Adjectives like "wild", "insane" and "anarchic" are inadequate when attempting to describe TIM AND ERIC'S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE. In fact, I'm pretty sure the adjectives required to properly convey what occurs in this film haven't been invented. Let's just say it's vintage Tim and Eric, and leave it at that.
And if you don't know from "vintage Tim and Eric", I can think of no better place to start than with this star-studded tale of two ambitious young filmmakers who blow $1 billion on an unreleasable movie. Now in debt to the growling and very dangerous Tommy Schlaaang (a growling and very wonderful Robert Loggia), the duo hightail it for the Swallow Valley Mall, which they plan to fix up and somehow earn back the money they owe. Left to their own devices by the mall's TOP GUN-obsessed proprietor (Will Ferrell), they wind up doing very little to actually rehabilitate the mall. For the most part, Eric spends his time trying to win the heart of a comely-ish kiosk employee (Twink Caplan), while Tim steals the son of a used toilet paper store owner. They are assisted in the half-assed endeavors by Taquito (John C. Reilly), a touched young man who was raised in the mall by wolves.
TIM AND ERIC'S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE is all over the map in an endearingly deranged fashion; as with their TV shows, TIM AND ERIC AWESOME SHOW, GREAT JOB! and TOM GOES TO THE MAYOR, you've just got to give yourself over to the madness and trust that the hit-to-miss ratio will be high enough to justify the sit. From the absurdly protracted company logo gag to the climactic bloodbath, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. At times, it's an absurdly effective showbiz satire; mostly, it's just out of its fucking mind. But Heidecker and Wareheim keep the laughs coming, and get out just as the film is threatening to overstay its welcome. As a debut film, it's much funnier than NIGHT OF THE HUNTER.
Earlier this week, I spoke with the duo about their initial dalliance with the big picture business. We discussed their creative process, the potentially off-putting middle section of the film, and their admirable anti-torrenting crusade.
Shrim not, lest ye be shrimmed.
Mr. Beaks: Making a film on your own terms like this, is there a certain budget number at which you know compromise is going to be necessary?
Eric Wareheim: Even $100 more than what we made this movie for. I think we were right in the zone of "Alright, that's a small enough amount of money to just run with it, and we'll cross our fingers and hopefully get our money back."
Tim Heidecker: We made the movie for between $2 million and $3 million.
Beaks: Was there ever a thought to making a bigger film?
Wareheim: This was pretty big for us, to be honest with you. We got almost everything we wanted. We worked with a crew that can make magic happen for very little money, the same way we made our TV shows for very little money. We didn't have to cut too much stuff out of our original idea.
Heidecker: I don't know what people do with $30 million or $100 million.
Beaks: Pay people who have very little to do with the actual making of the film, I think.
Heidecker: I guess so.
Beaks: How tightly scripted was this flim?
Wareheim: It was much tighter than our TV shows, which were more experimental in the way that we'd put a couple of people in some sort of set and try to find the joke. In the movie, we knew we were on a budget and time constraints, so we had to make a story happen and have it outlined in much more detail in the script. There's no way to improvise a narrative for that amount of time, so we relied on the script for the framework of the movie.
Beaks: How long did it take you to hammer out the script?
Heidecker: I'd say there was an initial six-week period of really going from zero pages to 100 pages, and then a longer back-and-forth editing process of rewriting and cutting things. It was really up until the shooting. We were cutting things for scheduling and budget and all kinds of reasons. We had a lot of ideas, and you've got to pick your battles.
Beaks: How did you structure the narrative? Did you use index cards for bits you wanted to incorporate?
Wareheim: It was pretty traditional: we had a board that had different kinds of story elements. We knew we were going to cut away to the "Understanding Your Movie" parts. We also had "fight scene" and "sex scene"; we blocked it out like we block out our TV show, and looked at it from a distance to make sure we're hitting things in the right moment. So you have "story element" and "wild joke".
Heidecker: It's funny, i was watching this documentary about Stanley Kubrick the other day, and his philosophy was as long as you have six or seven chunks, you can get a movie going.
Beaks: So what were the crucial chunks for you?
Heidecker: Getting that first twenty minutes of being in that Hollywood world, that douchebag world... that was important. And like Eric said, the sex scene, the Shrim scene, the big ending and the cutaways out of the movie.
Beaks: I love the company logo gag at the beginning, and how it keeps going. Did you ever think about going longer with that?
Heidecker: In the first many drafts of the movie, the first twenty pages of the script were those jokes, every conceivable movie-opening gag written out. And then we were like, "Alright, we can make this shorter." But we always knew, since this is Tim & Eric's first movie, there were going to be a lot of movie jokes in the first few minutes.
Beaks: Were you writing for certain actors?
Wareheim: We knew Zach [Galifianakis] would be a hippie-dippie spiritual guru, and we knew Will Ferrell and Will Forte could take their characters to those certain places. We'd worked with these guys before, and we knew they could go to that extra level of acting on the edge of sanity.
