erin_broadley

Robert "Fish" Fishman is in his early 40s. He spends his days as a quiet pencil-pusher in a Cleveland office park and his nights trying to forget about the time, 20 years ago, when he was the drummer of a rising pop-metal band called Vesuvius and was unfairly bounced from their lineup before they blasted off into the rock n' roll stratosphere. On the eve of the band's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he decides to distract himself by doing a little drumming for his nephew's high-school garage band, led by the talented Curtis (singer Teddy Geiger) and the cute Amelia (Superbad's Emma Stone) and that's when fate opens up a window for an unlikely second chance at rock glory. Rainn Wilson called up SuicideGirls recently to talk about The Rocker -- how he relates to late-bloomers like Fish, why he thinks drumming is "inherently funny" and whether hair metal bands actually belong in the Hall of Fame.

Ryan Stewart: They told me that you just did 27 interviews before me.

Rainn Wilson: Yes, bear with me. If you weren't with SuicideGirls, I would have blown this off.

RS: Oh, good.

RW: Are you a SuicideGirl?

RS: No, I sent in some photos and haven't heard back -- but they told me if you want to send in some, you're all set.

RW: Oh, fantastic. I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna get into some negligee and nose studs and send that in.

RS: I was worried you might remember me, because I visited the set of this movie last year and I accidentally ruined a take. My cell phone alarm went off at 6:00 a.m. while you were doing the music video walk-and-talk scene with Christina Applegate. Remember that?

RW: No, I don't remember it. That stuff happens all the time, though. Don't feel too bad. Don't beat yourself up too badly.


RS: It's kind of surprising that you didn't pack the movie with cameos by 80s hair band guys. There's no Bret Michaels or Sebastian Bach.

RW: We talked about that early on in the process and we just all felt that it would have been too gimmicky. Ultimately, that's just a gimmick to get press. It doesn't really help the story, doesn't help tell the story and the story was always really important to us. This is not a big sketch-comedy movie. It isn't like you're doing Zoolander and you want to get some models in, cause it's a big, broad sketch idea. These are real characters, working-class people from working-class families. It's pretty absurd and it's definitely comic and it's not all that serious, but it's real. We just wanted a really good comedy ensemble. I'd much rather have Will Arnett or Bradley Cooper in that role than to have Sebastian Bach.

RS: Do you think successful hair bands will actually be welcomed into the Hall of Fame?

RW: Absolutely they will.

RS: Winger? Warrant? Slaughter?

RW: I don't know about all of them. Let's be real here. There are good metal bands and not so good metal bands. I don't know that Warrant or Winger are ever gonna make it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but I don't know if KISS is already in there or Guns N' Roses or Motley Crue -- the ones that are lasting, high-quality bands that really added a chapter to the history of rock and roll. Absolutely, they should. Remember that there were a lot of poseurs back then that were trying to cash in on the hair metal pop craze with a lot of crappy songs.

RS: True. Everyone respects Guns N' Roses now.

RW: Sure, they're incredible musicians. You can't deny how great some of their music is. In my mind, it started to turn south as they added more and more synthesizers, but their first two albums were incredible. They're rock albums, period. It's the difference between Aerosmith and Whitesnake. It's real rock and sell-out rock.

RS: Did you ever have a good experience at a hair metal show, back in the day?

RW: You know, at that time I was in college and although I appreciated how much fun the music was, my musical tastes were definitely going in a different direction. I spent a lot of the mid-80s kind of listening to more punk and new wave and I was listening to a lot of Gang of Four and The Clash and Tom Waits. When they started prancing around a little bit too much and wearing too much makeup and started acting like my Aunt Mary Lou when she was drunk at a family reunion, I kind of stopped paying attention. I remember waiting tables at this bar in 1989 and they had all this Guns N' Roses on the jukebox and I loved it. I thought it was just kick-ass rock and roll.

RS: Was doing the drumming for this movie physically exhausting? I read a news item recently about how rock drummers are now thought to have the physical prowess of, like, a triathlete.

RW: Absolutely, it was really physically hard, but it's not like your muscles get sore, you know what I mean? When you're drumming for that long it's hard to keep your focus up. It's a mental focus game, like tennis. It's like when those guys are in the fifth set -- with the exhaustion, how do you keep yourself sharp? It's pretty intense training.

RS: Did you put a lot of thought into how to make drumming funny?

RW: Drumming is inherently funny. You don't really need to think about how to make it funny. It's impossible to drum with a serene face. It all begins and ends with Animal from The Muppets. The headbanging, the monosyllabic grunts, the cartoonish idiocy, the ugly face, it all kind of begins and ends there.

