FROM THE NEWS ARCHIVES OF CINEMA CONFIDENTIAL
INTERVIEW: Broken Lizard on "Beerfest"
POSTED
ON
08/24/06 AT 2:00 P.M.
BY ETHAN AAMES
The boys from Broken Lizard are back.
The comic geniuses behind the cult favorite "Super Troopers" return this weekend in "Beerfest," the first official Broken Lizard movie under their new production deal with Warner Bros. Pictures. While the troupe collaborated on last year's "Dukes of Hazzard," they haven't been seen together in their own film since 2004's "Club Dread."
"Beerfest" tells the story of two brothers who upon learning about their German heritage, find themselves in a secret international drinking competition known appropriately as "Beerfest." After suffering humiliation from the German team, the Wolfhausen brothers travel back to the United States where they vow to train and put together their own drinking team in order to regain their pride.
At a pub crawl in New York City, the guys - Jay Chandrasekhar, Steve Lemme, Kevin Heffernan, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske - sat down to speak with reporters about their latest comedy outing.
The idea for "Beerfest" originated while the guys were in Australia promoting "Super Troopers." Says Paul Soter, "They sent us to Australia to promote 'Super Troopers.' They had us do all sorts of crazy stuff. They sent us to a big beerfest and we got there and we were there supposed to talk about our movie but it turned into chugging competition, which tend turned into arm wrestling, which it then got weird so they had to shuttle us out of there. We're like, Beer festivals are crazy, totally fucking crazy. It's a funny world and it's fun to put a bunch of people together, and everybody should get as drunk as they can, and compete in whatever there is to compete with. We were so tickled with the idea that we wondered, What if we were in some kind of beer drinking team and we competed against guys in other countries. We took some of the stuff that happened to us in Australia and went from there."
"There would be situations in college where a friend would wake up in a living room, sleeping on the couch by himself," continues Jay Chandrasekhar. "A local family would think he drank way too much and he'd wake up to this family staring at him. There are little flourishes like that that are all throughout the movie. We have a lot of those stories."
The heaviest beer drinker on set wasn't anyone of them, says the guys, but it was actually SNL's Will Forte. "He's incredibly sweet and polite. We were shooting and he just downs it instantaneously and goes, 'Do you have another one?' 'Do you have another one?' He'd nail like five of those," says Soter. Kevin Heffernan observes, "He'd take two minutes in between to go to his trailer and vommit."
The Broken Lizard guys also commend actors such as Cloris Leachman and Jürgen Prochnow for taking risks and joining their picture. Paul Soter remarks, "You offer a chance for somebody to do something and you think that most people aren't very excited. That's why, for Brian Cox and 'Super Troopers,' we're like 'Aww, there's no chance we'll get Brian Cox' but you offer people the chance to do something against type."
One of the craziest scenes in "Beerfest" actually didn't have anything to do with beer but rather, well, "pleasuring" frogs in a science lab. Steve Lemme plays Fink, a scientist whose job it is to extract semen from frogs. Lemme reveales that the idea for the character came from a high school friend. "It happens to be that a friend of mine in high school masturbates frogs for real - for the purpose of science. I'll tell you this, though; I realized he was embellishing and exaggerating the stories of what he did and what he said. We asked, 'What are you doing over there?' He goes, 'Masturbating frogs for a living.' We're like, 'Really?' He goes, 'We have to set the atmosphere. We need to have noises of the Amazon rain forest and spray frog pheremone.' He didn't expect it to come to life. But I went and he just squeezes the frog and it comes out like that."
After many years working together, the guys reveal that their writing process has remain unchanged since college. "There are so many different phases. At the beginning, we spend three or four days in somebody's living room and throwing out every idea on the topic. It's my favorite part of the writing process. Then, eventually, we outline 20 pages and we begin to hone in and craft the jokes. The last thing we do is assign characters so that nobody is writing for themselves. Once we assign characters, we start tweaking to adjust to somebody's body type."
The team looks forward to their relationship with Warner Bros. as they embark upon new opportunities. Broken Lizard has setup their production shop at the studio and will be producing low budget, high concept comedies for the studio. Soter reveals, "We can find scripts and say, 'OK, let's make this a Broken Lizard production' that's something that we like and we want to get made and help get made. Now there's the ability to do more than just make our movies, but get other movies made that aren't necessarily Broken Lizard movies but movies we think should be made."
"Beerfest" opens in theaters tomorrow.

