A Real American Hero

Armed with coffee, and in one case, a date cake, Jorma Taccone, Will Forte and Ryan Phillippe, sauntered into the Indiana Memorial Union’s Distinguished Alumni Room with bags under their eyes.
Taccone gazed at the portraits smothering one wall, joking, “I think they need some more white people up here,” while Phillippe looked right at me and simply said, “Your friends got us hammered last night.” It was the morning following the screening of their new movie, “MacGruber,” and their first-ever trip to Kilroy’s.
After rehashing the night before, including Taccone’s ill-advised trip to Sports, the trio sat down with WEEKEND to talk about the new film, which opens tomorrow.

WEEKEND: What made you decide to make “MacGruber” into a full-length movie?
Taccone: It was always in our head as sort of a pipe dream every time we were writing the sketches. Then, after the Super Bowl commercial, it became a little more of a possibility. Lorne (Michaels) talked to a couple movie companies out in L.A., and as soon as we heard there was a potential opportunity, we started writing a script for it.
We wrote it really fast, in about four or five weeks. The first draft was insanely long, like 175 pages, but it all came together... That was a really long answer.

WEEKEND: Jorma, this was your first directorial feature. Can you talk about that experience as a whole and how it was to film in only 28 days?
Taccone: I think it was intense for all of us. After the first week, we were doing six-day weeks. It got to a point where you could look at your weeks and laugh at them, be like “Whoa, we’re shooting a gun battle on Monday, some explosions on Tuesday, another gun battle.” But we got through them and had a pretty good time doing everything.

WEEKEND: Ryan, you’ve worked with some pretty big-time directors (Robert Altman, Clint Eastwood). Can you compare them to Jorma?
Phillippe: Well, he’s younger. (Laughter) Really, it’s so hard because each film and each experience with a filmmaker is unique. One of the coolest things, even though I joke about it, was getting to work with someone close to my age. We have a lot of the same reference points, so I connected with him as a friend better than I would with guys like that. He also has great energy, and one of the reasons I wanted to do the movie was because I knew he would bring that kind of edge and sort of take on the film, make it unique and set it apart from some of the other
(“Saturday Night Live”) films in the past.

WEEKEND: Will, being that you are MacGruber, did you feel like you had to carry the movie?
Forte: Oh, no no no... I felt like they wanted me to do a good job. (Laughter) Really, I couldn’t believe that the three of us were entrusted with that much money. Being able to do this idea was very flattering, and I guess they were kind of forced to cast me. That would have been horrible if they had cast someone else. (Laughter)
Taccone: Having the schedule that we had, everything had to work together, but without Will’s energy, it really would not have come to fruition. He gives so much to his performances. He would literally come home, and after a day of shooting, he would go run for like five miles around our neighborhood and learn his lines for the next day, which were a ton because we had such little time to shoot.  

WEEKEND: This movie obviously had a lot of gratuitous sex and violence. Were there any scenes in your mind that stand out as a favorite?
Forte: I know one of my favorite days was shooting the guns at the end. The only bummer was that Kristen (Wiig) and Val (Kilmer) and (Boothe) Powers couldn’t be there too.
Taccone: Well it’s also kinda cool that the shot when MacGruber shoots a gun for the first time was the first time Will had ever shot a gun. So it’s wild — he’s popping up shooting double Uzis for the first time.

WEEKEND: How did you make a 90-minute action movie out of a 30-second “SNL” sketch?
Taccone: That was actually the biggest excitement for all of us, that we had a character that we liked but there was no real plot to the sketches. It was sort of the biggest advantage that we had, that we could make up whatever we wanted. ... We knew we wanted a genre movie, like a late ’80s, early ’90s action movie, and we wanted to stick this character that we liked into that genre.
Forte: And we needed at least 30 dick references.
Taccone: Yes, and then we had a quota.
Phillippe: A cock quota. (Laughter)

WEEKEND: How did guys like (Ryan Phillippe) and Val Kilmer end up in this project? What was their pitch to you?
Phillippe: I got invited to the read-through before it was a “go” movie. I think they were kind of looking for a guy who played soldiers in movies, but I was surprised to be invited. So I took the script home and laughed almost every page — I’ve always been a huge comedy fan.
When we signed up, Val and I, the Internet predicted it would be the end of our careers, but as it’s turned out, it’s everything I hoped for, and it’s the film I can’t wait for my friends to see out of everything I’ve ever done, and it’s the kind of movie I’ve always loved.
Forte: He has definitely the toughest role in the movie, and he’s really good at it. He really holds the whole thing together, and that’s why I call him the MVP, because he is.
Taccone: We wanted some real actors so that the world surrounding MacGruber was as real as possible.
Phillippe: Val started in comedy, and he was so into it. He would write Will threatening e-mails as (character Dieter Van Cunth).
Taccone: He started his own Twitter as Cunth!
Forte: He’s such a great actor, but he’s a great comedian as well, and I think people forget that.
Phillippe: Snappy dresser, too. (Laughter)
Taccone: Please quote that. And have it be the title.