To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the film, we asked the cast and crew to weigh in on the classic comedy that thirty-five-year-old men are still quoting to this day.
The Screenplay
Writer/Director: The idea really came to me out of the blue. I saw a guy with a funny voice fall down a flight of stairs and I thought, Wow, that could be a short film. But then I saw that same guy stand up and immediately get hit in the groin by an errant baseball and I thought, Wow, that could be an entire feature if I added some sex stuff. A week later, I had finished the script’s first and only draft.
Male Lead: The script was so solid. So dense. Real thick paper. Bound well, too. Don’t see scripts like that nowadays. Now they’re all PDFs.
Male Co-Lead: It was just crammed with gags. Some pages were entirely gags. No dialogue. No description of the gags. Just the words “We’ll do some gags here.” I remember asking my agent, “Can a movie have this many gags?” And, I’ll never forget this, he said that it could.
Executive Producer: Most screenplays put me to sleep. They’re long. They’re boring. A majority of the words are spelled correctly. And, usually, I read them in bed at 2 A.M., after taking several Ambien. Not this one. This one was special. It was such a wild ride that, at the end of its forty-seven pages, I still wanted more. More time with the characters. More gross-out scenes involving naked elderly people. More Ambien. I’m a man, by the way.
The Casting
Executive Producer: We were very deliberate with our casting. There’s an old saying in Hollywood: “The people you cast are going to be the people who are in the movie.”
Writer/Director: I didn’t want actors, but, in the end, we went with actors.
Male Lead: The audition was very interesting. I had my lines memorized, but they told me to improvise instead. I didn’t know how to improvise, so I just made things up on the spot. I thought they would be mad, but they actually loved it.
Male Supporting Actor: Coming from a Shakespearean background, I didn’t expect the audition to feature so much swearing. Or so much synthetic semen.
Lead Boom Operator: Normally, us boom operators aren’t brought in for auditions, and this was no different.
The Atmosphere on Set
Writer/Director: We bonded so much. We were like a family. And I’m not just saying that because I hired most of my family to make the film.
Male Lead: It wasn’t like work. It felt more like summer camp. We all had nicknames and inside jokes. We’d all go swim in the lake after a day’s shooting. Our parents sent us cookies in the mail. There was a bear scare for a few days.
Third Male Co-Lead: This was my first feature film, so I was worried that people would, you know, haze the new guy. Couldn’t have been further from the truth. I was the one who hazed all of them.
Executive Producer: I was on set quite often, and I can describe the vibe in seven words: fun, fun, white, male, fun, bear, fun.
Head Caterer: They loved my spaghetti and meatballs. They even added a line in the movie about my spaghetti and meatballs. When the one character orders at a restaurant, he orders spaghetti and meatballs. Before having my spaghetti and meatballs, that character was going to order linguini with clam sauce. I got a writing credit for that.
The Editing Process
Writer/Director: After shooting for two months, we started editing and were, like, “Wow, we really have a movie here.” This wasn’t a commercial or a TV show. This thing that we’d shot was a movie. That doesn’t always happen.
Editor: We were getting major pushback from the studio to keep the film under eighty minutes, so a lot of great scenes where a guy was accused of being gay because he wore a polo shirt or drank wine instead of beer were left on the cutting-room floor.
Love-Interest Actress: The four scenes in which I had lines were cut. I was told it was because the bear stole the footage, but I’ve since spoken with several zoologists, and they’ve said that doesn’t sound like something a bear would do.
Executive Producer: It was my idea to have bloopers play during the credits. I thought it was important to show the audience how many times the actors fucked up.
The Legacy
Executive Producer: The movie really encapsulated a moment in time. The movie is 1999. I mean, Kid Rock did the entire soundtrack, and Monica Lewinsky makes four uncredited cameos. Now, if you were to ask me, after two decades, does the film still hold up? Has it aged well? Is it so politically incorrect and sexist that it’s outright offensive to nearly everyone on Earth? If you asked those questions, I wouldn’t lie to you. So please don’t ask me those questions.
Male Lead: You couldn’t make this film today. And I’m not saying that because half of the people who helped make it have been “cancelled” and subsequently “incarcerated.” I’m not saying that because we had so many white actors playing characters of every different ethnicity, including fictional ethnicities. I’m saying that because we filmed so many scenes in fully operational Blockbusters.
Writer/Director: I still can’t walk down the street without people stopping me, telling me how much this film means to them and their fraternity members or co-workers at JPMorgan. I’ve made scores of films since, including four sequels and two reboots, but nothing’s been quite the same. We captured lightning in a bottle. A bottle of synthetic semen.
Lead Boom Operator: I haven’t worked in film since. That bear ate my only boom mike.
