Club Dread director Jay Chandrasekhar

Club Dread director Jay Chandrasekhar

By Daniel Robert Epstein
Feb 27, 2004

I saw Club Dread the other night and it’s damn hysterical. In the theatre there was a group of people who for the first five minutes just grumpily kept saying “This is stupid.” But then the jokes and the killing came on full force and then they were saying “This is stupid” and laughing their asses off. Broken Lizard is the comedy troupe behind both Club Dread and Super Troopers. I think line between stupid and funny goes back and forth and that’s = the point behind their films. They do their best to emulate early 80’s comedies such as Caddyshack, Stripes and all the films that came out of Saturday Night Live, the good ones anyway.

Broken Lizard started out at Colgate University when Jay Chandrasekhar got four people, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske together to be part of this new troupe. From there they performed written sketches at many different colleges and venues in New York City until they broke through with their first feature film Puddle Cruiser. Since then they’ve written all their movies together and they solve all of their problems democratically. In fact they get along so well that Club Dread is credited to Broken Lizard as a collective. They’ve often been compared to Monty Python but being they aren’t and never will be British middle-aged intellectuals that isn’t a fair comparison. But instead they are their own niche and I hope to god they keep filling it with funny movies for years to come.

Super Troopers is a very funny movie but isn’t that strong on plot. With Club Dread they’ve done a lot to fix that by combining humor with the horror of 80’s horror films like Sleepaway Camp and The Prowler. Coconut Pete’s Resort is an island paradise where the drinks flow free and so do the women. But now a killer is stalking all the staff members on the island and the Jimmy Buffett-like Coconut Pete commands them to cover it up so the guests will still have a good time.

I got a chance to talk with their in-group director, Jay Chandrasekhar, who plays the dreadlocked British tennis instructor Putman.

Club Dread opens today. Check out the website.

Daniel Robert Epstein: I heard that Broken Lizard has wanted to do a horror movie for a while.
Jay Chandrasekhar: We’re all horror movie fans. The guy in particular who is the biggest fan is Paul Soter. We always thought a horror movie would be a fun thing to do. We didn’t want to do a spoof or be self-referential like Scary Movie or Scream. I think Scream is awesome but I haven’t seen Scary Movie.
DRE:
The first Scary Movie is pretty funny.
JC:
We’re trying to make late 70’s early 80’s comedies. Super Troopers was very influenced by Smokey and the Bandit [released in 1977]. Club Dread is super influenced by Halloween and Friday the 13th. We were hoping to make a movie that if you took out all the jokes it could still slide by plot-wise with real horror movies. It would be one of those films with us and our humor injected in. So the key was to play it as real as possible and keep the horror as close to real as possible. Though there are certain bits like when the killer catches up to the golf cart which you would never find in that kind of horror movie.
DRE:
But it was still funny and scary at the same time.
JC:
That was the balance we had to reach. You can’t be too silly that takes the people out of the horror and you also can’t do anything too grotesque or horrifying that takes people out of the comedy. You can scare the shit out of people sometimes real and sometimes cheap. We wanted people to realize that it reminds them of those older movies.
DRE:
There is also some good nudity in it.
JC:
There’s a fair amount of nudity but that goes along with this genre. It’s a throwback to the 70’s.
DRE:
Like the end of Super Troopers there is chaos at the end of Club Dread. While it was stronger than the ending of Super Troopers did you find it’s tough to wrap up the kind of movies you do? Does the plot catch up with you?
JC:
The key with us is that when we make films we have to make sure the stories make sense. Occasionally comedies just go, oh we don’t care it’s just a comedy. But the movies that really survive the test of time are films like Animal House, Fletch, Blues Brothers and Trading Places which all have strong stories.
DRE:
A good example of a wild ending is in Caddyshack. No one was expecting the entire golf course to blow up.
JC:
Right, when we used to perform on stage we would do shows which were an hour and fifteen minutes long with 10 stage sketches and four or five short videos. We always found that we had an easy time starting a sketch, an easy time in the middle throwing jokes and always had a hard time ending the sketch. It was hard to wrap up the end. So we learned then that you really have to focus on endings and try to throw in as much excitement, action and comedy as you can. People are going to leave the theatre thinking most about the last five minutes. The flip side of it is that you have to open the movie strong as well. The goal is to open big and end big. You can have lulls in the middle but you just can’t lose the audience. Frankly I think we have lulls.

