When we got to Atlanta, we went through [the script]. Troy [Miller] was always going through the script. Even in something like this, as frivolous and campy and fun as this movie is, he still wanted to make sure that story points were as grounded as he could make it and characters were as grounded as they could be, even in the context of this heightened reality, which I admire. It’s the way I work myself. Everything’s got to be grounded no matter how stupid it is.
We did a lot of work going through the scenes and kind of cleaning them up and getting them to the point where you could say, “Okay, I can see this happening. This makes sense to me.” There wasn’t a lot of improvising and there wasn’t a lot of fooling around on the set. I think [Cheri Oteri and I] both like to know the lines that we’ve got, and we felt comfortable with the lines. I think there may have been some moments here and there where we were winging it a little bit, but it’s pretty much what’s there on the page is what you get.
How’s “American Wedding?” coming?"
I think it’s a funny movie. I haven’t seen it but I know, even from the script, that Adam Herz jammed a lot of stuff into that script. I told him when I read it, I said, “Man, this is like comedicly relentless.” These kind of - raunchy is not the word but it’s close – scenarios that he comes up with, he just keeps coming up with them. They are really funny put in the right context, incredibly funny. And this one has a lot of heart to it as well, because it’s a wedding. It’s got a nice little vein of sentimentality running through it, which is closer to the first “American Pie” to me than the second one. It could be the best one of the three; it could be the funniest one of the three.
Why did they do a third one?
If you have a film that makes it, that has a great opening weekend, then you know that Monday morning there are people getting together talking about, “Let’s get some people together and figure out a scenario for the next one." That’s just the way it works, I think. I didn’t know what was going on with “American Pie.” I knew when the second one did well... It just had a huge opening and did much better business than the first one. Although personally I liked the first one better, I didn’t like the second one as much, but at some point I heard that they’d hired Adam to work on a script and that’s always a good sign. Bringing somebody else in to write the script you know you’re going to be in trouble because this kid, I don’t know how he does it, but he really has a handle on these characters. He loves them.
Was Jim’s Dad a character you had to rework for yourself?
From top to bottom, every scene. The part was really a much smaller part and there was something about the character. It was too nudge-nudge-wink-wink. I didn’t like it. Paul and Chris Weisz said, “What do you want to do? What do you want to change?” I said, “I want to change it completely.” They said, “Go ahead. Why don’t you come in one day and we’ll just kind of improvise? We’ll go through the scenes.” Which is what we did.
My thing was I wanted the guy to be a good guy. I wanted him to be totally supportive of this kid and feeling guilty that his son’s sexual peccadillo – he’s humping a cake – that he would take it upon himself as guilt for not having laid out the birds and the bees thing properly to his kid. They allowed me to do that. We went through all the scenes. They became funny, and they expanded a little bit. Because it seemed to be working so well in the movie, they added a couple of things later on in the movie. That’s how it turned out.
Interview with "Dumb and Dumberer's" Eric Christian Olsen and Derek Richardson
