The Worst Idea Of All Time - DIRECTOR'S COMMENTARY (ONE)
Episode Date: July 23, 2017It's been a long time coming but the boiz have managed to secure director Maximum Joseph and writer Meaghan Oppenheimer for a director's commentary. Enjoy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for... more information.
Transcript
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Today.
You ready?
Okay, let's go.
The hunt for the wildest movie of the summer.
Everybody run!
Ends here.
This is your super friendly and not aggressive reminder to buy tickets immediately.
Borderlands. Now playing.
Are you gonna play that dastardly intro again?
Try, try, try, try, try, try, try.
Ow!
This movie's still fine.
It's a cully bastard
One of them dies, that guy's screw
One of them's a hothead, his name is Jay
One of them looks like Johnny Depp
And his name is Johnny Depp
Classic Maximum Joseph
You forget that films are supposed to have a point
Hello
Hello and welcome to this director's commentary.
Of the film.
Of the film.
We are your friends.
We work so well together that we finish each other's sentences, don't we?
We sure do.
My name is Max Joseph, but you might know me affectionately by my self-chosen and very
popular nickname, Maximum Joseph.
And my name is Megan Oppenheimer.
Megan Oppenheimer.
A pleasure to see you.
Say it with me now.
Megan Oppenheimer.
Everybody at home, once more, Megan Oppenheimer.
And that is how we would start every day.
When we were working on the script, We Are Your Friends,
we thought to portray friendship friendship we'd best display friendship
to each other one of our many rhyming slogans that we use to guide the writing process hundreds
of which we will share with you throughout this director's commentary well rest assured there is
ample opportunity as we hold your hand through this screening of our i would say commercially
you know uh not next yeah i really love that term mixed because when this movie came out
we had what got described as mixed reviews which was exactly what we were hoping for because what's
an important element of djing you You guessed it. The mix.
See, we know each other so well.
We can guess exactly where the other one's going.
It's a beautiful thing to behold, isn't it?
So, look, listen.
Welcome to this film.
We're in it now.
We've been introduced to our first two characters already.
We took a lot of time fleshing them out, really thinking about them. We wanted to make some three-dimensional representations
of the kind of fuckboys that we were used to on the LA scene.
Frustratingly, neither of us could remember examples
of the people we tried to write about,
so we had to kind of build the characters from scratch.
We had to create entire people.
You don't look in a position that you'll be comfortable
even after about 20 minutes, I've got to say, Max. Do you want to in a position that you'll be comfortable even after about 20 minutes,
I've got to say, Max.
Do you want to chill out
or are you okay for now?
Do you want me to chill out?
I just want you to be in a position
where you can chill out
because we're in for a long time,
not a good time.
Yeah, no doubt.
You know what I'm saying?
Do you want me to make some adjustments
so that maybe your headphones
aren't quite so...
No, no, I've got to tell you, Megan,
I love how accommodating you are.
I've always said
this about you too accommodating if anything all right rest assured if i'm uncomfortable i will
speak out so max um we thought we'd chuck some more characters in at this point because we've
done such a good job of commentating on the fleshed out nature of the two we haven't even
named them yet look we've we've copped an eyeful of our star. Yeah, we really have.
Zach Coley, the crying DJ, who we decided to have embodied by the actor Zach Zeis-Fron,
I believe his name is.
That's how he insists on being called now.
At the time, he was known as Zach Efron.
Probably still, even though it was years ago, still best known probably for his role in
High School Musicals, certainly at the time we secured him for the film.
I mean, I would argue he still is.
Right?
Yeah.
The crazy thing is we showed him the original script for We Are Your Friends.
And we told him, well, it was at the time, it was a pitch for High School Musical 4.
And he was really excited by it.
He was positively jazzed.
He was positively jazzed. He was. And like we say when we made the movie,
if you want to make it with them,
you've got to fake it with them.
You see?
So sometimes you've got to pop a little line.
