Hammer & Thump

Though it’s not technically a Broken Lizard film, thanks to director Jay Chandrasekhar and co-star Kevin Heffernan, the new raunch-com The Babymakers shares the outrageous, often offensive sensibilities of the New York comedy troupe responsible for Super Troopers, Beerfest, and Club Dread.

The Babymakers follows Tommy and Audrey (Parks and Recreation‘s Paul Schneider and Magic Mike‘s Olivia Munn), a couple trying to get pregnant. When it turns out Tommy is now sterile, his pals (including Heffernan) hatch a plan to break into a sperm bank and steal back the still-potent seed of life Tommy had donated years earlier. This fool-proof plan also involves hiring a “master thief” from “the Indian Mafia,” played of course by Chandrasekhar.

Last week two other writers and I sat down with Chandrasekhar and Heffernan to talk about The Babymakers and its parade of masturbation and sperm jokes. But the chat instead turned out to be a very thoughtful and informative look into the process of comedy film making from two guys who take their craft seriously.

The Babymakers opens today in select theaters and is also available from video on demand.

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How did The Babymakers come together?

Jay Chandrasekhar: I ran into my friend Jason Blum who produced Paranormal Activity and Insidious, and he’s done pretty well with these low-budget horror movies. And he asked, “Do you think we could do the same thing with a comedy? We need a movie that can be accomplished for not a huge amount of money but also has a big sort of studio hook.” Kevin had brought us the Babymakers script from Peter Gaulke and Gerry Swallow that had ended up in turnaround at Warners. I’m friends with them, so I called the studio and asked for it back and they said “Sure.”

Though this isn’t technically a Broken Lizard film, there’s plenty of your humor in it. However, it also deals with more grown-up issues like relationships and family planning.

Chandrasekhar: We’re people who live in the moment, right? So when we were writing that beer-drinking movie, we were drinking a lot of beer.

Kevin Heffernan: Write what you know.

Chandrasekhar: And while we weren’t cops, we were certainly smoking a lot of grass at the time of Super Troopers, and that’s what it’s about, grass smoking. So now we have a lot of jokes about kids and wives and trying to have kids. It doesn’t mean they’re super clean. Often in Hollywood romance is treated with this sort of hazy glow and nice music, and it’s why we’ve ended up with a lot of these romantic comedies that are intolerable to watch.

This is also a heist movie.

Chandrasekhar: Heist movies seem to be very popular in Hollywood right now. They’re extremely fun to act in. We put those masks on, and we’re creeping around, and we’re like, “We’re in a heist movie!” It’s exciting. I also think the elements of them are starting to get a little repetitive, so it ends up being very fertile comedic ground.

Heffernan: Plus, there’s this high-concept idea of sperm bank heist movie–we haven’t seen that before. It’s the kind of thing you throw as a one liner and people will say, “Oh, okay that sounds funny.”

How did Paul Schneider and Olivia Munn get involved?

Chandrasekhar: Brian Cox on Super Troopers was such a good actor, and you put a great actor in the middle of a movie like ours’ and it grounds the whole thing, and allows us to cover him in powdered sugar, or to put Jürgen Prochnow in a beer vat.

So we like that formula, and Paul is one of the great actors of this generation – I think that’s reasonable to say. We loved him in Lars and the Real Girl, and our friend David Gordon Green had worked with him when they were in college and said he’s one of the funniest guys he’s ever met. And Olivia was in our film The Slammin’ Salmon, which Kevin directed, and she’s great—she’s funny, she’s a good actress, she’s bright, she’s…

Heffernan: …beautiful…

Chandrasekhar: …beautiful, and has a quick comic mind, really quick, and writes a lot of jokes herself. Hollywood wasn’t ready to hand her a lead, but she and I were friends, and she said, “I need to play this part.” Of course since then she’s worked with Sorkin on The Newsroom and Soderbergh on Magic Mike, so we ended up riding the Olivia wave this summer.

