Slammin’ The Salmon with Broken Lizard

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Article by IFQ Critic Todd Konrad

Since producing and releasing their first comedic feature together, Puddle Cruiser, the comedy team Broken Lizard has stayed consistently busy since their cinematic debut in the mid-Nineties. The group, consisting of members Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, followed that first movie with a string of beloved, practically cult classic, comedies: Super Troopers, Club Dread and Beerfest. In addition, each of the members worked on separate, non-Lizard projects from The Dukes of Hazard (directed by Jay Chandrasekhar and featuring Kevin Heffernan in a supporting role) to Paul Soter’s directorial debut, Watching The Detectives, starring Cillian Murphy and Lucy Liu to name only a couple of examples.

Whether together or individually, the Lizards bring to the screen their own uniquely consistent sensibility, which can be traced from that first project to their latest outing, The Slammin’ Salmon. Directed by Heffernan, the film received its world premiere at the 2009 Slamdance Film Festival. Speaking of the screening, Heffernan noted that “…at one particularly funny scene a guy literally fell off out of his chair and off the riser on to the floor because he was laughing so hard.” I recently spoke with both Heffernan and Soter as well as long-time producer Rich Perello in order to gain some insight into this latest film’s origins as well as the working habits and history of the Lizards themselves.

Part One: Broken Lizard Producer Rich Perello

IFQ: How did you hook up with the Lizards in the first place, and what made you want to

climb on board as their producer?

Rich Perello: I had been a struggling filmmaker trying to get some features off the ground; I had made some short films that were actually pretty successful and tried to get a feature off the ground unsuccessfully. So I ended up going back to Wall Street, which is where I started after college. And with my new gig on Wall Street I told my employers basically that I wanted to be a filmmaker and that I’d be spending fifty percent of my time making films or trying to make films and fifty percent dedicated to the investment banking business. They were ok with that and I was trying to set up some films, we had a series of temps that worked at the firm. One of them happened to be one of the members of Broken Lizard, Erik Stolhanske, and he was in a cubby near my office and heard me talking about film and I heard him talking about film.

We finally connected one day and he said “you know I work with these guys, we have a live comedy show, we’ve done some shorts stuff and we’re actually trying to put a feature together. Why don’t you come by and check out our short film?” So I went to see a screening of Tin Foil Monkey Agenda which was the first Broken Lizard, extended-length short film, about 20 minutes long, and it was absolutely hilarious. Erik then invited me back to the loft, what we called ‘The Lizard Loft’ which was a loft these guys had in SoHo before SoHo rents went through the roof.

All the Lizards lived there and they were doing a writing session. I was laughing so loudly at almost everything that was going on, basically how they interacted, how they were coming up with material and then after seeing the film, I was convinced I wanted to be in business with these guys. And so they had a little script called Puddle Cruiser. We ventured out on our first feature together, all of us making our first feature film, including many of the people involved in the movie besides us, i.e. the cast and crew. We went up to Colgate University and shot that indie film. So that’s how it all started and I’ve been with them ever since.

IFQ: That actually leads to my next question fortunately enough. Starting off with Puddle Cruiser, which was a completely independent project, to films made under studio auspices like Club DreadBeerfest, what are the pros and cons of putting a production together yourself versus working with a studio in your experience with the Lizards? and

RP: You know, there’s always the obvious creative independence which for filmmakers is sometimes the most important aspect of making a film independently. You don’t really have to answer to someone in a suit about who’s going to portray whatever acting role you have or what color the sets are going to look like or what the script’s going to look like. So creative independence is the obvious, first thing but there’s also some nuances in actually physically making the film, basically pros and cons. One of the most important for us has always been that we work basically under an extended family atmosphere. We’re still working with people that we collaborated with on the first film, Puddle Cruiser, our sound department, grips, the DP of our last film was the second AC on our first film. So we tend to bring people with us as we move up and along in our filmmaking, and when we’re making them independently we have a much easier time bringing all the people we want on board to make the next film. Whereas with a studio, we often have to go with someone who has more experience or that the studio approves of whether it’s a casting director or director of photography.

It’s always worked out in the end but it’s nicer to have the personalities that you know and you know their strengths and weaknesses and can build around them. I also find that when you’re working independently, even though you’re working twice as hard and twice as many hours for half as much money, you’re incredibly efficient in that you really can’t afford to be wasteful in time or resources. From every level then you become much more efficient and there’s so much less time for dealing with the red tape of approvals. You can make a decision on the fly that will be most beneficial and efficient for the production and creatively as opposed to “let me see if I can get that pushed through the studio” or “what are the steps I need to take to get studio approval?” By the time that’s all said and done, you’ve wasted a week of your time when you could be using that time much more effectively. So those finally are the biggest advantages: creative freedom, working with people that you love to work with, and also the efficiency because even though you tend to have less resources you tend to work much better.