This feels like a new spin on an old Hollywood favourite.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Of course, as usual, Maxima.
So we thought it would be fun in this bit of the film
to just take a break from making a film.
We were finding storytelling really hard.
And it was quite jarring for us how quickly we found that pop up
in the process.
So just to make sure we remain comfortable with the process,
we decided at this point we'd insert a music video,
something which is much easier to direct. Something that't require a lot of experience yeah i myself have directed
numerous music videos and i myself also have directed numerous music videos we don't need
to get into the finer points of which or for whom when some of them are very well known and not for
the end product but uh certainly for some of uh what happened on look
anyway that's all in the past now and the future is uh is is this is now really isn't it these are
the characters establishing uh some of their personality traits their relationships to one
another and instead of writing dialogue what we did is we got all them to just say it straight
down the barrel of the fucking camera.
We just thought it would be easier, you know?
And a lot of these decisions were made in the editing room, I have to confess.
There was a lot of ADR, a lot of...
We kind of got to the point where the studio was getting furious that a movie wasn't coming out.
Oh, okay.
We've experienced our first technical error.
That's good.
What seems to be the problem there, Megan?
I'm not sure.
Well, rest assured, the film is going along at a reasonable clip.
Yeah.
As you were saying, what exactly were you saying?
Look, it's impossible to tell, but, you know,
life comes at you pretty fast.
to tell but um you know life comes at you pretty fast so fuck what i was trying to um tell everyone was that a lot of these uh decisions got made in the editing room because the studio were going
they keep tapping their watch they walk into the room with us and they just tap on their wrist watch
and we go yeah yeah yeah yeah we get it you've got a nice watch they come in with a calendar a
wall calendar we say yes we get it you can afford wall calendars we get it. You've got a nice watch. They come in with a calendar, a wall calendar.
We say, yes, yes, we get it. You can afford wall calendars.
We understand.
We've got, we read you.
And then Jeff from the studio,
he told both of us,
he said,
you two will never work in this town again
if you don't fulfill your contractual obligations
to give us a Zeiss Fran-led ensemble music movie.
And we said,
well, that's a terrifying prospect
because that deadline is looming
and we've been through all of the footage.
A movie it does not make currently.
So we started scrambling,
looking for other editors with music video experience
and then discovered this nifty little thing
called stock footage,
which you can purchase online pretty cheaply.
If any of you are sort of stuck in the quagmire of making a movie right now, I cannot recommend
stock footage enough.
It was a real game changer for us.
We accidentally gave Zeiss Fron the majority of the production budget of this film, but
I think the stock footage did a majority of the heavy lifting and storytelling.
That's right.
And it cost us next to nothing.
Well, we-
A few hundred dollars.
We pitched that sort of marketing idea to the studio.
We said-
To Jeff.
We said, what about this?
A movie that is led by stock footage.
And Jeff said, look, that's not really what we paid you for.
And we said, I know, but that's what we got.
You're cleaning that up a bit too.
Because I'll tell you what,ff curses like a sailor absolute potty mouth on that man if you don't
know sailors are famous for having a terrible mouths he did have a point though which is that
we were treading new ground had not been done before well not successfully and i also assured
us that the marketing materials weren't really part of our responsibility,
which I kind of found infuriating.
I largely made this movie to experience what it's like to advertise one,
so to have that taken away from me really...
You just wanted to get on that junket, didn't you, Max?
Yeah, well, I had a lot of fun on the junket,
obviously with Zace Fron, as he wants to be known now,
and didn't do a lot of tours
with Jarhead actually
he didn't really want to
come on any of the
media junkets
confusingly to me
no he's a serious actor
I believe he had a play
opening
downtown LA
he was doing
a Shakespeare
it's crazy to me
Shakespeare show
is that what they're called
yeah
Shakespeare show
but you would act in a movie
and then afterwards
choose to do a play
I was like
Jarhead we've got cameras.
We can film this stuff.