In our stage show we actually came up with a sketch that was called “The Big Ending.” Before the sketch a voiceover said “And now the big ending” and two of us jumped out with swords and we were battling each other then this princess and a villain were there.

I think the ending of Club Dread is ten times better than the ending of Super Troopers. In fact we reshot the ending of Super Troopers because the previous ending is weak. It’s really average. It was the last day of the shoot and we were getting wasted until six in the morning. I went and slept for three hours and I woke up with my eyes all bloodshot. It was the first and last time I ever directed still drunk. The script wasn’t good enough either. We thought it was good when we wrote it but Fox was nice enough to let us go back and re-shoot it.
DRE:
What’s the troupe’s writing process?
JC:
What we do is that I will assign a point person to each script because we’re working on a couple at a time.
DRE:
So since you founded Broken Lizard are you in charge of the process?
JC:
Well the only way it works is if there is a non-selfish mentality happening. Me taking all the credit is the road to the end of the group because first of all I don’t deserve it [laughs]. But more than that there also needs to be somebody who is in charge. There will inevitably be disputes between people and decisions that cannot be solved by a vote. I will assign a point person and usually it’s just asking who wants to do it. Paul Soter was the point person on Club Dread because he is the biggest horror fan. He was the guy who originally wanted to do the movie. We sat around for about a week coming up with ideas like let’s set it in a winter resort because it will be cool to splash blood on the snow but no that would take too long to shoot. For Super Troopers it was rough shooting on the highway in Poughkeepsie. So we thought we could get Fox to let us shoot it on a desert island. We came up with bits and pieces like originally Coconut Pete was this guy named Lazlo Fox who was a kind of a Ricardo Montalban Fantasy Island type guy. Then somebody came up with the Jimmy Buffet angle. So we spend four or five days throwing out ideas, we’ll type up notes or scenes and we’ll give them to Paul and he’ll type up the first draft. Then we all read it and we’ll each do another five pages of notes then spend another week having meetings about the script. As you get deeper and deeper into the process you end up spending time on the scenes that aren’t working. But we also had to come up with five characters for each of the five members like the Fun Police guy, tennis instructor, masseuse or whatever just to make sure there are five even characters. Then at around draft 17 I’ll cast it. So up until that point everyone is writing for every character then inevitably everyone starts writing for their own character. That’s just human nature. But casting in the beginning would cause a lopsided issue; you shouldn’t be fighting for a character’s lines but for the whole script. Make the whole script funny first.
DRE:
Marijuana has been demonized by Hollywood. If someone smokes pot in a movie they usually end being bad in some way. Pot has been prominent in both Super Troopers and Club Dread. How important is it to you to get pot references in the movies?
JC:
Everyone knows that pot is about as harmful as alcohol. We’re in this prohibition thing with grass in this country that we were in the 30’s with booze. I think all the cops and politicians know it too. I don’t think parents want their kids smoking grass and I don’t think they should as well. But at 18 shouldn’t we be able to smoke grass. For us, grass is not the demon weed. There are a lot of jokes there because in some ways it’s funnier because it’s prohibited.
DRE:
Upright Citizen’s Brigade has often referenced THC as one of their inspirations. Do you guys go that far?
JC:
The reality is that if you visit any college campuses they are smoking a lot of grass. Its part of the culture of America’s youth right now. I know it’s illegal but its only grass.
DRE:
How much improvisation goes on while you are shooting?
JC:
Not while we are shooting but while we are writing. We never have the luxury of time to improv while shooting because there is so much money on the line. It’s not an easy time to create funny stuff while you are there. If the actors have ideas or think that their lines aren’t working they are expected to think about it the night before and talk about it in the rehearsal. We would like to get a big enough budget so we can do more of that, just shoot the script and spend an hour or two improvising. I think the greatest comedy movie ever made is This is Spinal Tap. It feels like it was created in the moment. I think that feeling is what all filmmakers in comedy should be going for.
DRE:
You can’t be a comedy troupe and not have a very serious side especially while making a movie. Do people treat you guys like it’s a party?
JC:
I think part of the thing about us is that moviemaking is supposed to be a blast and fun. Sometimes people lose sight of the fact that we are going down to Mexico for two and half months with our best friends, we’re shooting a movie which we all wrote and are starring in. If you can’t have fun doing that then you are in trouble. Yeah it’s serious and we take it seriously. But its important to project fun while you are doing this. With our movies I think there is a little bit of a lifestyle element with them. When you watch those old Rat Pack films they were bombed and just hanging around Vegas. So you want to believe that they were just bombed, hooking up with chicks, smoking cigarettes and whatever. Part of the entertainment is behind the scenes. You want people to believe that something is happening that they hope is happening.
DRE:
I’m a big fan of character actors. When you have a certain part who says “We got to have MC Gainey.”
JC:
He’s hilarious.
DRE:
What was it about him specifically that you felt you had to cast him?
JC:
He was so great in Citizen Ruth and Con Air. He’s a tough guy that’s funny as shit and he knows the rhythm of the jokes. He’s got that big old goatee and used to play guitar in Jimmy Buffet’s band years ago.
DRE:
Did you audition him?
JC:
Hell no. You don’t audition MC. At that level they say “You know what I do.”