But the upside of working with the studio is that we have these fabulous offices on the Warner Bros lot, and when my mom comes to town to her it finally seems like I have a real job you know? I have a little parking space with my name on it that she gets all excited about, Aaron Sorkin’s little golf cart is right near my space, which drives her nutty. We have a stable base of operations with people that work with us, people we’ve been able to hire because in the past we weren’t able to do those kinds of things and there’s also the power of Warner Bros. For example, if we’re making a Warner Bros movie or Fox movie, or in this case a Warner Bros movie, where scheduling is never an issue when we need to get something into the lab and out right away. Or being able to rent equipment when we need it, because we can actually pay what they ask us to pay (laughs).

There’s no begging, borrowing, or stealing to get anything done. And then one of the things we recognized in making our first couple of studio movies is that there’s something to be said for all those people who do have a considerable amount of experience in making a film and bringing them into the mix. We would have a challenge of how do you blow up a car? How do you do this? And it’s hard to find that guy who has never done it before and say to him “hey we’re going to have you go blow up the car” whereas with a guy who’s blown up a hundred cars, it’s much easier for him to do so it makes production go much more smoothly. So having the advantage of those people with years of experience, really knowing what they’re doing, and bringing it to the table. What I think we’ve created now then is this really nice mix of creative people involved in our films, those who have done it a thousand times, know all the tricks of the trade and how to problem solve but also bringing people who are new to this world or relatively green to the studio making process who can do things a little bit differently than those who’ve done it a thousand times before.

IFQ: Getting back to the Lizards, besides The Slammin’ Salmon, are there any other Lizard projects in the pipeline that we should be looking for and if so, could you give us a little bit of info about them?

RP: We’re in an interesting position these days because not only are we developing our own projects which are Broken Lizard-starred, writing, and directing but we also producing. So we have several projects where either one of the members is writing or directing or a combination of those things, but not all the guys are acting in it or maybe some of the guys are acting in it and we’re helping them push it along. Or they’re entirely new people that we’re working with, so we have a variety of different projects in different phases right now. We have a couple of Broken Lizard projects similar to our past projects that we’re trying to get off the ground.

One is The Greek Road, and just for the record, I’m terrible at the pitch so I’ll leave that for the creative guys. But it’s essentially an ancient Greek road movie where Plato is a wrestler for Athens University and is failing Basic Philosophy so the university hires Aristotle to tutor him in so he can make the Olympic team wrestling finals. They travel on the road together while the gods are betting against each other over whether they’ll actually make it or not; so that’s one of our epic stories that we’re trying to set up. But that’s a bigger-budget film and we’re trying to get a studio behind that it. We’ve had that one out for a while now and that’s the one we’d really like to get going next in terms of a Broken Lizard movie. And then we have several other projects that we’re producing with other folks; one member of the group, Steve Lemme, will be directing a film called Run For The Border, which will be an independent film that we’re raising money for, are very excited about, and are very close to actually make happen. And then we have several others all over town that we’re trying to get going. But those two are ones that come to mind right now.

IFQ: I should ask since I’m sure there are plenty of Lizard fans out there who desperately want to know, is there a Potfest movie in the works?

RP: Yeah, we would love to do a Potfest movie, we’ve talked about it, at one point we talked about doing an animated Potfest movie. And it’s back in the hopper so yes, that’s on our agenda as something we’d like to do. We haven’t quite figured out how or where we going to do that one quite yet and it’s not written yet, but that’s definitely one we’d like to do. I mean, we’d like to bring sequels to our films like Super Troopers and Beerfest in that way like Potfest being a pseudo-sequel to Beerfest and Super Troopers 2 as something we’d like to do too if we can convince Fox to do it with us.

IFQ: Finally, since you’ve worked with the guys since the very beginning and watched all the success and attention that the group has achieved so far, what are your thoughts on their continued creative output and dealings with them personally not only as collaborators but as people as they’ve gained all this attention?

RP: I think one of the things that’s been really great is that I still love making movies with Broken Lizard; it’s the most fun of any job I’ve ever had in my entire life, of any movie I’ve ever made. Making a Broken Lizard film is the most enjoyable experience and it’s the reason that we still bring all of our people along because they love making movies with us. No matter what we doing, either making an independent movie, a studio movie, or something in between the guys are incredibly adaptable and it was very hard at first to see if that was possible. We all worked out of New York and it was all very independent, a real fly-by-night operation and as we all came into our own t and have studio execs to answer to and are pitching stuff to studios all over town it’s a very different experience.

As it’s always been though with actually making our films, it’s kind of a well-oiled machine. There are certain members of the group that are really focused on taking the creative out of the equation for a second and others are great at working on the business side. There are guys who are involved with the legal side of Broken Lizard, guys that are focused on the television side as we’re developing a number of different television shows right now. Everybody’s sort of finding their way and it works really well. What we’ve found is that it’s an incredibly tight market right now, with comedy in particular, and will continue to be. But that’s one of the reasons that we’re trying to do a little bit of everything but not spread ourselves too thin.