Hey, dude, what was the first maneuver as a seven-year-old
once you were cracked riding a bicycle?
Did you chuck some training wheels on it again?
No.
Did you take a step back?
No, dude.
It's the exact same situation.
Well, in this circumstance, Jarhead actually had.
That's exactly what it is.
He found the thrill of riding a bicycle without training wheels
too exhilarating. And so
every night, he'd
wait for his parents to fall asleep and he'd
tell the story every day on set, which eventually
became infuriating. But he'd run downstairs
under the banner of darkness
and to fix training wheels back to
his bike because he found it a much more secure experience.
Seems crazy to me. Every morning
his father would take them off and every night he'd put them back on again so he's um he's certainly
a cautious man and he uh he sort of insisted between takes on doing like on prac i guess you
could call it practicing but um on yeah practicing the takes with the other performers which we all
found very distracting when we were trying to have a good time.
He kept tugging at their shirts and saying,
we've got to go practice.
Yeah, what did he call it?
Rehorsal?
I think it's because when you ride horses,
you want to have a couple of goes before you get in the race.
So he was being like, we need to rehorsal the scene.
That sounds right to me.
Of course, acting is Jarhead's second passion after equestrian.
Correct.
And boy, did he let us hear about it and see it by bringing his equine to set every day.
He insisted upon riding it.
We said, we can send a car for you.
He said, no, no, I'm fine for transport.
Thank you.
P.S. I'm going to need some hay bales, shade, sugar cubes, salt licks, a water pail, a bridle,
and a brush.
I, of course, didn't know at the time that horses like sugar cubes.
Yeah.
They love them.
They can't get enough.
Wow.
But more as a special treat, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's a good thing that horses have hooves
And not fingers
Otherwise they'd always be combing through the sugar cubes
And masturbating
That's the other thing they'd be doing all the time
You can masturbate with hooves
Can you?
You can't with your horse's legs though can you?
Oh look nah it's
Why was Jarhead
He kept insisting on
Tending to the horse
every couple of days.
Yeah, well, I think he just meant
making sure the horse was still alive.
I mean, we did work long hours.
Oh, my God.
I feel embarrassed now
because my mind went to a whole other place.
Oh, you thought he was...
I thought he was wagging off the horse.
That's illegal.
I mean, you know,
I was over-minded as the next guy, Megan, but...
It's not illegal.
It's a necessary part of horse husbandry.
I know that it's not.
If you want to be a good husband, you've got to wag that horse off.
I know that it's not, strictly speaking, illegal,
but I saw what he was doing,
and the way Jay was doing it, definitely illegal.
So look, as sure as my name is, Megan Oppenheimer.
Which it is.
Co-writer of this fine film.
Boy, did we have a great time filming this scene
yeah introduced to our antagonist uh yeah slash uh sort of very formative figure in the the
professional career of uh zay cole's character um zicoli zay's friend's character zicoli sorry uh
dj james reed um now a lot of ds get DJ names, but we thought, you know what?
Something a little different for this guy.
What if, what if, what if we forgot to give him a DJ name in the movie about DJs?
And what if we did the exact same thing with our lead character played by Zayce Fron?
You know?
Yeah.
And the studio, Jeff, was ropeable.
Well, the thing is, if you want to capture the essence
of the Los Angeles underground electronic music scene,
then what you've got to do is you've got to get out there.
You've got to see the sights, you've got to smell the smells,
and you've got to drink the drinks.
And so that's what Megan and I did.
We went out there and we got absolutely rat-faced.
And after two months of intensive research,
we came back with diddly-doo.
And Jeff said, what did you find out there?
And we sort of just panicked.
That was the first meeting back after our two-month research break,
and we said, well, I'll tell you one thing that they're not doing.
We're using alternative names.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Definitely no one needs to have a name.
The thing with Jeff is what I admired about him is he had a lot of faith in us.
