Super Troopers 2 movie poster. (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Over the weekend CU Independent’s Arts Editors Austin Willeke and Christopher Koehler got the chance to speak with three of members of the cast of Super Troopers 2: Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme and Paul Soter.
Chris Koehler: Alright so we’ll open it up. This has been the longest gap in films for you guys as part of the Broken Lizard (comedy group) since Slammin Salmon. So we are just curious what you guys have been up to since the end of that film, and what have you learned and what have you brought forth into Super Troopers 2.
Paul Soter: Good question, I don’t believe anybody has asked what have we been doing?
Kevin Hefferman: Well we made a couple mov- I’d say a good couple movies. And we made a TV show. We have been writing a lot [for] TV.
Austin Willeke: I know on your bio on the website it said you were going to, if TV Gods played it out right, we’ll see a new show from you soon.
Hefferman: Yeah, Remi and I shot a pilot a couple months ago. We’re waiting to see if it gets picked up, but there’s a lot of throwing shit at the wall.
Soter: Yeah, I mean we would sell scripts, set up pitches, TV movies — just nothing went through. We did [have] a lot of fun with it. A solid year touring as a five-man group, and then the guys kinda started chasing different things. Two man comedy (pointing to Steve and Kevin). Jay directs a lot of TV. Erik does a lot of public speaking. You know always with the idea in mind that we would get this movie up and running. It’s just taken a while.
Koehler: Really — so this has been a goal you guys have been seeking for a little while now?
Steve Lemme: Yeah man, people ask you know like, “so why the long wait?” I mean the truth is it’s incredibly difficult to get financing for films.
AW: I mean you guys had to crowdfund this one.
Soter: Yeah, we had to.
Lemme: And so we feel fortunate that the fans showed up in such a big way.
Soter: When we came up like, there was a place for the small mid-level movie and every studio had like an independent arm.
AW: Like Fox Searchlight.
Soter: Like Searchlight. Like every studio had one, plus there were just a bunch of other kinds of mid-range places so there [was] a viable platform for those in between movies. It just doesn’t exist anymore. Studios are now in the business of making movies that they think will make over 100 million dollars and then another 300 in China. So it’s just not the same business that it used to be.
And so even as a sequel to a popular movie, it was still something that people believed in, but not up to the point where they were willing to write a check and say ‘yeah let’s do this.’ So we really had to prove [Super Troopers 2] to people. And the crowdfunding campaign, fortunately, did that. Not just in raising that money, but quantifying for investors — because we still needed prime investors to pay above what we got out of the crowdfunding. But we needed Searchlight to really get behind it.
Lemme: Yeah, Searchlight is not really a studio that ever developed and financed films — they typically would acquire films from Sundance, which is what they did with Super Troopers [the original]. But I think also was a big thing was the DVD market.
AW: Well because I know that like — that’s what cemented Super Troopers as a cult classic — that’s how we experienced it. I mean we are half you guys’ age. We were five when it came out in theaters, but growing up watching all of the goofy stoner comedies and everything, Super Troopers was kinda held as the high pedestal of like, ‘this is what you need to watch if you are going to get into the good shit.’
Soter: Yeah and thank god for that — that’s what allowed the audience for the movie to continue growing for years and years and years, so it’s a completely nontraditional sort of exposure trajectory for our movie. Like we talked to people at Fox home entertainment and they would be like ‘it’s the weirdest thing.’ Or people at Netflix are like ‘your movie behaves unlike any other movie’ because it grows over years and years and like, does this [Miming a slow but consistent upward trend with his hand.] Over like 20 years and that’s not what movies do.
AW: Because it’s a multigenerational audience now. Like, you got people who were original fans of it, and then people in our generation that have grown up watching it.
Soter: Right, so that’s been great, and I think we’ll see what the pay off is this weekend, but I think that’s what allowed us to really slowly build a wide fan base, that and with the DVD market going away all of the sudden. If you’re a studio now, you’re like ‘alright now I need all of those people who watch DVDs to leave their couch and go see it in the theater.’ I mean how do you guarantee that? I mean there is no way to guarantee that. And then their best shot, I mean it’s more like they say ‘make the theatrical release an event’ and that’s where 4/20 came in. It’s like — OK make it a thing that if you’re a fan it’s like ‘ok ahh that’s when I’m going’ and I mean of course I have to.
