McKay: We've done a lot of table rewrites on the movie, worked it a lot of different ways so a lot of the ideas have been kicked around, but then there's some that nothing beats being there in the moment and you see it happening and you're like 'alright this will be funny.' It little bit becomes a game of you're looking at it on TV and you know what would be funny is if the character said this right now and then you can actually yell it out and it happens. It's like 30-70. I'd say 70% on the spot tends to be kind of the tendency. But then they think of some of the stuff too and Will and John so it sort of all balances out.  

Do you ever get an actor to refuse to say something that you shout out? 

McKay: One time that happened yeah. Someone wouldn't curse. We were trying to get them to curse. I kept saying it to them over and over again. Cris Collinsworth the wide receiver, the guy who does NFL Today. He came on and he was playing Will's boss just for two lines and I kept giving me dirty things to say because it was Cris Collinsworth. It was a bit of joke casting for us. An inside joke to Will. He would not curse. He kept changing it every time. So that will happen sometimes or the phrasing is so strange the person can't say it, but 98% of the time they always say it. Mary is probably the toughest as far as people I've worked with.  

Steenburgen: I didn't know not saying it was an option. I'm glad to hear that.  

McKay: Real often Mary will do the line will and say it but you're the one who is going to hell. And Richard does the opposite. He goes worse than what I say. Richard has these great dark emotional pockets in him from Rhode Island. It's the deadly winters of Providence that keep coming out on set.  

Jenkins: I actually said a line and I begged him not to use it. 

McKay: Oh yeah. 

Jenkins: After I said it I was like, 'did I say that?' I said, 'oh Adam you can't use that.' He said, 'oh I think it might work.'  

Steenburgen: That's because you actually think about what you say and pay attention to it and I have no memory. When this movie comes out it's going to be totally new to me because it's literally like childbirth. Everyday I go home and have no memory.  

Would you say this is your most rewarding film as a director? 

McKay: Yeah, it's pretty fun. As far as all of the ones we've done there's no more enjoyable one. Every single day it's like my favorite scene from the other two movies we did just because it doesn't matter what we're doing. I warned our line producer with the schedule. I said, 'you know we can improvise on every line of dialogue on this movie.' There's no line where it's like 'there's go the balloon' and there's a shot of a balloon. Every single line we turn into a meal so it's fun. If the movie sucks, it won't be the most rewarding.  

How would you define this movie tonally? 

McKay: Obviously seeing what Judd Apatow was doing because he has a lot of freedom when he stays real. 'Let's try to do one being a little more real and look at all you get out of it without going so absurd. You can hook people in these ways.' Within two weeks we blew that rule. They have a fight where they punch 12-year-olds in the face, dogs attacking people. I was like I'm not going to have dogs in this movie. I always have wild dogs and they're tons of dogs all over the set.  

Steenburgen: They knocked me down. 

Jenkins: One of the dogs bit me in the ass. 

Steenburgen: He did. 

Jenkins: It was a little dog. 

McKay: He got a tetchiness shot.  

Jenkins: I turned to Adam and said, 'did you get that on film?' He said, 'yeah we got it.' Today I said, this is the scene after, today I said, 'maybe I should be limping when I come in.' He said, 'I don't think we're going to be using it.' I got a tetchiness shot.  

Do you already know in your mind what take you're going to be using or do you wait for the screening process to help you decide? 

McKay: We screen six or seven times and you shuffle stuff in and out. We had the knife in the leg scene in Talladega and we knew it was funny, but we didn't know it was going to be that funny. So the second I heard that first roar it was like, 'dig out the footage' and we started going and we didn't have a lot. Same thing with this. You just never know rhythm wise what's going to hit, where you're going to have to mine more. It could be the smallest thing you'd never think of, but we definitely have our favorites going into. There's five or six jokes I'm putting into it no matter what or five or six scenes that are going in unless it's dead silence, they're going into the movie.  

Do you feel like the stuff you don't use you can just add onto the DVD? 

McKay: That's a huge thing although it seems to be fading a little bit as far as the people who watch this stuff on DVD. When it first came out it was such a novelty, it felt like everyone watched it. I've noticed a little bit of a dip where you just get the movie and want to watch the movie. There's so much TV and Internet, but yes that's always made me feel better about it. "Anchorman" we could really cut a second movie out of it. We shot more footage on this than anything else I've ever done so there's going to be hours of extra footage.  

You were supposed to direct Land of the Lost right? 

McKay: Yeah.  

How daunting is it to where you're probably not going to have that sort of freedom of time because it's going to be heavy in effects. 

McKay: The main reason I didn't want to do it is because we had just done "Talladega" and I wanted to do small character kind of stuff. It just seemed like the most fun.  It really became a choice between this [Step Brothers] or "Land of the Lost and I went with this. But God, I used to love "Land of the Lost." That was a painful movie to turn down. Just the idea of getting to design the Sleestak outfits. I was going to try to get Bill Laimbeer to do a Sleestak as a homage to his original one. But yeah, I had to choose between the two. But they have a great director on. Have they announced who it is yet? I don't think it's official so I won't say anything, but they have a really good director in mind.  

You're also producing more now so what do you have lined up? 

McKay: We have "The Goods: The Don Ready Story" coming out. We're lining up the ensemble for that and I've actually been talking to Mary [Steenburgen] about coming to do something, but not Richard.  

That's a used car salesman thing? 

McKay: It is, but it's closer to the big auto mall type of thing. It's not like dingy used car. That's another ensemble movie like what's we're doing, just loads of improvising. Ed Helms, Dave Koechner, Katherine Hahn who is fantastic in our movie, tons of guest appearances and Will is going to do a cameo. Neal Brennan is going to be directing it and we start shooting that in early December. We have two other movies we're trying to get going for March, but neither one is official yet. Then we have our show for HBO. The "East Bound and Down" got picked up. We start shooting that in January and I think I might direct an episode of that and Judd was saying he might do one as well.  

With the Don Ready story are you worried about being in the shadow of Used Cars? 

McKay: Sadly I think only the people sitting in this circle remember "Used Cars." People have forgotten about it. I of course love it, but it's very different than that. It's more of a Glen Gary, Glen Ross kind of film.