He just kind of left us to it
But then once he found out what we were doing
That trust quickly was eroded
He's not afraid to make decisions
And he's not afraid to go back on them
And that's a trait that I think is very valuable
In an employer or an employee
Just in a professional relationship
You've got to make decisions all the time
Here's one that we made for this scene
When we introduce the love interest
to Zace Fron,
what should she be wearing?
Beetlejuice's top?
Sounds good.
Yeah.
Let's run with that.
A lot of people don't know
it's the original top
from Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice.
Some people call it Tim Burton's
but not me.
Not after the way
Tim treated me.
No, let's get into that.
No, no, please.
No, let's get into that.
It's water under the bridge.
Tim and I get along fine now What happened with you
And Tim Burton
What project were you working on
Because this is a story
That did not come out in filming
Well and for good reason
I think
I don't know what the word is
Can you hold my beer
Yeah no worries
Thanks Max
I got you Megan
Pretty much
Tim and I were
Directing a music video
That was never released for Johnny Depp.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
Johnny Depp, eh?
What a guy.
He's not a...
What a guy.
Johnny wasn't doing that well at the time either.
Well, he's not doing that well now, from what I gather, either.
No, no, no.
The wave has crested and betwixt.
And betwixt then and now.
I saw that Pirates movie.
The latest one?
Yeah.
How was it?
No good.
Look, we can't shit on the industry too hard,
but tell me all about it.
So we wanted to introduce some cool to the film and we decided the way that you introduce cool
to We Are Your Friends is with drug use.
So we wrote in this nifty little scene i say right this one was a little more organic i have to
confess uh maximum joseph started waving a notebook in front of my face and it just had the words
drugs and circles all over the page various sizes various capitalization and i said okay
that was actually my name is megan
oppenheimer co-writer of where are your friends i surely don't know what you're talking about
and mac said someone give me a fucking camera and a boom operator and watch this he took two of our
leading men two crew and he produced the scene all by himself and i i've never been prouder to
work with you here's some of that stock footage doing the heavy lifting.
The aerial shot of Los Angeles at night.
Funnily enough, this scene, also all stock footage.
Unbelievably, there was stock footage,
old stock footage of Zac Efron and Wes Bentley
acting against each other
in exactly the same costumes
as they're in the scenes surrounding it in this film.
So obviously we just brought that up,
slotted it in and it, I mean...
It's just too perfect.
In terms of storytelling,
it sort of keeps things moving along
in a reasonable clip quite nicely.
Oh, boy. Okay, very good.
Max, you all right over there?
Sorry, I was...
Every day at the same time,
I work on my Donald Duck impression, and...
Oh, it's just clicked over to be that time?
Yeah, but it's over now.
It's going to be that time of the hour.
So Minimum Joseph making a debut in the movie.
And by debut, I mean cameo,
because that's the first and last time we see him.
Minimum Joseph is,
and I know he's a good friend of yours, Max,
but Jesus Christ, that kid is annoying.
Hey, come on now.
He had no right to be on set.
He had every right to be on set. He had every right to be on set.
In what world was he entitled to be on set?
He was a hired extra.
I paid him in petrol vouchers.
That's true.
As all of our extras were.
Yeah, and...
We found some interesting loopholes to those union laws,
which is that if they're not working for you,
you don't have to pay them.
And what is work?
Is it attending a party where there happens to be a lot of cinema cameras around?
No, it's just a party, you know?
Doesn't sound like work to me.
I mean, we put them through their paces, sure.
I guess they all just went home and thought that was a really weird party.
Yeah.
And I mean, then there was the release forms.
Yeah.
Well, the way you want to do that is you want to forge the signatures you want to forge
all of them that way you avoid any tricky conversations any sort of people who studied
or studying law or like to fancy themselves a lawyer and ask you know pesky oh anyway this is
why i enjoy doing these um directors commentaries often i do it for my famous music videos which we
won't get into the back catalog of now but these little tips and tricks of filmmaking for young guns
who are just getting into the industry,
they might not know that forging signatures for a party shoot
is just the easiest way to go.
