Re-Post: Exclusive Interview with John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill

If you have nothing to do this weekend, check out Cyrus!

I saw this back in March at SXSW and it’s one of the funniest movies I’ve seen this year.

I interviewed both John and Jonah for the film (along with the directors, Mark & Jay Duplass).

For the entire interview, click here.

For the Duplass Brothers interview, click here.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

You guys did a lot of – I know that the Duplass Brothers do a lot of improvising in their movies.  How much did you guys stray away from the script?

John:  Dialogue-wise we never really did the script.  There were a few places where we did what was written, but for the most part I mean, I thought that was a really kind of egoless way to direct a movie especially since they wrote it.

Jonah:  And it was a really good script. It was a great script. It was actually one of the better scripts I’ve ever read.

John:  Yeah, you know what needs to happen here.  We don’t have to say this. Just say it as honestly as you can to each other.  It was a lot of fun, very empowering, but also a big responsibility.

Did you ever worry that you were ever going to just like – were there a lot of scenes where it just didn’t work because you didn’t end up in the right place?

Jonah: Only one scene that I think….

John:  A couple places where scenes were…. what we found on the day didn’t exactly jive with what the structure of the movie needed to be in the editing room, so in those places I think they did those more creative voiceover things.  You heard dialogue while people are not saying dialogue.  Where they kind of layered, which I thought – it’s not what they intentionally set out to do.  It’s not that they filmed those scenes so they could do that, it’s that we improvised our way through a scene and they turned it into that.  It’s one of those cool moments where necessity is the mother of invention.  They created this new interested way to move the story along because they needed to because the scene that they shot was different than that.