He might do this! If he gets to say something with a point of view…”. The joke was going to be that he was from C-SPAN. He was going to say that C-SPAN was going to change the news, because it was going to be stripped-down, and you’d see the truth. “Someday, everyone’s going to be watching C-SPAN!” Of course, I’m sure someone underneath him was like, “Are you fucking crazy?! He’s the President!”

How did you develop your brand of humor?
It’s always been what I’ve liked, going back to the Fawlty Towers episode when the German comes in with a head injury. I remember laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes. Or, in Airplane when there’s the spinning headlines and there’s the one that says, “Boy Trapped in Refrigerator, Eats Own Foot.” A lot of comedy writers have pointed to that joke as a seminal joke. It’s those moments when all order goes away and it’s just chaos. To me, as a kid, there was nothing more exciting than watching a movie and realizing, “Oh my god–anything can happen!”

The first time Will and I ever collaborated was our first year on SNL, a sketch called “Wake Up and Smile”, which was about the teleprompter breaks [during a newscast.] It basically becomes Lord of the Flies–since they’re not being told what to say, they all revert to their animal selves. It ends with Ferrell ripping the head off of David Allen Grier, with lots of blood, and they form a cult, like, “The Order of the Hand”. They just regress immediately. The first sketch he and I ever wrote was called “Niel Diamond: Storytellers”. That was another one where we just got fucking insane. The joke was [that Niel Diamond was telling all the stories behind his songs, and he] has all these harmless pop songs, but the stories are just horrible. “When I killed a drifter to get a hard-on.” They just get more and more out of control, and we realized, “we both like this!”

You’ve got all this footage of these funny guys saying funny things, so much footage that you have enough for a second edit, which you’re going to release. How much fun is it in that editing room, and is the second edit done?
It is done. I just went in and gave all the last notes on it. It’s crazy. It’s 350 new jokes. I think there’s, like, seven jokes we couldn’t replace that were spoken jokes. Otherwise, every single joke is replaced. It’s about 10-15 minutes longer, there’s whole new runs and riffs. I can’t imagine doing a comedy any other way. When we’re in that editing room, the worst feeling is when you’re painted into a corner by a crappy joke. “Shit! We have nowhere else to go!” With every movie I do, I hate that feeling more and more, so I just make sure to have alternate takes no matter what we’re doing. It’s the greatest–I’ll go to the editor and say, “There’s got to be a better joke than that.” A lot of times I’ll remember [something we did on the day], and he’ll go and dig it out. One of the other editors will cut four versions of the scene, I’ll go “That one!”, and we’ll test screen it. The sheer volume of improv on this one, because there are so many actors, we were doing two screenings at the same time most of the time. We’d run another cut in a different theater, and I’d get to see every joke. You record the laugh track and you go, “Holy shit, that worked!” Up until we locked, we were finding new jokes. We screened the alternate version before we had locked picture on the regular release, and I found four new jokes in the alternate version that went into the regular movie. By the way, I could still be doing it now. It never ends. It’s a blast.

Were there any discarded plotlines for this movie?
No, amazingly. There are a lot of plotlines, too. I was joking with [Judd] Apatow that it’s like James Brooks were 11-years-old and into minotaurs and tridents, that’s what [this movie’s] like.  There are, like, five storylines going through it. There’s the love story with Meagan Good, there’s the broken marriage, there’s the relationship with the son, Tamland has a love affair going, there’s the news and the synergy thing…there’s a lot. I thought for sure one or two of them would be cut, but they all seemed to play.

In this case, it was just the alt jokes, the sheer tonnage of improve. It’s very funny when you tell the studio, in the first [movie’s] case, “We have a second movie.” They can’t comprehend it. I told them, and they were like, “Haha! Must feel like that, right?” I told them that we had a second movie and that we’d already cut it, and it just didn’t compute. Later, when the movie kind of hit, they were like, “What did you mean about that second movie?” They didn’t even do anything with it the first time. It was the same thing in this case. I kept telling them we had a second movie with all new jokes. This time, they believed us a little more and they’ve already scheduled it to be released.

What made you want Brick to have a love interest? Why him?
I think the answer is almost in the question. Just say, “Brick has a love story.” Will and I sit down and just spray out possibilities. We write this 25-page document of what we’d want to see in the movie that makes no sense with the story at all, these dream moments. I don’t remember which one of us said, “Brick’s got to fall in love.” It wasn’t calculated at all. It just came out of what we wanted to see in the movie. I think it’s a little bit inspired by the ending first movie where it says he’s married with eleven kids.

Are there any jokes that you went with even though they maybe didn’t quite work with test audiences?
That’s an interesting question. That’s the fun of it–there’s an artistry to that. You’re not a slave to those test audiences. We put jokes in even though they don’t work, just because we think they’re funny. But you need the audience to go on the ride with you; you can’t just isolate them. It’s this give and take you’re constantly playing with. There’s the line between Brick [and his love interest] Chani (Kristen Wiig) where she says, “I’m trained and certified…” (and then Brick finishes the sentence) “…to fire a military-grade missile launcher.” It never got a peep out of the audiences, but at one point I was like, too fucking bad–it’s going in the movie. Sometimes there’ll be a joke that I don’t necessarily love, but then it kills, and you’re like, “What? Why is it killing?” If they love it that much, it’s like, alright, they can have that one. That process is just so much fun. You’re taking the audience on a ride, but messing with them a little bit.

They do test scores [with the test audiences] where they combine the “Excellents” and the “Very Goods” and you get a number out of it. You hear about movies that get a “98” or “100”. We don’t want that. For this one, I said the highest we should ever get is a “90”–I still want 10% of that crowd not liking the movie. That was the highest we got. There still should be some people walking out going, “That got too weird for me…”, you know?

It’s been going around that Paramount had cold feet about giving this movie the green light. What was their concern, and what changed their minds?
It was purely about the fact that since the first one, all these guys have become incredibly successful. They all have high quotes, and rightfully so. On paper, if you’re going to do the movie and pay everyone what they should be paid, it was going to be a certain budget level. We told them that, and they went, “Are you fucking crazy!?” We said alright, we won’t do it, and made The Other Guys. People kept asking us and asking us about it, and we went, “Shit, man. We should do this anyway.” We went back to the studio and said we’d do a pay cut, and we still couldn’t get it right. Then, at the last second, they were able to find the right budget level, but it still involved everyone taking 60% pay cuts. But, you know what? We can’t complain. We still get paid ridiculous amounts of money for the jobs we do. Ultimately, it’s so much fun.