If you go to any of the filmmaking schools,
a lot of them are going to tell you you need release forms.
Yeah, you know what I say?
Fuck film school.
You do say that.
Do you know what I keep saying on set?
Of course you do because I said it all the time.
Film school, not cool.
You know, it's another one of our little rhyming slogans.
That one was more yours.
I actually went to film school and I found it to be very,
very valuable on my journey to being the director I am today.
Maximum Joseph.
And that's why we work so well together because we come from different
backgrounds.
And we finish each other's
sentences. Not where I was going with that at all.
I was going to say we sort of complement
each other's with the different skill sets and
backgrounds that we come from.
Yeah, and especially the sentences
thing. So
animators?
That's what Jeff said to us.
He kicked in the door one day and said
animators? And we said, said Jeff what are you talking about
and he said
he threw his watch down onto the desk where we
were scribbling some notes and he said
guys the film's coming out in a month
I've got an idea what if
I've got access to a few animators what if we put a cartoon
in the film we said
love it couldn't have felt better about it
we were hoping it would take up more time
anywhere up to 30 or 40 minutes.
But turns out he only had enough petrol vouchers
to pay the animators for about 45 seconds of sequence,
which still turned out to be a surprisingly large amount
of petrol vouchers.
Well, yeah, the thing is it's just harder to get animators
at a party and working and convince them
that they're not working.
They fancy themselves detectives,
and more often than not, we'll see right through that.
This is what filmmaking's all about, you know?
The Greats, Hitchcock, Spielberg, Cameron.
What do they all have in common?
They figured out how to trick animators into coming to parties and how to forge their signatures
I thought you were maybe going to include me on that
You know I want to be on that list
You know as well as anyone
My name belongs on that list Megan
Maximum Joseph
The fuel for good art
Is the pursuit of greatness
So by putting you on that plinth
Alongside your heroes,
I would be robbing you of the opportunity
to continue to strive for greatness.
I won't do that,
and I won't tolerate others doing it either.
A very underhanded way of telling me I'm not great.
So this was a scene that we decided to shoot
after a big night out,
and we just thought we'd roll with it.
So everyone's hung over yeah somally
because she is a insufferable bore megan from one woman to another i will not stand for that
statement just because someone lives a different lifestyle from you doesn't make them a bore i know
that i know woman on woman violence in the industry shouldn't be tolerated verbally or
physically but i engaged in both on this film uh numerous you really shouldn't be tolerated verbally or physically, but I engaged in both on this film numerous times.
You really shouldn't be dredging any of this up, Megan,
I've got to tell you.
Well, look.
I found, I think, the most intimidating element
of the way you treated Somi Leonce.
It was the psychological warfare you waged.
I won't apologise for it.
Well, you really should.
Well, I won't, and I'll barely acknowledge it.
This is a fun little joke that you thought of yeah i i said what if we played we put a phone secretly on set somewhere and called it while the actors were performing and uh they were so
confused you can see them all here they're just furious with me you can see it written all over
their faces and then eventually they said where is it
i said i'm never going to tell you and they just sort of had to act around it and that's why
everyone's kind of on edge here they do look pissed off as well don't they yeah that's true
to you you're the one who's and they're all beautiful and i gotta tell you it's usually
harder to piss off beautiful people because often they're just thinking to themselves how beautiful
they are for some reason gives them a sense of satisfaction.
Imagine just walking around constantly being unable to emote
because you're just obsessed with how beautiful you are.
So I define creative ways to undermine that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, look.
What do you think I kept having a go at Somaly?
You know, this is what I was talking about.
No emotional depth because her whole head's just contained solely
with how
attractive she is are you speaking about somally the character that we created together or emily
ragit kowski the human being that was created by uh mr and mrs ragit kowski presumably
with her acting skills potato potato my friend oh, if you don't know, potato, potato is an old Hollywood saying,
meaning sort of you say one thing, I say another, but it's the same thing.
