anderswolleck

Jay Chandrasekhar burst onto the comedy scene by directing Super Troopers, the Broken Lizard comedy troupe movie. That film was well received both commercially and critically. But the pendulum swung the other way with Chandrasekhar and Broken Lizards next movie Club Dread.

Now Chandrasekhar has entered major Hollywood territory with his film remake of the television series The Dukes of Hazzard.

Check out the official site for The Dukes of Hazzard

Daniel Robert Epstein: You ended up with a lot of southerners in this movie!

Jay Chandrasekhar: When we started making this movie the goal was to try and hire as many Southerners as possible. Johnny [Knoxville], Jessica [Simpson], Willie Nelson, Burt Reynolds and Joe Don Baker are all Southerners. Seann is not but hes so damn funny that I felt wed make an exception. My family is from Southern India so were the hillbillies.

DRE: Whats it like working Joe Don Baker?

JC: Joe Don Baker has vampire hours, hes nocturnal. Hes asleep all day long. Hes a little bit of an odd fellow.

DRE: Do you direct him or just point him?

JC: Hes got a great sense of humor. Hes got a real a dirty old man thing going on in a really funny way. I try to hire great actors and let them do their thing and then make small adjustments.

DRE: What was the biggest challenge of this film?

JC: Well the key for me was to try and keep the actors in the cars as much as possible. I saw the film Bourne Supremacy and the car stunts in that took my breath away and I havent had my breath taken away like that since Ronin. When I was ten years old and saw that car fly through the air in Smokey and the Bandit I thought Oh my God! So it was important for me to try to make people feel that way because now weve seen 20 years of stunt movies. This guy Dan Bradley did the Bourne Supremacy car stuff and I said I had to have him for this movie. Dan has this great machine he invented called the Go Mobile which is the chassis of a Cadillac El Dorado. So you put half the General Lee on it, and then the crew is on the other half, and since its one piece it can go 70 to 80 miles an hour and you can bash cars into the side of it and do all sorts of amazing things because its reinforced. The old way of doing it was to take a truck and tow another car you can go 35 miles an hour. So the difference for the actors is dramatic. That and we sent Seann to driving school. It was funny because theres a scene where theyre coming out of Cooters Garage and they screech to the camera and you see the General Lee for the first time. What happened was he came screeching around the corner and he almost went into a ditch and then almost into another ditch and theyre laughing and whooping it up and then it just went dead silent. I heard Seann go, The brakes are out, while they were heading towards a roadblock with all these fans waiting for autographs. Seann just took the car and jammed it into reverse and it screeched to a halt.

We wanted it to feel that sort of visceral quality that those stunts had in the original show originally had because we knew somebody was really in that car. There are some digital things we did but we tried not to do too much of that.

DRE: How many cars did you wreck?

JC: We went down there with 30 General Lees and came back with seven.

DRE: I read that all the Broken Lizard members worked on the script, how come they didnt receive credit?

JC: It was a real rip off. We wrote every single line but the WGA has an antiquated system and they give credit to the first writer who created structure.

DRE: How was it doing the Super Troopers homage?

JC: I shot it with the feeling of Well if it doesnt work we can cut it. But some people dont get it.

DRE: Do you think this movie will play better in the South?

JC: Its odd. I mean if you look at the original show, aside from Uncle Jessie the actors werent Southern. So I dont know. I know that show has become really big in the South over time, and there was a lot of excitement down there for it but Warner Bros said that when they started selling the DVD, the highest number of sales were in Chicago, New York and then Washington D.C.

DRE: How would you rate Jessica Simpson as an actress?

JC: A four out of five. I think shes great and I think this was the perfect part for her to play. I think she was smart not to take a movie that she was going to have to carry. She could be among a bunch of cooler other actors and do her part and learn. I thought that she did exactly what I hoped for.

DRE: Did she have to go through an audition process?

JC: Oh yeah.

DRE: What impressed you about her?

JC: I was skeptical because I dont necessarily appreciate pop stars jumping into movies. But she came in, did an audition and was nervous. I said Ill give you another chance to come back and try it but youre going to have to go bigger than that. She came back and we did a screen test with her and we looked at her in the monitor and she was glowing. She had a certain charisma that she was just exuding. When she got down there and got more used to being with Burt Reynolds and these people, she started to grow and flower.

DRE: Who had final approval on the shorts?

JC: I did.

DRE: Did she make you wear the shorts at all?

JC: Yes, the deal was, she kept coming out with pairs of shorts and I kept saying shorter, shed go back and shed come out and Id say shorter and finally she said you wear these damn shorts, and I said I will. Then the final day came and they had a pair made for me. I put them on and of course it was a day that her MTV crew was there. There were all these jokes about the shorts and they were lotioning up my legs and all sorts of fun stuff. Then when I watched the show, theres no mention of why Im wearing the shorts, theres just a shot of me wearing the shorts and talking to her so I got a lot of calls.

DRE: How come you didnt have MC Gainey [Rosco P. Coltrane] do the Rosco laugh?

JC: I thought I could do The Dukes of Hazzard like they did The Brady Bunch movies, which I loved but I ended up wanting them to just inhabit a vibe. I intentionally didnt have MC Gainey do the laugh because you just cant imitate that.

DRE: Did you ever try to get John Schneider and Tom Wopat back for a cameo?

JC: Yeah, we called them and talked to them about it and but they either didnt want to do those parts or they were charging a lot of money. It just didnt work out.

DRE: Last time we spoke you mentioned that instead of Broken Lizard concentrating on one script like you did with Club Dread, you were going to have each member put together a script from an idea you all came up with. How is that process going?

JC: We have three scripts that are ready to be made. I think were going to make one this fall called the Greek Road that Kevin Heffernan was the point man on. Its set in ancient Greece and Kevin is playing Plato as freshman wrestler at Athens University. Hes supposed to wrestle at the Olympics and hes failing his class so they hire a Socrates to tutor him. But Platos a little thick so he cheats and the two of them take a trip to the Olympics.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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