Todd Strauss-Schulson is a filmmaker whose journey to directing features is inextricably tied up in his journey into manhood; it all began when his grandpa bought him a video camera for his Bar Mitzvah. From those humble beginnings, Strauss-Schulson has gone on to nab Panavision's New Filmmaker's Prize, has traveled to Asia for an extended gig directing MTV's Whatever Things, a reality show billed as "a more stylish version of Jackass with an all western cast." His comedy shorts have played South By Southwest Film Festival and the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal. Most recently, he directed his first feature, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, in which everyone's favorite stoners are getting older and facing the responsibilities of career and fatherhood. After a quick discussion about whether or not guys who are half-Jewish need to only be half-circumcised, SG caught up with Todd Strauss-Schulson in a bar in downtown Boston, down the street from his alma mater, Emerson College.
Michael Marano: So, in a lot of comedies, especially in the post-Judd Apatow world, the tension from which the humor comes is based on the characters being in a between state. They're stuck between adulthood and a perpetual adolescence. I'm thinking of Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, Fanboys, Bridesmaids, Shaun of the Dead, among others. It's about frustrated adulthood. In this movie, Harold and Kumar are getting older. How did you navigate this terrain, without resorting to the same old crap?
Todd Strauss-Schulson: There was always the idea in the script that it would take place six years after the last movie (Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay), and we'd catch up with these guys, where they are in their lives now. I think there's something really true about the idea that you lose 70% of your friends every seven years. I think that's a real statistic, and [that statistic is] a line in the movie. And it's something that's happened to me. And I think there's something true about losing your college friends as you get older, and also growing apart from each other. I was 29 years old when I booked A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, and I turned 30 four days into shooting it. So, I wasn't thinking much about the post-Apatow world as we were making it. I was thinking about my own personal experience as a human being, having to act like an adult, helming my first movie, but also wanting to be a child and play with the robot [the Wafflebot in the movie, which makes waffles to perfection] and wanting to play with the fake snow and being star-struck by Neil Patrick Harris and having to do all this stuff. So, to me, there was something that was personally relatable to [the material]. And I think to the writers [Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, creators of Harold and Kumar] and also to [stars] John [Cho] and Kal [Penn].
MM: Your comedy short Mano-a-Mano, while manic for a lot of its running time, starts out with a lot of deadpan talk about things that are over-the-top. John Cho is a master of deadpan. I particularly love it when he does when he does the "Slow Harold Burn," and gets really angry. In a really cartoonish 3-D movie, how do tap into a comic actor's capacity for deadpan?
TSS: For me at least, with comedy, it's mostly about friction. It is the friction of the material versus the telling of it. The joke versus the telling of the joke. A filthy joke told in an elegant and classy way, in terms of score, imagery, all that stuff. The idea of counterbalancing. I mean, this movie is insane. It's bi-polar. Things happen that are cartoonish. But counterbalancing that are grounded performances. Elias [Koteas] is playing it straight [as a bad guy], John and Kal are playing it straight. Even [notorious tough guy actor Danny] Trejo is playing it straight [as a scary father-in-law]. He's not trying to be [goofy]. They're all trying to ground the movie in some sort of an emotional reality, even though the movie is out-of-control. So, there are deadpan moments like slow burns, there are moments... that do more observational or clever bits of dialogue that aren't all cartoony. So, I think the idea was [there should be] a variety of different kinds of comedy styles and to counterbalance all the silliness with some kid of sweetness and wittiness.
MM: So, when you were in Asia doing MTV Whatever Things, you had no money, no technology. It was just raw videography on location. You do Harold & Kumar, your first feature. And it's not a quiet feature. It's full of noisy spectacle. And you got 3D technology and a full cast and crew. How do you find the core of your personal humor in two such completely different filmmaking situations?
TSS: Asia was a pretty significant learning curve. Because the show is very popular. It was the third season of the most popular show on MTV Asia, they told me. 250 million people were watching it. Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, China. And so you could go into a bar on Thursday night and the people would be watching the show. And in the beginning of doing the show, I was doing Kids in the Hall-kind of ironic stuff that I thought was funny and people were turning it off. I would watch them just turn the channel off. I felt like I was a stand-up comic and I had like a week-long delay on my jokes. And they were just turning the channel. It was like I was getting a walk out. And it was a bummer! And the seven or eight months that I spent there was a slow learning curve as to what would be funny to these people that don't share a common language, the show as in English and subtitled. Who don't share a common pop culture. What will still be funny to them that would be funny to me? And so it became this series of more visual jokes. More universal relationships. The bully and the one who's being bullied. Parents and kids. Things that are human! Human issues and visual jokes that didn't have to rely on whip-smart, Howard Hawks-style dialogue that just didn't seem to travel as well. And absurdities. Silly absurdities worked well. A gigantic guy and a little guy, that was funny. Or back-flipping on to a mattress full of tacks. Or elephant polo. Absurd conceptual ideas seemed to travel. I would watch these Jacques Tati movies, and I would watch all these movies and say, 'Oh, I guess that's why these thing remain relevant, and funny!' Because those things have more poetry. The physical stuff seems to last longer than the verbal stuff, at least for me in comedy. And so the idea of being able to do visual absurd comedy that's grounded in some sort of universal relationship I think you could say is the common bond in comedy.
