“Harold and Kumar” stars John Cho and Kal Penn have been traveling the country doing a series of promotional appearances. The San Diego Comic Con tour stop was where I caught up with Cho, Penn and director Leiner for a short interview before they took the stage in front of thousands of comic book/movie fanatics.
Can you talk about the evolution of this project?
DANNY LEINER: The script that I got from Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg was pretty close to what we ended up shooting. What we worked on developmentally was just some character arc stuff, and the detailing of the guys’ journey. A lot of the comedy and set pieces, almost all of them were in there to start. And in the rehearsal process with John and Kal, we just spent a lot of time kind of working on the beat of the scene and incorporating stuff that we would work on [in rehearsal] in to the script – but really keeping the integrity of the script. I thought the script was really good. My idea was if I could shoot each scene of the script at the level of the script or elevate each scene or whatever in that regard, I would be in good shape. That was the aim we were working from. Then during shooting, there would be some improv’ing but it would be going mainly from what we had built in to from our rehearsal process.
Was the ethnicity of the characters in the script originally?
JOHN CHO: It was written into the script.
KAL PENN: The writers grew up [with] a pretty diverse group of friends and they were always kind of in tune to the fact that whenever they would see movies, nobody ever looked like their friends. Or half of their friends were completely not represented. So in addition to writing a script that was funny and could stand on its own, they specifically wanted to write a Korean American and an Indian American character. Harold Lee is based on their best friend who is named Harold Lee.
JOHN CHO: He used to get mistaken for me on occasion, so they thought that was funny. I think that had something to do with me hearing about the script early on.
DANNY LEINER: It was definitely something that attracted me to the script was the fact that it was such a fresh take on like a buddy/stoner film, something I haven’t seen.
KAL PENN: It wasn’t all white guys.
DANNY LEINER: Yeah. I wouldn’t have been interested in doing it if it was – or even the white and black guy. Stuff that you’ve just seen a lot recently.
How tough was it to get Neil Patrick Harris to sign on?
DANNY LEINER: Well, I’ll tell you we really wanted him so I was nervous about it. I went to New York, he was on Broadway doing “Cabaret,” and I went and kind of pleaded my case for him to be in the show. You know, he has a great sense of humor so he liked the idea of playing the character Neil Patrick Harris. He thought it was really funny. His concern was that there weren’t too many “Doogie Howser” [references]. Like he wanted it to be about Neil Patrick Harris and not about Doogie Howser and I wanted it to be exactly the same. So he was into it. I was really glad because we were definitely on [the same] path.
There’s a ‘Battleshits’ scene in this movie. Do you know anyone who plays a toilet game like that?
DANNY LEINER: The writers I believe…
KAL PENN: They were friends with a lot of football players and stuff and before games they used to play battleshits.
What was used in place of the marijuana in the movie?
KAL PENN: Oh. Marijuana was substituted with marijuana. No, just kidding.
JOHN CHO: I don’t know, you have to ask these guys.
KAL PENN: It was a herbal mixture.
JOHN CHO: It hurt. Actually whatever it was, it hurt. There was no high and it hurt.
