Back in October of 2007, I got to do something really cool….I visited the set of the upcoming Will Ferrell comedy “Step Brothers.” If you haven’t heard of the film yet, “Step Brothers” stars Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly as two grown men that still live at home.

 

Will plays Brennan Huff, a sporadically employed thirty-nine-year-old who lives with his mother, Nancy (Mary Steenburgen). John plays Dale Doback, a terminally unemployed forty-year-old who lives with his father, Robert (Richard Jenkins).  When Robert and Nancy marry and move in together, Brennan and Dale are forced to live with each other as step brothers.  As their narcissism and downright aggressive laziness threaten to tear the family apart, these two middle-aged, immature, overgrown boys will orchestrate an insane, elaborate plan to bring their parents back together.  To pull it off, they must form an unlikely bond that maybe, just maybe, will finally get them out of the house. 

 

While the synopsis sounds like gold to me, I’m even more excited as “Step Brothers” reteams Will with writer/director Adam McKay. Perhaps you saw their last two films… “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” and “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.” To me, both of those films are classics, and as soon as I’d heard about “Step Brothers,” I couldn’t wait to see it.

 

So you could imagine how happy I was to get invited to the set. Not only would I get to watch Will and John interact, I’d also get to see how Adam McKay directs. In the next few days I’ll be posting my full set report, but until then, here’s another interview I participated in and it’s with Richard Jenkins, Mary Steenburgen and Writer/Director Adam McKay.

 

The beginning of the interview is only with Richard and Mary, as Adam was still directing. But as the interview progressed, Adam walked in. If you’re looking forward to "Step Brothers"…this is a solid read.

 

As usual, you can either read the transcript below or listen to the audio as an MP3 by clicking here.

 

Finally, if you missed the on set interview with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, or costume designer Susan Matheson, just click on their names. “Step Brothers” hits theaters on July 25th.   

Richard Jenkins: It's hard. I don't have any improv experience. It doesn't mean I haven't played around with scenes and things like that, but these guys are really fast. It's been an incredible test.  

Mary Steenburgen: I started in improv and went into different kinds of things. I guess I returned to it a little bit in the last few years, a little bit with the Larry David show and just fooling around with him. With these guys, I think my job is more to anchor it a little bit so they can do their thing. If there's thing that come funny sometimes then that's great, but it should never be a competitive sport. First of all, we wouldn't win. But second of all [neither] would the film. It just wouldn't work. Someone has to has to keep the emotional idea of the scene however crazy we just have to keep rolling and that's Richard's and mine job. We've actually done scenes together where we've improved and it gets a little insane and we can fly a bit more in those. I feel like in these scenes I'm mostly supposed to just keep the reality going.  

In improv though there's always a structure. Which of your experiences is more structured? Step Brothers or Curb your Enthusiasm?  

Steenburgen: They work pretty similarly actually, but I would say Larry [David] is more structured than Adam [McKay] believe it or not because even though with Larry there is never a script, you don't start out with any lines whatsoever and with Adam you do, there will be scenes where we go so far from what was originally written that it doesn't bear any resemblance. With Larry, once you get the shape of the scene, you say different things, but the shape of the scene kind of stays the same. With Adam, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you fly through a totally different planet and that's fun too.  

On Curb your Enthusiasm you're playing yourself right? 

Steenburgen: Yeah, I'm playing myself. 

So are you really playing yourself, yourself? 

Steenburgen: No, it's like the same self world that Larry and Ted [Danson] both play. It's not really any of us, but we give it our name. 

Are you used to having a director yell out lines to say in the middle of a scene? 

Steenburgen: No. He's so fast. 

Jenkins: I've had it before. 

The Farrelly brothers? 

Jenkins: David O'Russell. It's happened to me before and it depends on how they do it. I always kind of enjoyed it because it just takes the scene and you do a right angle like this and it's somewhere that whoever is watching the scene like Adam says, 'I wonder what would happen if it went this way?' It's sometimes better than being in the scene when you're kind of doing it. When you have someone watching it saying, 'do a right turn here. Let's see where we go.' It takes you to some interesting places. 

How does Adam, a comedy director compare to working with the Farrelly brothers? 

Jenkins: The feeling on this set, it's just a lot of fun. There's a lot of jobs that you can do that you can be miserable at. Making movies should not be one of them. It's just a lot of fun.  

Can you each talk a little about your characters and how you both ended up with kids this age that won't leave the nest? 

Jenkins: It's not my fault.  

Steenburgen: My character is the ultimate, ultimate enabler. That's how she ended up with this guy. Even now when she's trying to push him out into the world, she keeps undermining it. We just did a scene where I go in and give them $20 to go to the movies and tell them not to tell Robert (Richard Jenkins' character), but that's pretty much indicative of how she handles everything. She just keeps undermining her own life and enabling him and infantilizing him. Yet, she is sort of terrified that there is something extremely wrong. Her deep dark fear is that he has had some sort of brain damage.  

Jenkins: That came from an inprov. 

Steenburgen: Yeah, that came from an improv. I said it to Adam on the first day and he said to go ahead and do it. So my secret, secret dreadful secret is that I think he was dropped on his head when he was little and that maybe I did it and that it's my fault and that's what all this is about. We actually did a really funny improv where I ask him if he's noticed anything about him. Then he keeps not answering me, but it's not totally negative so I'm enabling that anything he says I hear as positive. I end up just leaping with relief. So that's Nancy.  

Jenkins: Robert absolutely ignores everything in front of his face for the longest time. It's interesting because I think they're both forced to deal with this in ways since they're together that they probably haven't when they're not together. We just rehearsed a scene where I realize that my son is going to meet Nancy for the first time and all of a sudden it's a scary thought. She enables and I ignore. My life is falling apart. It's really interesting. The fact that they love each other so much and where the relationship goes to in this movie, I think it's really interesting. I didn't really see it when I read the script. It's going to some really interesting places and we find a lot of that with our scenes in the bedroom along talking about them and about us and our dream and then it all turns to s**t.

Are your characters formers spouses mentioned at all and what kind of affect they have on them? 

 

Question: Can you talk about how this idea came up? 

Adam McKay: We met and had dinner. We had like 60 ideas for movies and none of them were quite right. I went to the editing room the next day for "Talladega" and someone said bunk beds and I was like, 'wait what if they're adult step brothers' and I called them up and they're like, 'I love it.'

Steenburgen: Is that true? 

McKay: Yeah.  

Question: After Anchorman and Talladega you could have gone on to do something bigger, but you went smaller. Why did you decide to go with fewer cameras and smaller sets? 

Mckay: It was because we kept looking at those movies and our favorite scenes were the ones where it was characters sitting around talking. We're like, 'why don't do an entire movie of characters sitting around talking?' That was the basic idea. You do "Anchorman" and "Talladega" and there's the big car thing or the camera is moving and you're like, 'you can't be funny here.' We wanted to do a comedy in a home and getting to play house with characters too seemed really fun just because they're more grounded. That was kind of it. No more cars blowing up for one movie. We just want to have them sitting and talking. Talking heads scenes we love and of course once we decided that we have like 50 fights in this movie and stunts.  

Question: Can you talk about the freedom of working in an R rated environment? 

McKay: It's probably bad in a way because we love it so much. Literally you'll do scenes and you'll say f**k like 30 times and you're like, 'this is too much.' But it's great. It's fantastic and you don't even think about anything you say. You just do whatever you want. Anytime you hear Mary Steenburgen f**k and f**k.  

Steenburgen: That's his favorite thing by the way.  

McKay: It just let's everyone go wild without any consciousness of anything.

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