INT: Lemme/Heffernan

Set
Visit Intro / Jurgen
Prochnow / Paul
Soter & Erik Stolhanske
/ Steve Lemme & Kevin Heffernan / Jay Chandrasekhar

Like
the interviews with Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske, this interview
was a lot longer than what you see here. In fact, it was probably
the longest of all the interviews but again, I’ve truncated it to
include only the questions relevant to BEERFEST.
The interview was also, incidentally, the most fun. Not to detract
from the other Broken Lizard guys, who are also very funny, but
Steve and Kevin are f*cking hilarious. It wouldn’t be a stretch to
say that everybody was laughing for the entire length of the
interview. Also, Steve had a small bald patch on the front of his
head and I’m still slightly confused whether it was for the movie
or he just happens to have a bald patch there. Either way, it was
cool-looking!

Can
you just say your name just so they can differentiate really quick?

Steve
Lemme (SL): Steve Lemme.

Kevin
Heffernan (KH): I’m Kevin.

Speak
in a higher voice.

SL:
Hi. I’m Steve Lemme. Right out of the gate. Well, as you cannot
see on the tape recorder, I play a guy named Charlie Finkelstein,
who is sort of like the – every character plays a role in this
movie. I’m sort of the geek who’s figured everything out
scientific about beer. The anatomy of beer, the physics of beer, the
geometry of beer. I’ve even figured out a way to align the body in
such a way that the spine and the organs and throat align to create
the perfect chugging instrument. So that’s really what I’m here
for. Of course, as a scientist, I needed to get a perm.

KH:
This is actually your real hair.

SL:
Right.

KHQ:
In other movies, they’ve put like one patch of hair.

SL:
It’s a miracle. My hair has actually started to grow back up here
(points to the bald patch). Look at that.

How
much scientific research went into this role?

SL:
Quite a bit actually. I learned a word. It’s one of the longest
words in the English language. You know that word
antidisestablishmentarianism? This one’s longer. It’s
pneumonoultramicroscopicchillicovolcanocaniasis. And I throw that
around pretty liberally in this film.

As
in pneumonia, right?

SL:
No. No. It’s actually the passage – it’s sort of like osmosis.
It’s the passage of tiny particles into something else.

It’s
funny. I have a friend who’s going to beer – brewmaster’s
school in Germany. He has to take physics and chemistry. It is a
real science. Did you learn how to brew?

SL:
Have I learned how to brew? Oh yeah. Since the day I was born
motherfucker.

Looking
at you, you’ve been the good-looking guy of the bunch in a lot of
the movies. Did they do this on purpose? (Referring to Steve’s
perm and bald patch.)

SL:
We were talking about this a little bit yesterday. When we were
making Dukes of Hazzard, my original scene got cut. So I was going
to do the reshoot, the idea was thrown around about me doing male
pattern baldness, which I latched onto and so did every one else,
quite a bit. When that didn’t happen, it just seemed like a
natural fit to do it for this thing. I appreciate the good looking
guy comment. I’ll see you later.

Now
you’re going for the Larry Cohen look. You’re like the lovechild
of the Three Stooges.

SL:
Oh yeah. Actually I was modeling it a little bit on Sean Penn from
Carlito’s Way.

And
you wear the glasses.

SL:
Have the glasses. Yeah. Yeah. I have the glasses and everything and
I bring the front down a little bit to cover up the problem areas.

The
guys told us that a lot of this was sort of based on the beer
culture at your guys’ college. Can you tell us about some of that
beer culture?

KH:
Well, they say write what you know, so we decided we would make a
beer movie because that’s what we learned in college, beer
drinking. Right?

SL:
Yeah. Yeah. You’ll see quite a bit of the things we did in
college. There’s – we did a bit of beer drinking in college. In
the most – I think we drank so much that we got so bored with it
that we came up with – like everybody –new ways to do it. Like
we have the monkey chugs in this movie, which is upside down and you
race drinking beer in the roof of your mouth, which is easier said
than done. You realize every time you try to do i

t, that you instinctively put it up to your chin and then you spill
the beer all over your face.

KH:
I think the real inspiration was this trip that we took to
Australia. When we were doing SUPERTROOPERS promotion and they sent
us to Australia. One of the promotions that they sent us to was a
beer festival, which I thought that was kind of interesting because
we don’t really get that here. But they sent us there. We ended up
having a chug off against five Australian guys.

