Britt and Kato team up to fight crime, hitting the streets in Black Beauty, their super-charged car which Kato has made nearly indestructible. Their quest to take down bad guys leads them to Benjamin Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz), a criminal mastermind who isn't about to give up easily.
Together for a press conference in Los Angeles in support of Columbia Pictures' PG-13 3D Green Hornet, the cast, director Gondry, and producer Neal Moritz talked about the road to bringing this action-packed story to the big screen.
Seth Rogen, Cameron Diaz, Christoph Waltz, Jay Chou, Director Michel Gondry, and Producer Neal Moritz Press Conference
Cameron, what was like working on this guy heavy set and is it true that you are the best stunt driver and that you just didn't get to show it?Cameron Diaz: "Well, I can only comment on one of those. It was awesome working with them. I didn't realize that it was such a huge action movie because I came in the first week of shooting and the last week of shooting and all of my bits, there was no action. So I went away to be in another movie..."
Seth Rogen: "With a lot of action."
Cameron Diaz: "...with a lot of action, and I came back and when I saw what they'd done I was like, 'Wait a second. How did this happen? How did I not know this?' Before we started I went out and I took the Black Beauty for a spin. So I should've put two and two together."
Seth Rogen: "It's true, yeah. Well, I drove it, too and I don't drive it in the movie at all. They just wanted us to have fun."
The characters in the film seem to be very aware of comic book-style storytelling and clichés and tropes. Was that awareness important to you in the storytelling and in the performances and in the making of the film?
Michel Gondry: "It's something that we had differences in opinion about. I didn’t want that to be too prominent. I think it was important for you guys to acknowledge that we are in this world that talks about a comic book or not."
Seth Rogen: "Yeah, we kind of wanted it to be a world. The kid is a comic book superhero fan, obviously. To us the simple thought was, 'Who's the kind of guy who's likely to become a superhero? Probably someone who reads comic books and is a comic book fan or is at least aware of them.' But in the writing we kind of wanted to subvert notions that are in a lot of these comic book-type movies, things you'd find in a lot of early origin stories of comic book characters. I think in order to play with those ideas you have to be very aware of what they are in the first place, that they exist and to acknowledge them to some degree. So, for us, we kind of wanted to dance on the line between being a comic book movie and commenting on a comic book movie."
Michel Gondry: "Another thing was Bruce Lee. One of the reasons that we love Jay Chou is because he didn't want to do a spin on Bruce Lee. We knew that had to pay homage or tribute to Bruce Lee because of his charisma and we don't want to mimic him or have Jay mimic him."
Did you go all the way back to the radio serials and watch all the episodes of the show? How much of that did you take in and how much did you have to tune out to do your own thing?
Seth Rogen: "In the beginning phases of writing the script we did a ton of research just to accumulate ideas. The way that we write is that we just start by making tons of lists of ideas and thoughts and things that we'd like to include into the movie. We tried to listen to almost all the radio serials. They're a little outdated, I guess. I guess back then just hearing footsteps for 30 seconds straight was really suspenseful and interesting. The creaking of a door opening was real cinema at that time, but it's a little hard to sit through hours of it at this point for me. But I'm very stupid. We went back to the radio show and the serials that were in movie theaters and the TV show, and we really tried to include ideas from all these things. The Zephyr is in there and little tips of the hat to the previous incarnations of it."
I think we can tell what the Michel Gondry sequences in the movie are, like when you see everything come together in his head. Was there a lot of negotiation about how many of those elements you could have? Was there more that you wanted in the film?
Michel Gondry: "Well, it's sort of easy with me because I remember I designed this sequence because I really wanted…on the paper it was like that. It was literally trying to piece it together. And I wanted to show it visually. I made a sketch and I remember telling my girlfriend, 'Okay, they will never go for it.' I showed the drawing to Neal on Monday morning as a lost cause with no hope. He just looked at it and said, 'I don't get it but just shoot it.'"
