Greg Mottola

Entourage went to shoot at Comic-Con, but what are the keys to making an accurate representation of the Comic-Con we know so it’s not Hollywood’s Comic-Con?

The one thing we couldn’t do because of our budget was have physically as many extras as I would’ve wanted because Comic-Con is just so crowded. There’s so many bodies in there. I also knew that it wasn’t going to be on screen that much. I think the things that helped us enormously were we could work it out in our schedule that we could shoot right after Comic-Con happened, so people could literally take the booths and put them in a truck and drive them to us. It’s one of those things in movies, it’s a pet peeve of mine when the production design is close but off. When you watch a movie where somebody’s breaking into a government computer and you’re watching a progress bar and a little skull and crossbones comes up. They’re trying to make it cool-looking and you think no one who’s designing software interfaces for the government are making the graphics look cool. It’s just not happening. These are utilitarian. The code-writers are not going, “Oh, I’m going to make a skull and crossbones come up!” I hate that so I didn’t want it to be sort of like Comic Con but then all the poster images are wrong. An enormous amount of clearances is the shorter answer. I was going long winded.

My pet peeve is when people are having a chat session and they’re saying what they’re typing, because of course the director wants us to hear it. But no one says out loud what they’re typing in a chat session.

That’s a really good cliché. I hate that. It’s true. Now that you say it, I
can’t wait to look for that. It’s such a romantic comedy thing to do or we’re trying to make it dramatic. I’ve never once said it out loud. Who’d do that? You’d be a psycho.

I think The Social Network might’ve even done it a little.

I vaguely remember Jesse Eisenberg. I think they did it by making it seem like he’s saying it out loud for the amusement of his friends.

You got the big and the obscure touchstones of Comic-Con: The food court, a panel session, the Shadowchild booth.

We couldn’t do a big autograph pavilion. That was just something that was outside of our budgetary restrictions. I really wanted to try and recreate that room, a giant room where everyone lines up to get autographs. The Shadowchild thing, I remember seeing there were places where Lou Ferrigno or Robert Culp were doing little autograph things on the Comic Con floor.

It’s accurate. They set up booths there. There’s an A-list filmmaker cameo in the film. How did you get him and did you direct him to do that voiceover?

We got him because Simon and Nick were working with that director, which is another clue. The A-list director suggested it. He said, “I should do a cameo, like Paul is talking to me on the phone and giving me script notes.” So Simon and Nick took advantage of that offer. We recorded it one day in a sound studio in Los Angeles with Seth and said director. The first time we started to do a take, I was so nervous I forgot to call action. For technical reasons I was waiting because we were videotaping everything Seth was doing for animation reference. I didn’t know they had speed on the video cameras and I was waiting for that. Finally the director turned to me and said, “Can I begin?” I already blew it from the get go. Then I actually did give direction. The direction I remember giving, there’s a moment where Paul’s giving notes to the director and the director gets an idea for his film, and I said, “Can you just give it that kind of enthusiasm that directors have when something comes to them that they think is really, really good?” And he said, “Oh yeah, I can do that.” And of course I’m thinking, “Yeah, because every time I look at a DVD extra you’re on, you’re 100% that.” There’s no one more enthusiastic than that guy. It was super cool because I gave him some direction, it got better and that’s the take that’s in
the movie.

Were you excited to have a substantial debate about intelligent design in a comedy?

The first time I read the script, it really made me laugh. I remember having this conversation with friends a long time ago, talking about movies like The Omen or Rosemary’s Baby where in a horror film where you find out that Satan exists, no one ever stops in the middle of the movie to say, “Well, it kind of sucks that Satan’s tormenting us or trying to kill us or the antichrist is trying to destroy the world. But, the flip side is now we know there’s an afterlife. So if Satan exists, God [does too].” No one ever stops to have that theological discussion. They’re just too busy running and trying not to get their heads cut off. When I read this, I thought that’s a really funny direction that in an alien movie, the alien says, “Look, if I exist, then your creationist view of the world doesn’t make any sense. This sort of one world theology doesn’t work.”
Also, obviously it’s hardly a political film, but I certainly think anything’s up for grabs satirically speaking. People who I think are kind of clogging up the national discussion at times or trying to dumb down the curriculum, I’m talking about extremists, people on the extremist branch of religion, I don’t have a lot of patience for that sort of anti-intellectual shit.