Was
Will Forte on your team?

KH:
No, he was on the opposing team and he is quite the beer chugger. A
shockingly fast and confident drinker.

SL:
Did they tell you – they must have told you about the chug?

KH: 
Well, it was funny though because Will Forte – I think you
come in and it’s all bravado in the beginning. We were all like,
‘We’ll chug the beer ourselves.’ Then by day three, you’re
like ‘oh my God.’ So he came in and did the same thing –
chugged a gigantic thing incredibly fast. Wow. Then he went outside
and puked in the back parking lot.

Who
do you play? Can you tell us a little bit about him?

KH:
My character’s name is Phil Crundle, aka Landfill, which is a
little play on words. Basically Landfill, because I’m the guy who
like drinks and eats anything and everything.

SL:
He’s Bruce the Shark.

KH:
License plates and shoes and stuff.

SL:
Yeah.

KH:
So they get me on the team to be that guy, that anchorman guy who
can drink fast and a lot.

So
if you bring your experiences from college to this film, do you
bring some of your bad experiences too? Obviously people who drink a
lot of beer have some real bad nights too. Are we gonna see some of
that in this film?

SL:
No, it’s all glorified. In a beautiful glow.

Q:
There’s no beer goggles?

KH:
There is. There’s a little bit of beer goggles in there actually.

SL:
We have a very intense beer goggles scene actually.

KH:
Very, very funny.

That’s
how you become sexy again.

SL:
Exactly. The hair magically sprouts out of my forehead like
playdough.

Are
there any big physical stunts?

KH:
I think in this there’s a lot more physical comedy than in the
other movies. Like for example I get into a huge fistfight with
Mo’Nique, me and Mo’Nique going at it. It’s actually – I was
talking to the stunt guys the other day. She’s going to do karate.
She’s going to fight. We’re thinking she’ll break out some
karate on me.

SL:
Yeah. Because Mo’Nique is a karate expert.

So
Steve, is it true you got your girlfriend Blanchard [Ryan] and she
plays his [Kevin Heffernan’s] wife? Is that true?

SL:
I will say this, yes it’s true. But I didn’t really get her into
the movie. In fact, when you see her, she’s actually the perfect
girl for the part. Wouldn’t you say?

KH:
She is perfect. We actually have a love-making scene. Me and
Steve’s –

SL:
They’re going to go at it animal fashion.

KH:
Right. That’s really why she’s in the movie. No, I’m just
kidding.

SL:
Why don’t you say something nice about her?

KH: 
I think she’s great. I fought for her to be in this movie.
It’s beneath her. She should be doing Shakespeare in Moscow.

What
about all this crazy sex that’s in the movie? You [Kevin] have
Blanchard. What about you [Steve]?

KH:
Steve gets seduced by the Swedish drinking team.

SL:
They are women. Yes. Well, when you see me – when you first meet
me, my occupation is that I’m in cloning. I work for the National
Institute of Health and I extract frog zygote manually.

KH:
The gamete.

SL:
The gamete. Yeah. I do it manually. It’s actually – it’s a
true thing. A good friend of mine does that for a living. He
masturbates frogs for a living. I’m not kidding. I don’t want to
say too much about what happens in my sex scene, but let’s just
say I frog the Swedish girl. Yeah.

There
was a little SUPERTROOPERS bit in DUKES OF HAZZARD. Are there
callbacks in this film to previous films? Is there a Broken Lizard
universe where these characters all exist in the same world?

KH:
We brought some guys back. We brought – a couple of the guys who
played the local cops, are guys in different scenes. And we brought
back Ozzie Fillipe who was the German guy.

But
they don’t play the characters they played.

KH:
They don’t play the characters they played.

SL:
I don’t think we have any callbacks.

KH:
We have a call back from PUDDLE CRUISER, which was our first movie.

SL:
What’s that one?

KH:
Domingo.

SL:
Oh, right. Domingo. I don’t know if any of you have seen PUDDLE
CRUISER, but there’s a little Flamenco dancer.

KH:
We brought him back.

SL:
He puts pickles on the table.

KH:
We brought a bunch of the actors back, but not necessarily in the
same parts.

Can
you talk about recreating Germany in Albuquerque?