Let's call the whole thing off.
Potato.
Tomato.
No.
Chocolate strawberry.
This is why we struggle with the filmmaking process.
This is why we work well together, I think, because we finish each other's sentences.
We're in the offbeat.
We're not doing well getting on the same frequency
or rhythm or tempo.
Potato.
This was a great scene to shoot.
We decided to go to my favorite spot
and just between you and I,
I have personally buried a few bodies
overlooking the San Fernando Valley.
Just between you and I.
It absolutely is.
This is a very special place to me.
It's where I go to think, bury my enemies.
Didn't you shoot one of your music videos on this exact location?
Certainly did.
And I'm not going to name who it was for,
but let's just say it rhymes with...
I can't even think of a way to rhyme rihanna without saying it so let's just say
it was her music video and be done with the matter i saw the rushes for that music video
it's uh it's pretty easy to see why it didn't make it to broadcast what do you mean i just i
saw some of the rushes and i don't know second bit. Why it didn't make it to broadcast.
Yeah.
Not sure why that keeps doing that,
but there's a little bit of equipment
which is giving me a persistent error
about once every six minutes.
And I'll tell you what,
we're locked in here for a little while
and it's probably going to test my patience slightly
if it's a constant six-minute hit of a button.
I can imagine.
How comfortable are you with the other piece of equipment that we have?
Pretty comfortable.
Now this, this is where we got our last few cents of petrol vouchers out of the animators,
introducing my favorite character of this film, Paige Harrell.
Yeah.
Deck full of diamonds, mouth full of concrete himself.
This was based on an amalgamation of both of our fathers.
Mine, of course, coming from a real estate background yours of course being an italian mafioso uh raised in
the bronx new york city and when you put those two things together um they're embodied in this
sort of anti-hero of the film a hero figure for the boys who are largely fatherless.
And he's the real North Star.
He's the real North Star for these fuckboys.
He is.
Real North fuckstar.
He is a fuckstar, actually, I've got to tell you.
He really threw his word around on set.
But he also had quite a hostile attitude towards me throughout the process.
I think he might have been in character, he might not have but he called me uh an unprofessional schmuck oh and um
sort of stuck with me but i think he carried those sort of traits well into the the role of page and
he's he's a cocksure guy that's what you got to know about this dude whose name i forget
the actor is always on you know what i'm saying he's he's a regular daniel guy. That's what you've got to know about this dude, whose name I forget. The actor is always on.
You know what I'm saying?
He's a regular Daniel Day-Lewis.
He turns up day one.
He's already in character.
So you shouldn't take anything he says.
Some of the other actors in the movie,
they'd come up to me between takes,
and they'd say,
Mr. Joseph, Mr. Joseph.
I'd say, please, call me Mr. Joseph.
They'd say, he's acting too well.
He's acting too well. I'd say, the problem isn't that one say, he's acting too well. He's acting too well.
I say, the problem isn't that one of my performers is acting too well.
No, I think the problem here lies with the fact that you're not acting well enough.
You sure told them.
You took them to film school.
That's another thing we'd say on set.
Hey, don't be a tool.
I'll take you to film school.
Yeah, and that would honestly halt a lot of momentum when someone
would be a fool and we'd have to drive them all the way
across town. Often in Russia, our traffic
five, six hours.
Not sure if that very close helicopter to
the audio studio is getting
picked up on mic, but we just like
to leave the door open when we do these things
because that's just how we do things.
Yeah.
Here's the thing about Maximum, Joseph and I.
We do things differently.
You've heard of our blue sky thinkers.
We're blue sky workers.
We work outside a lot is what he's trying to say.
He's trying to fancy it up a lot.
That's exactly what I'm trying to say.
So this was a scene where we decided we needed-
Our ceiling, the sky.
Sometimes we finish each other's sentences.
Oh, there's a little cat that's come to say hello with one eye.