RS: When you made those YouTube videos of the naked drumming, did they just turn the camera on and let you go?

RW: It was mostly me, but there was the director shouting from the sidelines. We especially didn't want to reveal my love pouch, know what I mean? So it was like, "Lift up your thigh! Move your belly over! Shift your buttocks! Move the drum stool!"

RS: With a studio comedy like this, I assume you get most of your input in right at the beginning?

RW: There's a long process when the script comes in ... it's very rare that a script comes in and it's like, "Okay, let's shoot this script." There's a process of development that happens, that leads to the script that gets the movie green-lit. It's like, "Okay, here's the script and it needs some work. Here's what needs fixing." Some of the elements in the original script were a little too broad. For instance, there's a scene where Fish gets his hair chopped off and there was a big pile of hair around him. It was really cartoony. It's a funny sight gag, but that's in Dumb and Dumber, you know? That's not in this movie. So we hired a couple of Office writers and they did a punch-up draft, just for a couple of weeks. They just went through it to kind of punch it up and make it funny and fresh.


RS: The rock band you form with the kids in the movie, A.D.D. -- did you guys, as actors, actually gel as a band?

RW: Yeah, we did. We had a great week before we started shooting in Toronto, where we all just hung out in Toronto for a week and rehearsed our music and were learning our instruments and taking lessons and getting costume fittings and rehearsing scenes with the director when we could and doing read-throughs of the script. It really brought us together by the time -- even just that one week -- by the time we started shooting, we were good to go.

RS: Did you have anything in common with those kids in real life, in terms of musical tastes?

RW: There's a lot of bands we all like. There's a lot of great rock bands that just bridge the generations these days. There's Foo Fighters and Nirvana and Radiohead and Wilco. These are all bands that you like in your 40s or in your teen years. It's amazing; at Radiohead concerts you'll see 16-year-olds and 46-year-olds.

RS: You must meet a lot of Fish types in the acting world -- guys in their early 40s who are still sort of hanging in there, waiting for their big break.

RW: Yeah, there are definitely a lot people like that in the acting world. They tend to congregate in coffee shops in the San Fernando Valley, living on the glory days of when they were almost made a series regular on the TV version of Tenspeed and Brown Shoe in 1979. They're kind of waiting around, hoping to catch a lucky break in their 40s.

RS: Do you sympathize?

RW: I think it's a tricky thing. Some people have said about the movie, "Oh, The Rocker is about how you should never give up on your dream." And it's like, well, I don't know if that's necessarily what it's about or if that's what life is about. To answer you seriously for a minute, I think that you have to pursue your dream as passionately and as doggedly as you can, but you have to really be open to the signs that the universe is giving you. With me, for instance, I had a long career before I had any success or fame or recognition, but I kept getting a little bit better jobs. I would keep on getting a little bit better job offers and it was always just enough to kind of keep me going forward. It was always just enough to have me say, "You know, I really can't quit now, even though I'm totally broke and I haven't worked in six months, because the jobs just keep getting a little bit better and the auditions are a little bit better." But if you haven't worked in 17 years and you're still holding onto your dream ... there's a fine line between holding onto your dream and living in delusion.

RS: By the way, wouldn't a rocker like Fish have gone after Emma Stone as a love interest instead of Christina Applegate?

RW: [Laughs] You know, maybe so, but I think that would be a little too skeevy for family audiences.

RS: Probably. Are you confining yourself to the family-friendly stuff on purpose?

RW: No, not at all. In fact, a couple of projects I'm developing are definitely more R-rated, more dark, have more edges with a darker indie feel. So, I'm all for that. This just happens to have come across my plate in the last couple of years.

RS: When we talked on the set last year you mentioned a script that you were developing with Bob Odenkirk, about a subpoena server.

RW: As of right now, it's dead in the water.

RS: That's too bad, I love his stuff.

RW: Who knows, if The Rocker is a hit, that might be the kind of thing that the studio calls back again and says, "Hey, maybe we need to look at that Keenan Rhodes: Unkillable Servant of Justice project again!" It's a really funny script.

RS: There's still Bonzai Shadowhands. Jason Reitman is really hot now, something must be happening with that.

RW: I just handed in my second draft to Jason and he loves it. He's gonna do a take on it and hopefully, potentially we'll be shooting it in 2009.


The Rocker hits theaters on August 20th. For more info, check out the official site.