Is that worldview dictated by the story? There’s an alien in the story, so that’s the worldview.

Yeah, I think Simon would put it that way. He would say this is a movie in which an alien is in it and you’d have to presuppose that in that world, creationism doesn’t make any sense. We just happen to have the conversation.

But I’m getting the sense that you wouldn’t make a movie that said, “This proves creationism and intelligent design is true.”

It’s probably unlikely because I actually believe in science. I guess Simon and Nick think it’s ridiculous to dismiss centuries of science, as do I.

Do the extremists qualify themselves for satire where the scientists have not?

I would say yes. I think that is a good way to frame it. The scientists are doing serious work trying to figure things out, some of the extremists are just people who aren’t willing to have an intelligent conversation.

What do you think about the alien visitor theorists?

Well, they don’t seem quite as loud and angry. I mean, I guess
Stephen Hawking says that we should not wish to meet aliens. He was essentially saying something along the lines of they’d be so advanced to us, so superior to us that the way we look at animals, they would look at us and they would consider us just stupid animals. They would likely kill us or farm us or make us slaves because we’d be so useless to them intellectually, which I thought was an interesting. There’s an interesting movie in that. Instead of coming here and blowing up our landmarks, if they came here and enslaved us that would be a fascinating, scary movie.

What was your take on the gay jokes at Mr. Frost’s expense?

Are they at Nick’s expense?

A few characters ask if he’s gay.

Oh right, Paul asks it. To me, the whole point of it is to tee up the fact that Paul says he’s bisexual. There’s a certain generic American homophobia that’s on display in those moments, particular in the Little AleInn scene but in Paul’s case it’s not homophobic at all. Paul’s a free thinker. Paul’s a live and let live guy. I thought it was another thing that really made me laugh when I read the script the first time that Paul comes from a planet where everyone’s bisexual because they’re just into the pleasure thing. He’s not uptight about that. It was one of those things where I thought you could say this in a mainstream film if an alien’s saying it. If you had an actor proclaiming in an offhanded way that he was bisexual, it would freak people out. It wouldn’t freak them out in Manhattan necessarily but it might freak them out in certain red states.

So it’s a gay friendly message.

Yeah, that’s how I always saw it. It’s not that our two lead characters are meant to be homophobic at all. It’s just that people’s perceptions are narrow minded and then the reverse is that Paul is totally cool with it. He’s totally accepting and in fact is bisexual himself.

Is it a bromance?

I guess. That’s one of those pop culture words where it probably makes us all cringe a little bit. Yeah, they’re supposed to love each other. I mean, I think the bromance thing has definitely run it’s course. What I like about this is that it’s a triangle. Paul’s this third interloper character who creates a different dynamic for our two comedy leads.

You got to do a classic spaceship flyover scene in the end.

Yes, we were trying to have our cake and eat it too which is that we wanted to obviously make a film that was funny. Obviously this is heightened silly comedy but we also wanted to have some of those moments from the movies that we loved, the film references and of course undercut them wherever possible. When we decided we were going to have a mothership appear at the end of the film, I sat in my office for a couple hours sketching out mothership concepts and e-mailing them to the special effects guys because I wanted to have a little bit of input into what it would look like, because when am I ever going do that again?

Yeah, only a few filmmakers ever get to do that.

Yeah, I knew that the ship itself that lands at the end, I knew that we were going to physically build some of that to save money because we didn’t want to do it entirely CG because we couldn’t afford that. What we could build, we could only afford so much too and I thought well, let’s go for the classic flying saucer shape because that’s something achievable for us. So I sat around and sketched a bunch of flying saucers with my production designer. Then getting to do the ship at the end, I just thought, okay we’re just going to see the bottom of it, and I gave them all these sketches for what should be in it. Then they did it. That’s fun.

Paul is now playing.