AW: 4/20 getting stoned going to a movie. It’s going to be a good time.
Lemme: You know they kinda created a holiday weekend for us.
All: Yeah [laughing]
AW: So it’s nice to have that association.
Soter: And we didn’t necessarily like hearing that at the time, because the movie was done in the spring of last year. And we were expecting and hoping for a summer release, so that phone call was very bittersweet. Because when you have waited this long and you’re there and the movie looked great we had done the test, and it tested higher than anything we have ever done. We wanted to be off to the races, and then to be told ‘look sit tight for another 10 months.’
AW: Oh you had to hold off 10 months? Sounds agonizing.
Soter: Oh it was, and you know the upside was ‘hey look here’s our thought. We think we can make it an event and we will go wide [release] with it.’ And you know there — there had never been a guarantee with the studio that they would go wide. It was sort of only guaranteed to go for like a medium-wide. So that was the carrot that they dangled. Then it was like ‘OK we can all just hang fire for ten months hoping that it would all pay off and now were are just a couple of days away from it and —
Lemme: And I’m terrified and I don’t want it to happen.
AW: Well especially so since you were going to release it, and now there’s 10 months of build-up, and now it’s got to be released.
CK: Yeah, start all over again. Recently there’s been a lot of revivals of films, especially you know in the post-2010 era. Like we have seen revivals of Anchorman and Zoolander and everything, so we are kind of curious — they get a lot of criticism for relying too heavily on the source material. How did you guys kind of take that and work with it, and how does the first movie play into this?
Lemme: I think our philosophy has always been in writing, that if it makes all of us laugh, it’s going in, and if it doesn’t make all of us laugh, it’s not going to happen. So given the amount of time we had to write the script, we have got like thirty-five plus drafts, which just means you keep adding jokes. The biggest conversation we had was about that topic was how many nods back to the first movie do we want to do. We know there are things, you know, the pullovers(gag in the first movie) that the fans want to see and you can do different pullovers, so you are not really doing the same thing. You do want to touch upon a couple of the inside jokes, but you don’t have to have seen the first one to enjoy the second one.
AW: Well I think that’s good because not even Star Wars is safe from the reboot criticisms. Like when Force Awakens came out, everyone was like ‘its just a new hope again.’
Soter: For us, the rule of thumb was don’t do something that if somebody hasn’t seen the first one, it would take them out of the movie. You know, so there may be a reference that, if you haven’t seen the first movie you won’t love it, but it’s not going to stop you at any point and make you feel confused. I also think the other part of that [is] just to [make sure] everything is a build of the original reference or a twist on the original reference, so that’s what we have been trying to do. We also want to kinda keep it at a minimum [because] the feedback that we have gotten over the years was that people just really enjoy these characters, they enjoy this world, and they enjoy the style of comedy. For us, it was like alright — even all these years later we can just make it feel like it kinda picks back up again. It feels the way you remember the first one felling with the way we interact with each other.
AW: Like you’re meeting a group of old friends again.
Hefferman: Yeah
Lemme: Yeah that’s exactly what it is. I think the thing we have heard the most about Super Troopers, the first one, and with most of our movies, is that it seems like a group of guys you want to hang out with. You know with the exception of Farva.
AW: [Laughing] Every group needs a Farva.
Lemme: Well every group has a Farva if you like it or no,t and you have to make the most of it.
CK: Absolutely
AW: I wanted to ask about the setting next. I really like the idea that it’s on the Candian border and you guys are like this occupying force, and I think that Canadian-American dynamic is great. But I know some of you were talking about potentially doing the Mexican border, but you picked Canada instead. I don’t know if you said it (pointing to Kevin) or if it was someone else that said that the Canadian border was a low crime area just like in the first movie, so you can focus more on the characters and antics. What went into the decision of not picking the Mexican border? I was wondering if it had to do with the hot political climate.
