Robert Kojder chats with Over Your Dead Body director Jorma Taccone…
Perhaps most known as a member of the songwriting/filmmaking comedy troupe The Lonely Island, Jorma Taccone is a successful director in his own right, having helmed what is easily one of the funniest movies of the past 20 years in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. His newest film, a comedy-action flick titled Over Your Dead Body, which stars Jason Segel, Samara Weaving, and plenty of others, while also being a remake of Tommy Wirkola’s The Trip, is the kind of hilariously violent blast befitting of a genre festival such as Beyond, which had its inaugural Chicago run this past March.
Jorma coming to town opened up the door for an exciting interview opportunity, where I couldn’t help but resist talking about the pure demented bliss of the damage shotguns are doing in this movie, and how those bullets are mangling faces. Who knew he was a gun fanatic? We also talked about why he felt the urge to remake it and about the casting.
As an aside, I will note that when he did show up to Beyond for a post-show Q&A, he was not only near Wrigleyville at the renowned Music Box theater, but decked out in the gear of Chicago Cubs crosstown rivals, the Chicago White Sox, where he was apparently ruthlessly (albeit playfully) scolded by my colleague and friend Steve Prokopy. As someone who had plenty of White Sox memorabilia in the background while interviewing Jorma, I’m not NOT saying I indirectly influenced him to do this without knowing, but I will happily take the credit. Enjoy the conversation below:
Hey! This is a fun movie, and I love The Lonely Island!
Thanks man!
You’re welcome. Shotgun shells are inflicting damage here in ways I didn’t even know were possible for movies. Can you talk about that process?
Well, if you watch the movie, especially as I have one thousand times, you’re right, shotguns do a lot of different things here! Guns do different things in this movie, what they’re capable of. I loved weirdly being raised by ex-hippies, or as my dad would say, long-haired freaks in the Bay Area, which is why my name is Jorma. I was named after a guitarist from Jefferson Airplane. I weirdly have such an obsession with guns, and so on this, I got to shoot a whole bunch of guns, weirdly, in Helsinki, because you wouldn’t think that that would be even legal there. It was all types of stuff, but yeah, I loved the shotguns in the original movie. This is based on a Norwegian movie called The Trip by Tommy Wirkola, who did Violent Night. I liked the guns being slightly different in this movie, too. This movie has a lot of subtle differences from the original. There are a lot of tonal shifts, and there are some changes in character. But that was definitely, to me, a thought process of what guns we were using for sure.
Speaking of that original version, what was the moment when you knew this was something you could remake to fit your comedic sensibilities?
It’s always scary to like, okay, I’m not going to say always scary. I do this all the time. Even having this presented to me as “Do you wanna make a remake?” I was like, no, I don’t want to do a remake. Then I watched the original. I love the original tonally. There’s a real Venn diagram crossover in terms of what Tommy likes and what I like; he’s making action-comedy, and I’m kind of making comedy-action stuff. I just couldn’t get the original out of my head. And then I loved reading Nick and Brian’s script, which is tonally just more me, the characters to me. I love the original; the original’s really dark. It’s very angry. But I wanted the characters to be a little bit more redeemable. They’re kind of easing into murder. In this version. I don’t think that there’s any like… I love the original, and it’s not like shade or that we’re saying which ones, but this felt more tonally for me.
Then, weirdly, there’s a lot of stuff that I even put back from the original, because I really felt like it was important. There’s a scene in the middle of the movie that involves a pool table that’s really dark, and it’s in the original as well. W kind of changed it to be… there’s some funny in it now, and it kind of makes it a little bit more palatable and more my tone. It was this sort of blend of pushing it towards comedy, but also really trying to retain what I loved about the original: the structure, how surprising it is, and how it has teeth, as the original has real teeth. Like this, I think it’s arguably more violent than the original as well. To me, it was just like reading the original and just thinking about my own tone and what I was going to bring to it; it was like the challenge of these three movies in one, a suspense thriller into a home invasion, into an action movie. Then I weave my comedy throughout, along with Nick and Brian’s comedy. It was just the challenge of doing it, like, and showing people different tones that I don’t think that they expect from me in particular.
I have seen Nick and Brian’s other movie, Pizza Movie, already; that’s also hilarious.
I can’t wait to see it!
Everyone is gonna ask you about Jason and Samara being in this movie. I think it’s awesome you got Ilkka Villi in here, since he’s Alan Wake.
Thanks! Dude, I was super lucky with the entire cast. Timothy took the most convincing to be in this movie. It was originally a pass, and then we had a whole conversation about it. But I was getting Jason, who became like the hub of the wheel. It kind of opened up all these things. I think a lot of people want to work with him. By the time it got to like Juliette, I was like, what’s happening? I was like, shocked that any of them wanted to do it. And I remember having a conversation with Juliette and uh, Paul, and they were talking about who they’d worked with, and they were talking about Leo, and I was like, “Leo DiCaprio, right?” Then I was like, “Wait, what did you work with him on Juliette?” and she was like, “Oh, this movie called What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” And I was like, yeah, I got incredibly lucky with the cast. They were all excellent.
Thank you so much for your time. Enjoy Beyond Fest!
I’m so excited! Right on.
Many thanks to Jorma Taccone for taking the time for this interview. You can read our review of Over Your Dead Body here.
Robert Kojder
