By Robert Sims, Special to the MovieKit.com
No matter how many MacGruber blows himself up, he always seems to live to screw up things another day.
But the raciest, sexist dolt who would be MacGyver now faces his greatest challenge: luring audiences away from their TVs to go to the theater to see the first Saturday Night Live-originated film since 2000’s lamentable The Ladies Man. In MacGruber, Will Forte’s special op teams up with trusty sidekick Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig) and the perpetually flabbergasted Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe) to stop madman Dieter von Cunth (Val Kilmer) from launching a nuclear strike against the United States. Mayhem ensues, mostly as a result of the incompetent MacGruber’s bumbling ways and his willingness to place a piece of celery in a place where the sun don’t shine.
Forte, Wiig, Phillippe and Kilmer joined director Jorma Taccone — an SNL writer responsible for creating such classic digital shorts as “Dick in a Box” and “Lazy Sunday” with his Lonely Island cohorts Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer — to discuss MacGruber’s latest mission.
Step 1: Create the perfect MacGyver parody
Will Forte: “MacGruber was Jorma’s idea. He kept coming to pitch it. Every week he would pitch it, for the sketch, and I would say, ‘No, I don’t want it, I don’t think so.’ He did enough weeks in a row where finally to shut him up we said, ‘Let’s write it.’ It was really his idea from the beginning.”
Jorma Taccone: “I’m not very good at pitching. Every Monday we have to get into Lorne’s [Michael, SNL’s creator and executive producer] office, all writers and cast. We get into the room and have to pitch in front of the wildly famous host. It’s really nerve-racking and I’m terrible at it. It was probably one of my worst pitches ever. I think the pitches went something like, ‘You play MacGruber, who defuses bombs only using pieces of shit and pubic hair, so nobody wants to hand you any of the items.’ And I got the worst groan ever.”
Step 2: Think big-screen
Taccone: “Lorne’s always been a real champion of MacGruber. He’s always really like it as a sketch. When the opportunity presented itself for Pepsi to maybe do something with SNL, he came to John [Solomon], Will and I. That propelled it into a little more of a national conscious. Not like SNL is not in the national conscious. But a ton of people watched that [2009] Super Bowl. There are people who don’t know MacGruber except for those Pepsi commercials. We sorta made that on spec. We made it entirely without Pepsi’s revision. We always wanted to make a commercial where he sells out because that’s well within his character. Because we had Richard Dean Anderson, we shot two MacGrubers, six individual little snippets. Because we had Richard Dean Anderson we didn’t know whether we would get the Pepsi commercial on the air. We shot one where MacGyer is MacGruber’s dad, and he’s also a little bit of a bit of shit. That propelled into the idea of it being a film. And then the opportunity came up, that there might be this opportunity—several different studios were interested in the idea—so we wrote a script and were really excited about it.”
Step 3: Make like MacGyver and work wonders with what you have
Tacoone: “The budget on this was $10 million…. It’s still a lot of money, but what we were able to get out of it is pretty awesome.”
“There’s a scene in the movie where they find MacGruber in a monastery. He’s reluctant to join this mission because there’s too much pain in his past. He wakes up from a nightmare and see Dieter von Cunth’s portrait on the wall. He was going to throw a lantern at the picture, burn down the whole monastery and walk away in slow motion like he’s a badass. These poor monks had to put out the fire. That was one of the things we couldn’t do: too much money.”
Step 4: Say goodbye to your dignity
Forte: “In Albuquerque, [Forte’s mother] came to visit. The final day she was get was the day we were doing the celery scene. I had prepared her. She’s been kinda prepared my whole life, but that was like … it wasn’t her so much. I was completely naked and cupping my genitals and placing this piece of celery and looked over and there was my mom standing, watching with no judgment: ‘This is what my son is doing.’ Next to her were her two friends who were not as excited about being there. I apologize.”
Step 5: Never work with props
Forte: “When we first got to Albuquerque and went to the Embassy Suites, as a joke, I guess they knew it was in the script, there was some celery that was in this care package that they had left in there. So we all came in there and were workshopping the placement of the celery. [Jorma] had a little Flip camera. He filmed it. Throughout the next couple weeks people would come up to me and say, ‘I saw the celery thing.’ He would send it to every people.”
Tacoone: “I just showed it.”
Kilmer: “I called Jorma in the middle of that and he said, ‘I can’t talk right now because we’re working on some props.’”
Step 6: Make (courtesy) pillow talk
Wiig: “When you do a sensual love scene with Will Forte, there’s a little barrier between—”
Forte: “This is only a love scene with Will Forte?”
Wiig: “Is it a normal thing? We are talking about the same thing? He put it in between our areas. Did we really use it?”
Forte: “I didn’t want to? You were the one who insisted on it.”
Wiig: “But we didn’t end up using it, but maybe I got fooled somehow.”
Taccone: “We did with it, it just fell out immediately.”
Wiig: “He had a little sack.”
Forte: “It was a pretty big sack. I think basically we just used a towel. This was not a piece of fabric that you wanted to be around after the filming. It was pretty sweaty and hairy.”
Step 7: Think big casting your villain
Kilmer: “It’s really funny. Isn’t it funny? The last time I read a script, a comedy or otherwise, where I called the agent and said I wanted to do it by about page 30 was a comedy not very many people saw called Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It was just like that. It was just so good. Every single idea I had Jorma would kinda not let me finish the sentence and go, ‘No.’ It’s only because it was so good there was nothing to add. I just got dressed and tried not to laugh. I blew out a take because Will was so funny.”
Step 8: Understand the difference between directing an SNL short and a feature film
Taccone: “The biggest challenege was trying to keep your head when every day before lunch … or an hour or two before wrap you were told, ‘What are you doing to cut? You’re not going to make a day. You’ve got to cut something in the afternoon, you’ve got to cut something tomorrow. There’s no way you’re making your day.’ We would make our day every single day, but it would be really fast. On occasion you would really have to think on your feet and say, That scene is now a walk and talk with a Steadicam. The hardest part was having to think, How can we consolidate? We wouldn’t do it that much, but we would consolidate certain scenes as long as it wasn’t to the detriment of the film. Directing is just being able to organize your time and not freak out.”
Step 9: Don’t even worry how MacGruber’s success or failure impacts other SNL characters heading to a movie theater near you
Forte: “My mom is giving me pressure. She’s thinking about not inviting me to Thanksgiving if this does not do well at the box office.”
Taccone: “There’s always pressure, but the budget being so low is helpful.”
Step 10: Hope for a sequel
Ryan Phillippe: “Especially in a tropical locale. MacGruber in Paradise.”