MM: But how does that translate to Harold & Kumar? It has so much dialogue-based humor.
TSS: It's a visual movie with a lot of visual jokes. There's a baby on a ceiling. There are huge car crashes. There's a three-minute musical number. There's a Sergei montage. There's an egging scene. There's a Claymation sequence that's all singing and dancing. There're Claymation penises. There's the universal relationship of a father-in-law who doesn't like his son-in-law. There's trying to have kids. There's growing older. There are plenty of universal things mixed with these visual flights of fancy.
MM: [MINOR SPOILER!] The opening scenes with the Occupy Wall Street Protestors, were they re-shoots done in the past couple of weeks, or were you guys just really prescient?
TSS: The answer is 'prescient,' and the answer is John and Hayden were prescient, the writers. What was going on while they were writing the script was, unfortunately, or fortunately, for us, there has been a horrible situation on Wall Street for the past couple of years. And so, there were a lot of protests about the bonuses and stuff while they were writing the script. And also, it plays into the tradition of Christmas movies. Y'know, Scrooge, Miracle on 34th Street, the bankers, the shop owners, the bosses. Those are all the fat cats. Those are the Scrooges. There's something to Harold being a bit of a Scrooge in the first 20 minutes of the movie. It seemed to make sense that he would be on Wall Street and that [protests were] happening. I think it is part of a tradition of Christmas movies that happens to be perfectly timed for right now. I'm secretly hoping that there's a horrible egging at Occupy LA today, or something. I hope they start egging the one-percenters! [Laughs]
MM: Did you reference other 3D comedies? Some of the 3D Three Stooges shorts, the Drew Carey 3D special?
TSS: Is there a 3D Three Stooges?
MM: There are several. From the early 1950s.
TSS: This is news! I should probably stop saying this movie is "The First 3D Comedy."
MM: It would still be the first feature!
TSS: I guess that's true. No, I hadn't seen that stuff. I would reference 3D that I didn't like.
MM: Such as?
TSS: I just don't think you need a tremendous amount of depth in Harold & Kumar! I don't need to see more of Kumar's shitty apartment. I don't need to see more of Tom Lennon's station wagon. It's not interesting to me. I want to see Kumar giving me a shottie in the first 30 seconds of the movie. I want to see Trejo's crazy face in a close up. That's what I want. I don't want there to be extra [visual] depth.
Michael Marano: So, in a lot of comedies, especially in the post-Judd Apatow world, the tension from which the humor comes is based on the characters being in a between state. They're stuck between adulthood and a perpetual adolescence. I'm thinking of Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, Fanboys, Bridesmaids, Shaun of the Dead, among others. It's about frustrated adulthood. In this movie, Harold and Kumar are getting older. How did you navigate this terrain, without resorting to the same old crap?
Todd Strauss-Schulson: There was always the idea in the script that it would take place six years after the last movie (Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay), and we'd catch up with these guys, where they are in their lives now. I think there's something really true about the idea that you lose 70% of your friends every seven years. I think that's a real statistic, and [that statistic is] a line in the movie. And it's something that's happened to me. And I think there's something true about losing your college friends as you get older, and also growing apart from each other. I was 29 years old when I booked A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, and I turned 30 four days into shooting it. So, I wasn't thinking much about the post-Apatow world as we were making it. I was thinking about my own personal experience as a human being, having to act like an adult, helming my first movie, but also wanting to be a child and play with the robot [the Wafflebot in the movie, which makes waffles to perfection] and wanting to play with the fake snow and being star-struck by Neil Patrick Harris and having to do all this stuff. So, to me, there was something that was personally relatable to [the material]. And I think to the writers [Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, creators of Harold and Kumar] and also to [stars] John [Cho] and Kal [Penn].
MM: Your comedy short Mano-a-Mano, while manic for a lot of its running time, starts out with a lot of deadpan talk about things that are over-the-top. John Cho is a master of deadpan. I particularly love it when he does when he does the "Slow Harold Burn," and gets really angry. In a really cartoonish 3-D movie, how do tap into a comic actor's capacity for deadpan?