The nice thing about having five members of a writing team is that you have five members that can really focus creatively on five different projects and also collectively concentrate on certain projects. And then each of us wears a producer hat so we can take on a lot of different kinds of projects. So in addition to doing our own films, we’re trying to develop bigger, studio fare films like the big two-hander, very broad, concept comedies for the studios and also looking at up and coming filmmakers. We’re developing all sorts of different material, not just to throw everything at a wall and see what sticks, but focus on a particular area that might be something an audience wants to see and that someone will want to finance.

So the transition has been great, the guys have been very adaptable to whatever’s thrown at them. And who knows, we might be thrown out on the street six months from now and still hucking independent stuff like The Slammin’ Salmon. That was an example of a marketplace closing up dramatically. With the writer’s strike happening, we had several projects that were much higher budgeted kinds of films on hold. But we had this idea that we had sort of been sitting on for a long time and said “why don’t we write this and get this out during the writer’s strike? It’s a perfect movie, we can make it for a price and we have investors who are willing to work with us on a project, let’s put this together”. Literally the script was bought by the production entity the night of the strike and we wrapped production the day the strike was over. It worked out perfectly.

– End of Part One –

Part Two: Paul Soter and Kevin Heffernan

IFQ: Where did the initial idea for The Slammin’ Salmon originate and moreover, what made you guys want to produce it yourselves rather than doing it under the auspices of a studio?

Paul Soter: We kind of hit on this idea that we loved the idea of this restaurant being run by a Mike Tyson kind of character, who Michael Clarke Duncan plays; this former heavyweight champion who’s out of his mind and there just was a point where we loved the idea of where they’re working for this Tysonesque character and found ourselves throwing out all these lines and stuff we would do. At some point we blended it together where we took this restaurant idea and have these guys work for this man who institutes a sales competition where the top-selling waiter wins ten thousand dollars and the bottom-selling waiter gets his teeth kicked in, incorporating elements of Glengarry Glen Ross, which we’re all big fans of. Watching guys crumble when you have this really intense competition and you’re basically selling for your life. So we kind of stirred all those things up together and then for the last couple years have been working on this script as just sort of a thing to keep in our pocket whenever we wanted to do something on the cheap. And that’s where Kevin comes in (laughs).

Kevin Heffernan: Yeah, we had this plan where we were writing movies with various levels of budget; it’s good to be ready for whatever comes around in terms of financing when trying to make a movie. We actually started writing it around same time as Beerfest and we had written it as a self-contained movie, one night in a restaurant that we could do good low-budget. We kind of kept it in our back pocket for a while and we got to the point where we’d finished a couple of our other obligations and were ready to make a movie. Unfortunately, we were running up against the writer’s strike and were finding that it was becoming difficult to find money out there or at least get studios to make a decision because they were afraid of the strike. And so we thought that maybe this was the perfect time to do The Slammin’ Salmon so we approached some finance people and also the guy who funded Super Troopers came back and said “I’d love to make this, I’ll write the check for you because I think it would be a smart movie to do during the strike”. So we were excited because it gave us something to do at a time when other people weren’t working and we were able to put the movie together.

PS: Yeah there was a weird feeling because things were so strange in this town and we know a ton of writers and actors who were out of work; yet for us, we did the whole thing on one stage. We built the restaurant on one stage in the Valley, so for us it was the most regular sort of job we’ve ever had. It was like “ok, you wake up every morning and you drive to your set” and it was a weird contrast to everybody else around us not working when we were having to get up every morning to go to our job. At the time it couldn’t have been better, because everything else we had going on was completely shut down so if we hadn’t have done this it would have really stunk.

IFQ: Well as you said basically, it was just the right time to pull that and have something ready to go. Kevin, you’ve co-written a number of the Lizards’ previous films, what made you want to direct this time around? Was it a deeply though out decision or more like “hey, I’ll do it this time”?

KH: It was a little more of that I think, it actually all came together pretty quickly because we got the financing quickly. You know Jay [Chandrasekar], who usually directs the Broken Lizard movies had some obligations to Warner Bros and so he couldn’t tie himself up with it. So I was basically like “I’ll be happy to do it”, we all kind of agreed and it just came together in that way.

IFQ: One thing that I’ve noticed about the Broken Lizard films is an incredible consistency in terms of the group’s overall comedic sensibility, whether it’s in independently made projects to studio films. How are you guys able to keep such a sure hand in what you feel is funny and communicating that clearly, or more specifically has there ever been pressure to change your approach to things to suit larger commercial concerns?