KH:
It’s kinda weird. New Mexico is giving filmmakers lots of rebates
and breaks and stuff, so Warner Bros. said, “You will go to
Albuquerque and shoot BEERFEST there.” We looked around to see if
we could make Munich (something about the United States at 18:00).
Ultimately the art design guys did a great job.

SL:
In our research for this movie, we looked up Oktoberfest and we
found out a number of surprising things: It is a carnival
atmosphere, they do not have beer until the beermeister taps the
ceremonial keg at the beginning of the festival, and interestingly
Oktoberfest is in September. It starts in September I guess because
October is too cold. It starts in the last two weeks of September
and carries over to the first week of October. So this is actually
more accurate – people will see it and go, “I don’t know about
this,” – but it is fairly accurate with Oompah bands and
Schnitzel, and like spleen eating contests and all that. The chicken
dance is a real thing. But in terms of Albuquerque, the crew here is
without a doubt the best crew we’ve ever had, and the art
department has, I think, taken this movie to whole other level. If
you visit the BEERFEST set tonight, you’ll see the scope of what
they’ve done.

The
crew is from here or you brought guys you worked with before?

KH:
It’s a mixture. We brought some of our guys and we hired from
here. The more you hire locally the more rebates you get.

Have
you perfected a German accent?

SL:
Me, no I can’t do a German accent. Although I try, sadly.

How’s
Jurgen?

KH:
He’s great. If you were like to say, ‘I need a real German bad
guy’, like a real German bad guy, he’s a guy who’s a real
German bad guy.

Does
that mean you can go anywhere and build a set and maybe you don’t
always need to go to the real locations.

KH:
Maybe, but it’s hard to say. When we get to the editing room we
might say, “You know what, we need to get some shots of real
Oktoberfest and pop them in.” Interior-wise you can do it
anywhere. But once you get exterior, you have to get kinda close…

SL:
They have built a ton of fantastic stuff, but it’s true – you
can’t really beat the one hundred thousand plus people who go to
Oktoberfest. It would be nice to get one shot of that.

So
much of CLUB DREAD was the atmosphere of being there.

KH:
We were really there.

They
were talking about some of the combinations you made? Making darker
German beers by pouring Diet Coke in the O’Douls. How foul was
that?

KH:
It got a little ridiculous because some of the German guys were
like, “I can’t drink anymore. I am done!” Plus, Diet Coke and
beer – which I thought would be a great drink to serve at a
restaurant.

Are
you guys losing a lot of time on bathroom breaks? I thought I would
see more Port-A-Potties around here.

SL:
You see us running to the bathroom.

KH:
It’s weird because you’ll drink six O’Douls and you won’t
feel drunk at all, but you go to the bathroom every fifteen minutes
and you’re not even drunk. It’s like being 65, you go to the
bathroom every 15 minutes.

SL:
I think one of the properties of O’Douls was that it goes through
you faster. That’s the price you pay for being sober.

What’s
that saying, you only rent it!

KH:
You only rent it! That’s true.

SL:
On these days when you do these chugs, between every take you’re
like, ‘Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom. Excuse me, I have
to go to the bathroom.’ And it’s real. You’re not screwing
around. And you make it there in the nick of time.

How
bout catheters?

KH:
They do have these beer chugging things they created with tubes, not
for w

hen we drink, but for the other teams we play against because they
can’t drink as much as we can. There’s a little tube where the
beer goes down.

You
would think with the budget they could have made animatronic heads
for chugging.

SL:
Have you heard of the Ubangi? It’s a real thing, like if you’re
drinking out of a cup, you get your entire mouth around the whole
cup and drink it down. He does a Ubangi in the film.

KH:
They have a computerized thing that I put in my mouth and it expands
my face.

Have
you guys thought of any good drinking games to go along with the
movie?

KH:
There was talk about creating our own drinking games, but then we
thought about the different drinking games and there are so many you
don’t have to create them.

SL:
People came up to us after Super Troopers and said, “Oh we
invented a drinking game – anytime one of you swears, you have to
drink.”

You’d
last eleven minutes of the movie and you’re gone.

SL:
I know that Warner Bros. suggested creating a drinking game for the
movie, just a dot that appears every few seconds.

KH:
The new one is that we reused a lot of extras, so you put a picture
of the extra up, and every time you see that guy in the movie, you
drink.

BEERFEST
goes wide on August 25th