"On a different occasion, like for the Kato-Vision when he runs to the car, we had parked two sets of identical cars and nobody had a clue why we did that. People were sort of scared to ask the question because they didn't want to look stupid or something. So they said, 'Is anyone aware that we have parked twice the same car?' I think Neal said that. I said, 'Nobody is going to say anything.' But more importantly, I guess this is the tip of the iceberg, but it's more important to me that I can identify with the hero. And with a guy like Seth playing the main character and the dynamic between Jay and Seth on set and even on paper was something that's different from what you see in general in comic book movies. So this part is me in a sense that I accept to do it, in a way. It's not something that I'd done physically, but in jumping onboard on a project like that I sort of didn't have to reflect myself. The whole story is based on their relationship and I thought that was perfect for me."
Jay, can you talk about doing the action scenes, whether you ever got hurt and if you watched Bruce Lee for research at all?
Jay Chou: "I built the Black Beauty. I didn't get hurt in the fight scenes because I'm Kato."
Seth Rogen: "Kato doesn't get hurt."
Jay Chou: "I think if you see the Black Beauty it will make James Bond's car look sissy. I like cars. I have many cars, but this car is the best."
Neal Moritz: "I think that Jay is adding the Black Beauty to his collection."
Seth Rogen: "I don't think that I can. It's a lot to insure in L.A."
Jay, you're relatively new to American cinema. What was your first thought after your Skype audition?
Jay Chou: "Very exciting and a little bit nervous because I should speak English. I'm training in English one month."
Seth Rogen: "It's amazing."
Neal Moritz: "When we decided that Jay should be Kato, we knew that we needed more days to shoot the movie. So we pulled a little trick. We went to the studio and said, 'We want to cast Jay and we know you want to cast Jay, but you have to give us extra shooting days,' which we didn't need for Jay. We needed for us."
Seth Rogen: "We needed it for me. It was my English, really."
Can you talk about casting Christoph in the film, and Christoph can you talk about your experience on the film and did you do any research for the role?
Seth Rogen: "[...]We wanted the villain to be, I mean, just a character more than anything. We wanted him to be sympathetic. Our fixation wasn't how to make this guy scary. We wanted more than anything to intellectually understand why someone would be so fascinated with killing another person, basically. So that's really how we approached it. We wanted it to be funny. And when we saw Christoph's previous work it had elements of danger, but at the same time was very entertaining and had very funny parts. That's really why we thought that he would be a good guy to do it."
Neal Moritz: "I think when Seth and Evan and Michel, when we first started talking about the role, I think the idea of a villain going through a midlife crisis was something really strong and something that we hadn't seen before. I think when we had our initial conversations with Christoph, that was something that he gravitated towards."
Christoph Waltz: "Picking up the question about the comics, I have nothing to do with comics. I know nothing about comics. I am aware of the importance of comics, but they're not within my world. Not because I feel that I'm above it, but just that micro-surgery is not in my world either. Is that a deficit or is that an advantage? When I do Shakespeare I don't question the world that was created there. Othello in Malta. The Jew in Venice. All these are characters and inventions. I don't need to go to Venice or the 16th century or Malta of the 17th century to understand what's going on. This is not what I do. I'm not a cultural anthropologist. I'm just an actor."
Michel Gondry: "Maybe to give a little spin to what you just said, we had a chaotic road which led to you. The road doesn't matter. What matters is that we got you. I remember one day they were doing a karaoke party at Evan Goldberg's house with Seth. And I drank a half bottle of tequila and I decided, 'Okay, I'm going to rewrite the villain in this movie all at once.' And I did it. And basically he was saying always, starting all his speeches with, 'When I was a little boy,' and the people would tell him, 'No, shut up,' which I guess happens to me all the time. I think that it was a couple of sentences that you picked up from this version and then everything was eradicated, but this sentence, you sort of used it as a way to express yourself. And I guess there was a certain confusion with the character for a while and we worked on that for a while. But I think what happened that was crucial was that Seth and Evan in the middle of the things started to really realize what the dilemma was. We had this additional shooting near the end where we brought in James Franco and then we realized that it's really the midlife crisis problem that was prominent. I think the first scene really indicates pretty well what your problem is. I think it was an awesome job that they did, to find that while we were shooting."
Christoph Waltz: "And it only took a half bottle of tequila."
Seth Rogen: "Exactly, and then we drank the whole thing."
Did you base your villain character on any other well known villains and do you have a favorite villain of all time?
Christoph Waltz: "No, no. This is not based on anything, but the ideas that were relevant to this story. I think that's very important. You don't take little bits and pieces and sort of acting by numbers and put them together into one kind of pre-fab kind of situation. No, no. Even though it might not look like that, it's really based on actorly and authorly considerations."
