Recess’ Ross Green met with Your Highness star and screenwriter Danny McBride and David Gordon Green at the Umstead Hotel and Spa in Cary, North Carolina, and discussed the trappings of big-budget filmmaking, their HBO series Eastbound and Down, and their meteoric rise through the comedy world. The two were promoting the film with advance screenings at North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem and North Carolina State University.
Recess: You’ve worked with James Franco before, on Pineapple Express. What is it that makes him such a versatile actor?
Danny McBride: Everything he does is funny. He’s one of those great actors that has such sincerity and looks like he’d be just the good-looking dude. But he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
David Gordon Green: And he’ll do anything. The crazier it is, the more excited he gets about it. I thought [the Oscar telecast] was hilarious. And he wasn’t [stoned]— he’s a totally clean, straight-edge guy. Who knows what’s going on his head, but it cracked me up when he said [after the Academy Awards awards], “Congratulations, nerds.”
DM: It was like the everyman’s take on the Oscars, and the Oscars are…I mean, they’re usually boring.
DGG: It wasn’t the big, song-and-dance Hugh Jackman or Billy Crystal type of spectacle. It was like, if a normal guy hosted the Oscars.
R: Discuss the challenge of filming a period-piece fantasy as opposed to a film like Pineapple Express:
DM: One thing about this film: it looks like it cost double what it ended up costing. Movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which we love and are hilarious, make jokes about how they don’t have the money to make it a big period-piece movie. They’ll simulate the sound of horseback riding with coconuts being clapped together. We wanted Your Highness to feel like it’s as big as Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, but obviously if you have the budget of those films, you can’t make as many dick jokes as we can. For us, the question was how do we get that big-budget feel without the actual budget.
R: You shot Your Highness in Belfast, Northern Ireland; how did you choose that location?
DGG: We went there because it has this great natural beauty, these great landscapes and rock formations and castles that we could take advantage of. One thing about Pineapple Express—and I’m very proud of that film— is that a lot of it was shot in someone’s living room. It’s really small in scope; this was an opportunity for us to make all that explode, to take what we thought was funny and put this huge landscape behind it.
R: Can you speak to the risk of doing a period-piece comedy, after the Jack Black/Michael Cera vehicle Year 1 bombed.
DGG: [Year 1] was really helpful because it came out right before we made this movie, and it was a spoof; people spoke like modern-day Americans. It helped us illustrate why we wanted to go 100% legit on making a big adventure action movie, play it totally straight, and have the comedy come out of the absurdity of the characters, rather than making a goofball sketch-comedy version of it.
DM: David and I constantly feel like we’ve snuck into the party and at any moment we’re gonna be thrown out—that we’re not really supposed to be here. So when we’re given an opportunity to make something together, we don’t want to waste it making something that was safe or down-the-middle. For better or worse, if the movie tanks, we can say that we took a chance and made something totally unlike anything else out there.
R: Five years ago, you guys were making low-budget films like The Foot Fist Way. Do you look around at your cast of Oscar nominees and indie darlings and wonder how you got here?
DM: I’m always surprised. Whenever you see a shot of Natalie, it always trips you up. You’re like, “Wow, that’s a real movie star in our movie.” There are some of those moments that will probably always surprise me.
DGG: I definitely get kind of overwhelmed with how awesome the opportunities we have are. You wake up during production and you think “Oh my god, we’re gonna go fight monsters today and I have this unbelievable cast to work with.” But even [on the promotional tour], I wake up and I’m in this fancy hotel, getting paid to make and promote this movie. I definitely still wake up without a feeling of entitlement, without feeling like its old hat, and thinking about what can I do next.
DM: We didn’t get a massage [at the hotel spa] but we took our time in the pool.
DGG: I definitely pissed in that pool a little bit (laughs).
DM: It is fun to share the movie with people, even to sneak into the back of the theater and see what people are reacting to. I tend to never watch the stuff I’m in after it comes out, so this is the time when you can enjoy what you’ve done and see people’s reactions to it.
R: You guys have done a number of feature-length comedies and a television series with HBO. What type of projects are you looking to move on to?
DM: I went to film school to be a director and a lot of my training is in the field, so I would love to focus on getting behind the camera a little bit more.
DGG: I just finished up a new movie that I’ve been working on; it’s Jonah Hill taking three kids on a coke run in New York City. And I’m hoping to twist into something a little different; there’s a horror movie I really wanna make. Your Highness opened me up to a lot of genres—the adventure, the romance—that I haven’t explored yet. I started out making independent dramas. Although I guess right out of the gate I’ve had a shot of a dude running around in his skivvies in every movie except for Your Highness…
DM: Although you do have a shot of a dude running around without a dick in this one, so…
DGG: I still got my track record (laughs). But audiences want to see a new movie every week, to see something different, and who wants to do the same thing over and over again?
R: You recently started writing the next season of Eastbound and Down. What can we expect from Kenny in the third season?
DM: We’re going back to Myrtle Beach; I think you’ll see a lot of the cast members from the first season back for this one.
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