Here’s a cool Jimmy Buffett story. Bill Paxton and I flew down to show Jimmy Buffett the movie. We got down to the theatre and Paxton kept elbowing him in the ribs while we were watching it. Buffett was laughing and started elbowing back. He was totally into it and got all the jokes. I think more than anything he was flattered that we were poking fun at his whole lifestyle.
DRE:
Bill Paxton hasn’t done a comedy role since True Lies [released in 1994]. What made him right for it?
JC:
We wanted a Southerner and a guy who understood comedy. Bill had actually seen Super Troopers, then called his agent and asked what we were up to. I met with him and I was sitting across from him going “You’re fucking Bill Paxton.” So he got the part.
DRE:
There is some great camerawork in the beginning like when the camera spins around mimicking the head that’s cut off.
JC:
Yeah that was Soter’s idea. We did it with a gyro lens. It spins the image inside the camera while you drop the camera. We tried a couple of different things but we were worried about dropping the camera. It took us 14 takes to get it right and literally the guy in charge of it had the airplane running to take it back to the rental place.
DRE:
Did you get your bush trimmed for that shot?
JC:
A little trimming. But Soter trimmed it a bit too much. We had to computer enhance his bush. That’s the only CGI shot in the movie.
DRE:
Was there supposed to be a Super Troopers TV show?
JC:
Yes we wrote a pilot for Fox where we actually moved the location to Reno. Fox said no and we decided to go make the movie instead. Coincidentally Fox Searchlight bought the movie at Sundance. We never ended up making the TV show because its almost impossible to write and act in a TV show on the networks. It’s not something we can do. We might make a TV show one of these days.
DRE:
Did the fact that Reno 911 came out have anything to do with your TV show not happening?
JC:
Reno 911 had nothing to do with the show not going on originally. Reno 911 is whatever, I don’t know. Those guys are funny.
DRE:
You must know those guys.
JC:
I know them around. I’m not sure why they chose to use the exact same uniform colors or set their show in Reno. But look they did what they did.
DRE:
Those guys are not untalented guys by far.
JC:
They’re funny guys. I’ve seen Reno 911 and I’ve laughed. It’s fine. I wish they chose blue uniforms. I don’t know if they were trying to capitalize on Super Troopers or if it was just coincidence. I think they made some interesting choices.
DRE:
What’s the future for Broken Lizard?
JC:
I think we’re going to do a college stage show tour. Probably get a bus and just do a stage show with some short films.
DRE:
You could be in some huge venues now.
JC:
We saw The Kids in the Hall in New York and it was a big theatre.
DRE:
Same with Mr. Show.
JC:
Yeah I know David Cross from directing Arrested Development.
DRE:
Did they hire you because of Super Troopers?
JC:
Yeah they did.
DRE:
What was it like not directing Broken Lizard?
JC:
Well these actors are so damn talented and the writers are unbelievable so it’s as a fun as making a Broken Lizard movie and I don’t say that lightly.
DRE:
Are you worried about The Passion of the Christ stealing your audience?
JC:
Christ I don’t know.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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