Beaks: I think John C. Reilly's Taquito is the tragic soul of this film. How much did he personally add to the character?
Heidecker: A lot of dialing in the voice and the makeup and that stuff happened very quickly on set, but he had a lot of input.
Wareheim: The way we usually work with those guys is we design a character for them and script out a couple of scenes. But they know they can add or subtract stuff to the character, and we like that kind of collaborative process.
Heidecker: The best stuff is always the stuff you don't think about or write. Taquito kissing us, I don't think that was scripted. I think that just came naturally, and that becomes the funniest part. We just all trust each other and are comfortable with each other, so it just becomes really creative.
Beaks: I think the middle section of this film is fascinating. You guys really commit to the cutting back-and-forth between Tim having very... strange sex with Katie, and then Eric you're getting defecated on in a bathtub by young boys. That goes on for some time. I think people who aren't familiar with your sensibility can stick with the film up to that point, but all of that might be a bit much for them. Did you consciously think of that scene that way?
Wareheim: No, we never thought of it as "This is going to turn people off." We just thought of it as a climax of funniness. Our primary goal is to make people laugh, and sometimes watching uncomfortable things is part of the process. Originally, those were two scenes; they weren't cross-cut at all. In editing, we needed to trim a lot of time, so we made that kind of a big montage scene. (Laughs),/em> It was actually a lot longer, but I think cross-cutting them, giving them THE GODFATHER treatment, kind of works.
Heidecker: We look at those things as being very silly and childish, and not something that should gross you out as much as just laugh at how stupid and silly it is. The sex stuff is clearly just two people goofing around. I don't think the intention is to think that that's real diarrhea. I think if you're reasonably intelligent and aren't too uptight, you can just appreciate that as silly and stupid.
Beaks: It's definitely funny, but at the same time it's... a lot.
Wareheim: I think one thing we're also noticing is that Tim and I have lived in this weird vacuum for the last seven years making our own show where this kind of thing is not out of the blue. We've had these kinds of sex scenes and gross poop jokes, but now that the movie is on a larger scale, we realize we're exposing people to this alternate universe that is kind of normal for us. And people are like, "Whoa, that's pretty intense."
Beaks: With alternative comedy, there's often a feeling that "the right people will get it". How do you feel about expanding your audience? Is this something you're trying to do?
Heidecker: There's a core of our audience that you could expect: a sort of younger, college-educated, hipster, alternative-style kind of people. But we run into people all the time that are like housewives and people's parents... just normal people. I don't necessarily think that our stuff is designed to exclude people. I don't know what it is about somebody who doesn't like it that makes them not like it.
Wareheim: I valeted my car the other night, and a maybe, like, forty-eight-year-old man took my keys and said, "I promise not to shrim in your car." I just wanted to sit with him and be like, "How do you know about the movie? Why?" But we love expanding our audience. That's not our primary goal, though. This movie is really made for us. Luckily, the fans like it, and hopefully others will like it.
Heidecker: I think it comes down to... it's a really easy thing to say in journalism and criticism, "Well, if you're not a fan of these guys, you might want to be careful." I don't know if anyone's ever done any research to say if that's the case. That just seems like a simple, logical thing to write, but it might not be true.
Beaks: A lot of your audience is young and technically savvy, and you guys have been fighting against the torrenting instinct some of these people have. At a recent Q&A, two kids raised their hands to say they'd torrented the movie, and they were...
Heidecker: ... ejected from the theater.
Beaks: (Laughing) Yes. Do you feel that your audience is largely supportive of this approach to combating piracy?
Wareheim: We think so. Our approach was let's do this in a funny way so we don't look like assholes. I've seen bands begging audiences to not torrent. But we're going to give you something; we got all of these celebrities, and made this funny pledge video. It's just another thing where we're like, "We're just like you. We worked really hard on this thing, and if you don't buy it, we're screwed and you won't get another movie." I feel like a lot of those people understood that message, and they tweeted us saying, "Yes, we bought this movie, and we've never paid for a movie or album before."
Heidecker: But the audience also knows, from at least what I tweet, that we also understand that the system is fucked up and needs to be fixed. We understand the demand for that, but at the same time... Magnolia has made the right choice in making the movie as available to as many people as possible in the easiest and most open way possible. It's going to be out on DVD eventually, and on all kinds of formats that everybody can get ahold of pretty affordably.
Beaks: If you make another movie, what direction would you like to take this? Would it be a proper sequel or something else entirely?
Wareheim: We're not quite sure yet. One idea was to do the "Trillion Dollar Movie," and it opens that we're in jail because we murdered all of those people. But I think the next movie will be similar, and it's "Tim & Eric's Some Sort of Adventure."
Heidecker: That's our instinct right now. But I think when we start writing, who knows where it will go? We don't want to repeat ourselves, and we've never done that in our career. That's what people will expect, for us to give them something new and different. The more you do that, the harder it becomes, but we won't rush anything out that we're not proud and excited for.
TIM AND ERIC'S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE opens this weekend in theaters. It's also available via VOD. Check it out.
Faithfully submitted,
