Man, I love this movie. This is exactly my comedy style. It’s silly. It’s hilarious. Well done. So just to get right into it, I wanted to ask, how do you direct VFX artists to properly create a penis flapping in the wind?
It’s a great question. It actually took a lot of swings, if I’m being honest, because you want to make it funny, and you also want to make it a surprise and kind of visceral, but not too jarring and weird and off-putting, because you can really lose an audience if it’s not correct. So we actually did a lot of versions, not to get too, ya know — just a lot of different sizes and types of things. How long you have it up is really important. I think what makes it not jarring and then cringey is the sound of it, because the sound of it in the wind is really funny. So yeah, it took a lot of time. There was a lot of conversations about that, if I’m being honest.
Now, you worked at “Saturday Night Live” for a while, so just to set the table, what are some of the segments that you directed that people might be familiar with?
I did the “Joker” thing, the [Oscar the] Grouch thing with David Harbour that people seem to really like, and I did the Totino’s commercial parody with Kristen Stewart people liked. Oh, and then this other one, “Friendos,” it’s a rap music video parody of Migos, when these rappers are in therapy. That was really fun to do. Those are probably the three. Oh, also a Dunkin’ Donuts thing with Casey Affleck, that did really well.
I love that sketch so much.
Thanks so much. Yeah, that was so fun to do. That was very early on when I was working there. He was great and that was fun.
You left “SNL” in 2021, and that was right around the time that Please Don’t Destroy arrived. So did you get to work with them very much at “SNL” before you left? And how did you end up getting involved with the movie?
Yeah, there was three months of overlap, and it was a very active three months. They got hired at the show as writers, and I was a fan of theirs before they got hired. I was leaving, and they had just started, so I kind of was like, “Hey, if you want to do any videos or anything, let me know. I’m not going to be here for awhile. I’m kind of down to just have fun and try some things.” And they were really excited about that idea, so it was a good match. It was a good dynamic, because they were coming in and kind of fresh and nervous and excited, and I was kind of leaving and sort of like, “I want to just try some fun stuff to do.”
So in the beginning, we did a bunch of videos together, but then I also had to do another shoot that week. We were doing like a music video or something, like a bigger budget kind of thing, because it was a little more experimental in the beginning. Then, as I was leaving, the movie started, they told me that they had this project with Judd [Apatow] and Universal, and it all fit together really quickly, but it was weirdly very fast and very uncommon in this industry to be that quick.