Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, the creative team behind Reno 911! (the series and the movie), expose the world of extreme ping pong in the comedy movie Balls of Fury starring Christopher Walken, Dan Fogler and Maggie Q. Fogler stars as an ex-ping pong champ who goes undercover to help the FBI capture one of their most wanted.
Improvisation on Balls of Fury: While there wasn’t nearly as much in Balls of Fury as there was in Reno 911! Miami, the actors were still allowed to throw in their own lines occasionally - as long as they didn’t do it in a scene involving Christopher Walken. “Reno, we don't have a script at all,” explained Garant. “It's funny because in this one, the first real person to sign up for it was Christopher Walken. He called us and in the very first phone call said, ‘Hey, I really like this script. I'll do it, but don't change a word. I don't want to sign up for this movie and have you change the script on me. He said, ‘I want to do this movie with this dialogue,’ so we promised him we're not going to change it. So that meant there were certain giant scenes and sections of the movie that you couldn't riff. You couldn't touch. You had to leave Feng exactly Feng. So if there were scenes with like Dan [Fogler] and Thom and scenes with Dietrich Bader where we were able to play with it a little bit.”
The Lengthy Production Process: Balls of Fury had its release date moved back, and that’s mainly due to the fact the studio underestimated how long it takes to animate ping pong balls. It wound up taking eight months to get the CGI right. “The CGI was shockingly long,” confessed Lennon. “We pitched the movie and we said to people, ‘And you're doing the easiest special effect. It's ping pong.’"
“It's been done. They did it in Forrest Gump,” said Garant. But in Forrest Gump the ping pong sequence lasted all of 30 seconds. “And in all fairness, the special effects company also said, ‘Oh, it's the easiest thing in the world.’ That's not true,” said Garant.
Lennon said, “It's very easy to do badly… I mean, the ball's got a reflection when it passes the table every time. It's wildly time consuming and there's a fair amount of math involved. It just took long.”
Rather than rush to make a January or February release date, it was crucial time was taken to make sure the balls looked right as they bounced around the tables. “Everything else in the movie would've been pointless if the ping pong were fake,” admitted Garant. “All the work with Christopher Walken, if the ping pong looked fake, the movie's pointless.”
Dan Fogler Has a Wicked Sense of Humor: Fogler said 90% of the ping pong was real. Yeah, right. “He's sticking to that,” laughed Lennon. “It's impossible, physically impossible.”
“There's one shot in the entire film that's actual ping pong balls,” confessed Garant. “There's a scene where he meets the Hammer, where he meets Patton Oswalt. There's a tracking shot of the gym that's all the people playing. The nun who's nailing it across the table, that's Wei Wang. She like bronzed in '92 and she trained all of our guys. So that shot is real ping pong balls. That room is real ping pong balls. Everything else is [CGI].”
What’s with the Shorts?: Lennon wears super short shorts in Reno 911! and in Balls of Fury. Does he have that written into his contract? Lennon laughed, “Here's the thing. I don't even own a pair of shorts. I kid you not. I don't own a pair of shorts in my private life. I have swim trunks for swimming in water, and pants. I don't wear…I just consider them to be a very silly piece of adult menswear. It's like any time you're an adult man and you want to be taken seriously, you come in in shorts like, ‘Look guys, if you guys don't knock it off, you're going to be in serious double trouble.’ You look like Lord Fauntleroy. You don't look appropriate in shorts, so that's why I always tend to wear them.”
“And they get smaller every thing we do,” added Garant. “The shorts in this one were fine. It was the singlet was much worse,” revealed Lennon.
On the Wackiness of the Reno 911! Miami Tour: The entire cast stayed in character throughout the lengthy press tour to promote the feature film based on their comedy series, and Garant and Lennon found the whole experience to be very surreal. “We did almost three straight weeks in the middle of January around the country every day as the characters,” recalled Lennon.
Garant said, “It was insane. Like there were 10 appearances per town, freezing cold, always in character.” Lennon shared how it worked in some of the towns they stopped in on the tour: “Get up at 4:30 and like go to the center of town with the local weather guy at 4:45am. ‘Hey, here we are! It's 4:45 AM and it's about to snow and here's a guy in shorts. I'm not so familiar with your program but apparently people like it. It's been on for about five years now? Wonderful, and here's a big front coming in.’ It was that every day for a month.”
There even came a time when they were so tired their imaginations got the best of them. “You know what? Actually we got to a point where - did you ever get so tired that you start to hallucinate a little bit? You just start talking,” said Lennon. “That was often when we'd been up for 28 hours or something. It was like the funniest thing we ever said and I don't remember it. It involved Dangle shooting a kid dressed up like an M&M….”
Page 2: Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant on A Night at the Museum 2