PS: I think that Club Dread and Beerfest were the two films we’ve done now where, from a sort of outlying stage onward, we were working with the studio but I don’t know if we just got really lucky or it was just due to the people that we worked with, we have not had any particularly heavy hand content-wise when we did those two films. I mean certainly we got notes but there was never any sense of “you cant do this” or “hold back on that”. I mean they were the sort of notes that you get from anybody just in terms of “let’s make the story work and be as satisfying as possible and try to have as many jokes in there as possible”. So any mandate from the studio was just to make the movie as funny and as good as we could possibly make it. There’s never been any sense of them trying to tamp down our style or our sensibility. So it hasn’t been incredibly different in terms of the creative experience when we do stuff ourselves or when we do it with studios. I mean our process among the five of us is very much where when you throw something out there, you’re really just trying to get everybody on board, the studios just sort of made that circle a little larger. With them we were doing the same exact same thing as before only with more people involved in the circle.

KH: Yeah I think it’s our numbers that allow us to keep such a consistent, comedic voice going. I mean when you have five guys there’s a lot of quality control (laughs). I think with the studios it’s the same way where you have five guys sitting in a room with an executive. It’s harder for the executive to say that something’s not funny to five guys who do think it’s funny. So you end up outnumbering the executive which is good. I think the only other difference is you have all these other extra layers of people that you have to explain the joke to which makes you have to get better at selling your ideas. The five of us have gotten to the point where we don’t ever have to really explain a joke to the other guys, Everyone can visualize what everyone else is talking about pretty easily at this point. You do realize that when you’re talking to someone outside of the group, you forget how much we’ve sort of ended up as one brain.

IFQ: Since you guys really broke out together as Broken Lizard, each of you have also been involved in outside projects like The Dukes of Hazard, Strange Wilderness for you Kevin, or directing for you Paul with Watching The Detectives, so what challenges and/or pleasures do you guys run into when collaborating together as Broken Lizard and then doing works on your own?

KH: I think the good thing is you can really feel the familiarity of working with each other as opposed to when you work on other projects and you don’t quite know people to the same extent. The familiarity then brings out more comedy I think, because you’re more comfortable to do things. The nice thing about going out and doing the other projects though is we have a set way of doing things where we’re together and then when you’re going out and doing separate projects you go out and meet new people who have their own way of doing things. You can then bring that back to the table with the Lizards and say “hey this guy did this kind of thing and it was a cool idea”. So I think it helps keep things fresh.

PS: Yeah and also realizing that not just among the five of us but also our producer Rich Perello, who we always work with, and so many of the principal crew members we work with too, you forget how nice it is when you can really trust everybody and implicitly know that everybody’s working towards the same thing. I had a very lucky experience doing my film but still you realize that you’re not quite sure who everybody is and all that. I was lucky casting people who really got into the spirit of what I was doing though. But my concern was like “look I’ve worked with these other guys and the atmosphere is always a family atmosphere with everybody having a great attitude and now I’ll be directing people for the first time I’ve never met before” and I happened to catch a great group of people who were cool and very patient with me. It was nerve-wracking but ultimately it worked out well if only this time.

IFQ: My final question to bring our conversation to a close is given all your success thus far both collectively and individually throughout the years, what are your thoughts on what the group has accomplished creatively so far and has the overall working dynamic between you guys altered at all as you move from project to project?

PS: I think the group has definitely gotten tighter and more efficient in terms of our process, which is also a little regrettable that over time with guys taking on more projects on their own as well as just a byproduct of growing older and starting families we just don’t have as much time together as we used to. So much of our writing process in the past sprang forth from just being together all the time because we were all single guys living together in New York City. And so now, it has to be a lot more regimented, we’re all at the office at certain times, we try to get a lot done during the day and it has forced us to become a lot more efficient in how we spend our time but it’s too bad that we just don’t have as much fuck around time because that was when a lot of the good stuff would come…

KH:…getting old, getting old changes everything, man. I think it is kind of amazing that we finished our sixth movie together and how many people are able to accomplish that? Having the energy to do five movies and we’re planning to do more still, it’s pretty amazing that we’ve been able to stick together and have enough energy to get all that stuff done. For me, from movie to movie, you just feel more comfortable in what you’re doing and working with each other so it just becomes old hat. That’s the nice thing I think about in still being together.

PS: Yeah I think every film is still a struggle. Getting a film made for us is still a challenge so that has made us appreciate every time we get to make one and no one’s ever taken it for granted. We’ve never hit that stage where it’s like “ok, we’ve got the idea now give us the money, let’s do it”, so we always appreciate it when we can get something going.

– End of Part Two –

-For more information about Broken Lizard, go to http://www.brokenlizard.com/

-For more information about The Slammin Salmon, go to http://www.brokenlizard.com/home/slamminsalmon.html

-To check out the film’s trailer, click here

*Photos Courtesy of Broken Lizard