The humor between Paul and Olivia is very deadpan, but you guys bring the silly Broken Lizard jokes. How do you find that balance between the two types of comedy in a film like this?

Chandrasekhar: To me the most important thing about any comedy is when you’re constructing the script and developing it, you have to say the movie’s going to exist within a certain bandwidth of jokes. So the most serious and subtle it gets is between Paul and Olivia, and the biggest it’s going to get is with Kevin and me doing our stuff. But it’s gotta fit—some jokes, some improv were too big and they were cut from the movie. They’re funny, but I don’t believe “If it’s funny keep it in.” You try, but if it doesn’t fit the tone, lose it.

Heffernan: Also you want to believe the main couple’s relationship – if it’s too arch or too broad, it’s not gonna work. And Olivia’s sense of humor is very dry–she’ll throw a joke out, and it will take you a second, “Wait a minute, what?” because she’s so sarcastic. And we’re used to playing these Broken Lizard characters, so if you believe Paul and Olivia’s relationship, then we can be the silly guys.

Does shooting fast and cheap lend itself to making a comedy?

Chandrasekhar: I’ve shot a lot of television lately—Arrested Development and Community and Up All Night and Happy Endings—and you’re in situations where you have to shoot a lot of very densely packed pages in a short amount of time. There are so many jokes you have to pay attention to in an episode of Community–physical gags, prop gags, or verbal gags or some combination of them all. So when it came time to do something like this film, it didn’t feel any harder than shooting an episode of any of these shows.

And how do you find the comedic balance in the editing process?

Chandrasekhar: You go long in the beginning, then you show it to audiences that you like and trust, people you know, and you make them give you honest answers. Sometimes it’s filmmakers or editors we know, and they’ll say, “The timing feels off” or “This is too much of this sperm stuff,” “Too many ball hits,” and you trim it away.

Also we learned how to edit movies because we couldn’t afford to pay an editor, so I’m in the editors’ guild. Our editor took a pass through this film, then I went in and adjusted it for my timing and gave it back to him and said, “I’m not as good with this action stuff, make it good, fix it, do your thing, but the timing of the dialog is roughly in the space where I want it.” To me that’s the whole thing with a Broken Lizard movie—you could listen to it and you can hear our timing. The most important thing about the editing process is putting it into a rhythm.

In addition to rough editing, you’ve both directed and acted in your films. Broken Lizard has become its own little film school.

Heffernan: We learned a lot on the job. We shot [our first short] Puddle Cruiser, and we didn’t even know where to put the camera. I was lucky to be involved in the production on all the previous movies from soup to nuts in terms of pre-production and post-production, so I was able to learn as we went along. By the time we got to The Slammin’ Salmon we had the same crew we’d used, so it wasn’t like I was being thrown to the wolves. The thing I learned was how grueling it is to direct a film and act in a film. It’s a tricky thing to keep all those things in your head and you’re acting. So I have a little respect for Chandrasekhar.

Chandrasekhar: Finally. [Laughs] Kevin directed my acting in this film. I learned from Brian Cox and now from Paul to shoot six takes and start with something subtle and get a little bigger and bigger until its over the top, so you have a range of choices.

Then you need someone to watch you and say, “You know, the timing on that could be a little different, put three quarters of a second pause there, try that.” Somebody watching you is crucial, because everyone else on the set except for him, their answer is “Yes sir, absolutely sir.”

Heffernan: Mine’s “Fuck you.”

Chandrasekhar: Yeah, he’s the only one who’s gonna go, “Eh, that’s not good.” I always say that directing and acting ruins two perfectly good jobs. But it’s the greatest way to get a good part. You’d be amazed at how many good parts I’ve gotten for myself. We looked at this going into it and said none of us in Broken Lizard have model good looks – I’m Indian, Kevin’s a big man, so how are we gonna star in movies? Let’s do it ourselves. And our mad plan has worked.