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| Dude Bro Directors |
TTDILA first started by talking to one of the directors/writers, Tomm Jacobsen, who was slowly joined by his colleagues over the phone.
The following is excerpts from our conversation together.
TTDILA/Jonathan: So you're in the film as is everyone I'll be talking to in some way?
Tomm: I get my face in the juicer at the start.
TTDILA: That must have been a lot of fun.
Tomm: Yeah, yeah that was a lot of fun. Actually, some people have posted that that's one of their favorite deaths in the film. They love blood spilling off my face like orange juice.
Tomm: I live in Silver Lake, I'm out in Virgina right now promoting the movie. Thursday, Chicago.
TTDILA: Why now? Why not October for Halloween?
Tomm: Well, some festival's take place before then. The Bruce Campbell Film Festival, so we don't exactly get to pick the dates. We're their midnight screening Friday! Very excited about that!
We then discussed Tomm's love of Tremors and him missing out on the special screenings in LA of the film and the work of Cop Car director Jon Watts, specifically "Clown" and Jon getting Spider-Man.
Tomm: If 5-Second Films were able to do a Marvel movie it be X-Factor. They're superheroes that are so flawed...
Soon more of the group joined us.
Alec Owen the lead, Brent / Brock and was a writer and Michael Rousselet who played Spike and was a writer and director too.
Unknown: We pushed him down some stairs, Jonathan.
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| Alec Owen |
Michael: So we were going to film the undewater sequence, Jonathan. The final sequence. Maybe two minutes before we were going to film someone yelled out Robin Williams is dead. And we stopped working. We all took ten minutes and all of us were floored.
Alec: Yeah it was weird how much it affected us.
Michael: We were in such high spirits because it's the last shot of the movie. And then all of it came crashing ...
TTDILA: Really? It's so weird someone wanted to say Robin Williams is dead so much. Like, they were the first person to tell. "Hey guys, guess whose dead?"
The group told me it was revealed with more dignity and sadness, someone blurted it out in shock.
TTDILA: Can't wait until it's one of the favorited movies in October. How was the LA Film Festival? How was the experience. I believe you have two screenings?
Tomm: Yeah, we got an extra screening 'cause we sold out our first one. And there our second screening sold out as well. It was unexpected to say the least. LA Film Festival treated us great.
The had free indie games to play. Great filmmakers to meet.
Michael: I would say my favorite part of the LA Film Festival was getting to show the film to an unsuspecting public. It was so validating after selling out the first screening.
TTDILA: Was that the first time you showed it to the public?
Tomm: That was the first time we screened it, the first time we showed the public.
TTDILA: At any point did you guys look at the movie and go, "Guys this is way too crazy, like this is is insane." Or, "Should we push the boundaries?"
Michael: There was a musical number...we cut a whole two, three-minute sequence. There was a musical number for the car crash when they were flying through the air. And we thought it was too silly.
Alec: That was the only case in post-production we got rid of anything. There were puppets during the script phase in pre-production that were cut. We originally had Officer Sminkle as a p*ssy-hound to off-set the dude bros, but Sminkle was coming off a bit too sexist. We ended up just making it a lot sillier. That being said we didn't have to dumb it down too much because we have a whole freaken sub-plot about a bag of oranges.
Michael: It's like waiting three years to seeing if a punch-line worked.
TTDILA: That long ago?
Michael: We shot in in 2014, but we started writing in 2012. The writing process was the most intensive, meticulous... that took years. The filming took five months, three?
TTDILA: Were you filming here in LA, or?
Alec: We actually shot a good chunk of it at Cedar Lake, up in Big Bear. And we shot at a Christian summer camp. It snowed when we went and we had to build an outside set in our cafeteria.
Michael: When people die outside, it's inside.
Michael: Tomm and me built a miniature town for two months.
Tomm: It was the best two months of my life. I wish I remembered more of it, but model glue is really powerful stuff.
TTDILA: Anything you wanted to pull off, but couldn't do?
Michael: There were some legal things, like we couldn't have more dogs on set. We wanted to have more kills involving animals for the opening montage and because of budget we couldn't.
Tomm: In the very early stage we wanted the paddle shop owner to be a gas station attendant like so many other horror films, Alec Owen or someone came up with the idea of paddle boats instead.
Alec: In an early version of the script, we had the whole thing being a dream sequence. It was going to be a dream of little orphan Brent and then we see all of the Dude Bros as young kids with him in the orphanage. He then looks up out a window and two planes crash over the orphanage and that would have been the end.
TTDILA: Who came up with the Brent getting lost within the movie bit?
Michael: Jon did that, the "Searching for Sizzler sequence." We though about planting him in background earlier in the film, so it would appear he broke the universe.
Alec: When Jon first came up with that idea, I looked at him and just gave him a hug. Like, "That is the f*cking idea, we have to do it."
TTDILA: Any times you couldn't stop laughing?
Tomm: Anything with Turbeaux. Anything with Paul Prado was really hard to film. He's a monster on camera, destroying the set, tearing down the set. Everything he did.
Michael: The way he would take direction from us was him doing the complete opposite. It was so funny and infuriating. Everything he did was gold. The hardest things was choosing what take and that goes to Brian Firenzi. Brian Firenzi cut the whole f*cking film and usually he would pick a take by looking at the sound wave file and looked at the biggest spike in laughter.
TTDILA: The actors, hard to cast or all friends of yours?
Michael: The big guest stars our fans of our work. Larry King was a wonderful guest. "Larry do you want to be in it? We'll kill you," and he lit up. G-d bless him. And he's a Dodger fan. Go Dodgers.
Alec: The members of the main cast are all 5-Second members.
Tomm: The only people we did casting for was the cops, the female cops.
Thanks to the 5-Second Films cast and crew. You can buy the film here www.dudebropartymassacre3.com and get the special edition with bonus features.
Wait, there's more!
Special screenings for Dude Bro Massacre Party III in September at the Cinefamily