Hefferman: I don’t think so. There actually was an article we had read that was specific to the Vermont border after 9/11. They had re-assessed the border and found out that the position markers were in the wrong place so there was a little bit of that land that was wrong and they had to decide how to re-do it. We thought ‘that’s a really funny scenario, what if a whole town was in the wrong place, right?’ So then that’s what we did with those people — are they Americans? And then what do we do? Then we were like ‘let’s put us (the characters) into that world. So I don’t think it was ever that much of a ‘let’s tackle like a border war or border politics’ kind of scenario.
Hefferman: Yeah we figured we didn’t want to get involved in the immigration argument since we know the appeal of these movies is to put this [stress] aside when you’re battered all day long with fighting. So there was inevitably just enough geopolitics, but more about that cultural divide. Especially since this town is French Canadian and so it was just our way of saying ‘hey look we have Bad News Bears go to Japan,’ so you have to find some cockamamy fuckin’ reason. But for these guys, you can get that kind of feeling by bumping them up like 20 miles north so you don’t have to come up with some outlandish reason to put them in a fish out of water scenario. It’s been right there above them that whole time.
Soter: You know we all — we were talking about it because the other night we sat through the first movie with an audience. Now it’s great to see. I still love it, but I hadn’t seen it in a long time. It definitely — it’s light on plot. It often feels like narrative is the excuse to weave sketches together, and we thought ‘you know let’s make an effort to have the second one be a little more engaging story-telling wise.’ And so we spent a lot of time on that, and I think that is the case with the second movie.
CK: Yeah and in the case of you guys doing it in Canada, I mean it sounds like you guys brought in a lot of Canadian actors and brought in a lot of the Quebec influence into it. So I’m just kinda wondering, you know you guys wrote the script together but when it came time to shoot, did the Canadian actors have any influence on the direction of the film?
Hefferman: Huge, yeah, we had guys like Will Sasso and Tyler Dean who are Canadian guys who play the Mounties and they grew up in Canada. They have their own kinda funny take on things and funny ways of depicting people in Quebec versus Vancouver or whatever it is and we don’t even know, you know?
AW: Kinda like how we depict people in Texas.
Soter: Yeah I don’t think I was aware of how much sort of regional differences and jokes exist among the provinces.
Hefferman: So they brought that in, and it was the same with Rob Lowe who is not Canadian, but you know he had a lot of funny Canadian-lore things that he knew about. He wanted to put that into his character, and it was great because it added a whole new kind of layer to the movie, that there was a lot of this Canadian humor.
Soter: And that’s what helped us contribute to the humor that gets thrown from the Canadians at the Americans. That was always important to us from the beginning. Other than the obvious sort of [points to Hefferman] the guy that gets to be the ugly American, that the rest of us have some like-degree of sensitivity to the fact that we are an occupying force, and therefore we wanted there to be this balance of we made zingers at them and they made zingers at us.
Lemme: But our zingers are like scratching the surface with very stereotypical things about Canadians, like they say “Eh” a lot, whereas when they come at us it’s really like a bulls-eye right on the money about.
Soter: It shows they know more about us-
AW: Like obesity or gun control.
Lemme: Right all that. Yeah
CK: Alright, So I’ve got one last question for you guys. With the film debuting on 4/20, are you planning on sticking around in Colorado to celebrate its release?
Hefferman: [Laughs]
Soter: I wish we could.
AW: IMDB said you [points at Soter] live in Colorado which we agreed wasn’t creepy to bring up because IMDB said it.
Soter: Yeah I grew up in Littleton
CK: Really?
Soter: And then I moved away to go to college where I met these guys. But we’ll be in New York. Because there is a New York premiere and they are going to have us do some press. But it’s nice because that’s where we were when the first one came out.
AW: Oh that’s nice.
Soter: And so there’s something that I think we are all looking forward to about being out there — basically it’s an election night where you get results coming in and it’s an event — It’s a crazy nerve-wracking, wild night. So yes, it would be fun to be here. But there is something fitting and special about the fact that we will all be together in New York.
You can contact CU Independent Arts Editors Austin Willeke and Chris Koehler at Austin.Willeke@colorado.edu and Christopher.J.Koehler@colorado.edu