TSS: For me at least, with comedy, it's mostly about friction. It is the friction of the material versus the telling of it. The joke versus the telling of the joke. A filthy joke told in an elegant and classy way, in terms of score, imagery, all that stuff. The idea of counterbalancing. I mean, this movie is insane. It's bi-polar. Things happen that are cartoonish. But counterbalancing that are grounded performances. Elias [Koteas] is playing it straight [as a bad guy], John and Kal are playing it straight. Even [notorious tough guy actor Danny] Trejo is playing it straight [as a scary father-in-law]. He's not trying to be [goofy]. They're all trying to ground the movie in some sort of an emotional reality, even though the movie is out-of-control. So, there are deadpan moments like slow burns, there are moments... that do more observational or clever bits of dialogue that aren't all cartoony. So, I think the idea was [there should be] a variety of different kinds of comedy styles and to counterbalance all the silliness with some kid of sweetness and wittiness.
MM: So, when you were in Asia doing MTV Whatever Things, you had no money, no technology. It was just raw videography on location. You do Harold & Kumar, your first feature. And it's not a quiet feature. It's full of noisy spectacle. And you got 3D technology and a full cast and crew. How do you find the core of your personal humor in two such completely different filmmaking situations?
TSS: Asia was a pretty significant learning curve. Because the show is very popular. It was the third season of the most popular show on MTV Asia, they told me. 250 million people were watching it. Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, China. And so you could go into a bar on Thursday night and the people would be watching the show. And in the beginning of doing the show, I was doing Kids in the Hall-kind of ironic stuff that I thought was funny and people were turning it off. I would watch them just turn the channel off. I felt like I was a stand-up comic and I had like a week-long delay on my jokes. And they were just turning the channel. It was like I was getting a walk out. And it was a bummer! And the seven or eight months that I spent there was a slow learning curve as to what would be funny to these people that don't share a common language, the show as in English and subtitled. Who don't share a common pop culture. What will still be funny to them that would be funny to me? And so it became this series of more visual jokes. More universal relationships. The bully and the one who's being bullied. Parents and kids. Things that are human! Human issues and visual jokes that didn't have to rely on whip-smart, Howard Hawks-style dialogue that just didn't seem to travel as well. And absurdities. Silly absurdities worked well. A gigantic guy and a little guy, that was funny. Or back-flipping on to a mattress full of tacks. Or elephant polo. Absurd conceptual ideas seemed to travel. I would watch these Jacques Tati movies, and I would watch all these movies and say, 'Oh, I guess that's why these thing remain relevant, and funny!' Because those things have more poetry. The physical stuff seems to last longer than the verbal stuff, at least for me in comedy. And so the idea of being able to do visual absurd comedy that's grounded in some sort of universal relationship I think you could say is the common bond in comedy.
MM: But how does that translate to Harold & Kumar? It has so much dialogue-based humor.
TSS: It's a visual movie with a lot of visual jokes. There's a baby on a ceiling. There are huge car crashes. There's a three-minute musical number. There's a Sergei montage. There's an egging scene. There's a Claymation sequence that's all singing and dancing. There're Claymation penises. There's the universal relationship of a father-in-law who doesn't like his son-in-law. There's trying to have kids. There's growing older. There are plenty of universal things mixed with these visual flights of fancy.
MM: [MINOR SPOILER!] The opening scenes with the Occupy Wall Street Protestors, were they re-shoots done in the past couple of weeks, or were you guys just really prescient?
TSS: The answer is 'prescient,' and the answer is John and Hayden were prescient, the writers. What was going on while they were writing the script was, unfortunately, or fortunately, for us, there has been a horrible situation on Wall Street for the past couple of years. And so, there were a lot of protests about the bonuses and stuff while they were writing the script. And also, it plays into the tradition of Christmas movies. Y'know, Scrooge, Miracle on 34th Street, the bankers, the shop owners, the bosses. Those are all the fat cats. Those are the Scrooges. There's something to Harold being a bit of a Scrooge in the first 20 minutes of the movie. It seemed to make sense that he would be on Wall Street and that [protests were] happening. I think it is part of a tradition of Christmas movies that happens to be perfectly timed for right now. I'm secretly hoping that there's a horrible egging at Occupy LA today, or something. I hope they start egging the one-percenters! [Laughs]
MM: Did you reference other 3D comedies? Some of the 3D Three Stooges shorts, the Drew Carey 3D special?
TSS: Is there a 3D Three Stooges?
MM: There are several. From the early 1950s.
TSS: This is news! I should probably stop saying this movie is "The First 3D Comedy."
MM: It would still be the first feature!
TSS: I guess that's true. No, I hadn't seen that stuff. I would reference 3D that I didn't like.
MM: Such as?
TSS: I just don't think you need a tremendous amount of depth in Harold & Kumar! I don't need to see more of Kumar's shitty apartment. I don't need to see more of Tom Lennon's station wagon. It's not interesting to me. I want to see Kumar giving me a shottie in the first 30 seconds of the movie. I want to see Trejo's crazy face in a close up. That's what I want. I don't want there to be extra [visual] depth.