Seth Rogen: "More actorly."
Seth, you mentioned subverting the origin story. Going back to Britt's great, great, great uncle, the Lone Ranger, there's a tradition of good guys masquerading as bad guys figuring out how not to kill people as they go through the episode...
Seth Rogen: "Yeah. We didn't quite figure that out, I guess."
Michel Gondry: "We had a problem with the body count. We killed so many people that we had to bring them back with a mustache..."
Seth Rogen: "Exactly. We ran out of stunt guys. You see zombies eventually. We thought, 'It's an action movie.'"
"I'm a fan. I always thought that it was funny that on the old A-Team TV show they would shoot 400 people and none of them would die. I think if you're going to make a violent action movie, you might as well just go for it. It's not explicit. It's not in any way meant to inspire people to do anything crazy. It's not supposed to instill any horrific images or anything like that. It's all for the point of fun and just kind of big action more than anything."
"It's funny because we actually watched a lot of action movies leading up to this, thinking, 'Can you kill people in one of these movies?' What we were fascinated by was, like, how many people die in your average [film]. In Transformers, Optimus Prime getting thrown through one building would kill 4,000 people and there's no mention of it at all. No one cares. No one says anything. I don't know if that's the best logistical cue to take."
Michel Gondry: "I wanted a scene where a dog got killed..."
Seth Rogen: "And we wouldn't let that happen. You can't do that."
Michel Gondry: "But all this being said, you don't kill anyone because you gas them."
Seth Rogen: "I gassed a lot, exactly. You don't see any bodies on the ground."
Christoph, how did you vilify yourself on set? How did you act as the villain?
Michel Gondry: "He started talking like a director and became evil."
Christoph Waltz: "Forgive me reverting to an answer that I've given before. I learn my lines and I show up on time. That's more or less what I do. There's no mystery behind it. I just do what is necessary. The decision as to what is necessary, that's a bit more tricky."
Seth Rogen: "It's impressive that he shows up and learned his lines because we would rarely give him them."
How do you respond to the intensity of fan expectation on something like this?
Neal Moritz: "Well, there was a lot of..."
Seth Rogen: "Speculation? I like to use the word speculation."
Neal Moritz: "…speculation of what the movie was going to be and how a combination of Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg - who are known for stoner bromance comedies - and Michel who's known for more indies and me who's known for more straight ahead kind of action, how could this combination come up with something that would be valuable. The thing that stuck with me through this more than anything is how the team of Michel, Seth and Evan and myself, even with all the negativity that was coming at the beginning of this process, what we were going through, how we all stuck together. So the first time that we actually showed this movie to a real audience and to see their response was probably the most satisfying night of my film career. It didn't make a difference what anyone had said in the past. When they saw the movie and they loved the movie, that they loved the relationship between the two guys, that to me is all that really matters, what a real audience says when they see the movie in a dark auditorium. We have been lucky enough on this movie through all the turmoil that we've had, which we've had plenty, that we really did stick together and ultimately make the movie that we wanted to make. Luckily audiences are embracing it as much as we hoped."
Michel Gondry: "There was a moment in time where I could describe exactly what you're talking about. We were in this room talking about the car. It had been a long process and we are supposed to have a deal with some big company and it was a crisis and the deal fell through. At some point we were all in the room and Neal said the most surprising thing to us. He said, 'Let's just shoot the car from the '60s.' We sort of had a high five moment with Seth and Evan because that's what we wanted to do from the beginning. We didn't even dare to ask Neal because we saw that he wanted the little nervous car that usually he has in his movies. That moment was really an awesome moment."
Neal Moritz: "We were very lucky that we were able to convince the studio to turn down millions of dollars in a car promotion to ultimately do what was best for the movie. I think we didn't try to manufacture some new, exotic looking cool car as the Black Beauty. It stayed something that was kind of tested, tried and true. And we just ultimately felt was sexy and beautiful. Staying with that car is really a kind of hallmark of that movie. We don't have characters with superhero powers. Our superhero in the movie is the car."
Michel Gondry: "So we bought one and we parked it right in front of the building. Everybody came down and then for some reason we felt that movie might happen."
Seth Rogen: "Once that car showed up it all seemed okay."