No way that you can verify if that's true or not,
but I can assure you a cat is checking us out in studio with one eye.
There's nothing wrong about that.
What are we going to say about this scene, Megan?
What are your memories of writing it?
What are your memories of shooting it?
I remember every male and gay
woman as part of our crew
being a little bit
distracted with a certain
someone's costume choices
which I did not make myself
but Zeiss Fron
insisted on that bustling tank
top that just shows them up
and everyone was getting very jealous
and thirsty It was really incredible i think because of the professional
environment we try to instill on set when you'd you know when you'd work with a lot of extras or
a lot of people who thought they were at a party and you keep telling them what to do and they were
saying but we're at a party and you keep saying no you've got to do this yeah they sort of they
get prickly they and there was a lot of talk about the
over sexualization of zeus fran uh that he's more than just a hunk of meat and um i mean it became
a bit of an issue there was a lot of back and forward a lot of to and fro a lot of up and down
a lot of rough and smooth a lot of black and white a lot of tumble and dry a lot of black and white, a lot of tumble and dry, a lot of caps and beanies.
There was a lot of water and oil.
There was a lot of fire and ice about it on set that day.
Plus, Simon Lee had her tits out the whole time.
Yeah, that certainly didn't help matters either.
We added the entire top half of that costume in CGI.
What's quite cool about this scene, to think as you're watching it,
is that we spliced it together.
So obviously we shot this footage at a staged party where most of the people
thought they were at a party.
And then the way we got the sort of monologue, if you will,
where Zace Front explains exactly what music is,
is we put him in a room for 10 hours and we said,
you think about what you've done.
After 10 hours he came out and we said, now describe DJing to us.
And he just walked up to a microphone.
He got it in one take.
And that's a good thing, because we wouldn't have wanted it anymore.
That's correct.
One is enough.
One is the loneliest number, and it's all we need.
Wednesday's Fronds doing a take.
This is more stock footage take This is more stock footage
This is more stock footage we had
The house music stock footage was the cheapest of all
Of course because no one
Wants to buy it
We bought that in a bargain bin that just said stock footage
Which is such a weird thing to find on a website
It's like I didn't even know digital stock
Could kind of have bargain bin status
Yet here we are
You click through to a page that had a big old yellow bin in it
and a sign sticking out that said bargain bin.
Come get your bargains.
Things are starting to pick up now.
What we filmed mainly was Emily Radischkowski
in front of a green screen for this.
Yeah, the actual party guys were in far too hostile of a mood
to look like they were enjoying themselves,
which is what we really need from the scene.
Andy Serkis there playing the role of Somaly's legs in motion capture,
which was not a small feat of digital engineering, I can assure you.
Not at all.
He had to play each leg at a different time.
So it wound up being twice the cost and twice the work for Mr. Serkis.
And we paid him twice the petrol vouchers for it. That's right. He was happy
as Larry
he's got a very
gas guzzling car
he does, he drives a Hummer. He's got a Pontiac
and a Hummer as well. Yeah he drives a
Hummer stretch limo, it's a Hummer with a
Pontiac in the middle
that's what it is That's what it is.
It is one of the ugliest.
It's Hummer in the front and Hummer in the back,
but Pontiac between the two.
That's what we're dealing with.
And it is long as the night.
And it requires the mileage of two cars.
So there's two tanks in there.
You've got to fill them both up.
Yeah.
Anyway, it turned out it wasn't necessary to get him because we had a lot of good footage of somaly's legs outside of
mr circus so that's uh something we've uploaded we're going to try and earn the money back on
that by putting it up on a stock footage website uh thinking how much we used it and how popular
this film turned out to be obviously it's going to become a sensation. And I think that it's time to pull back the curtain
and reveal that in the year 2015 when we made this film,
that was the current direction of filmmaking.
A complicated series of transactions involving you
going out shooting stock footage for other people,
uploading it, selling it, buying their stock footage
and constructing a movie from it.
Truly the golden age of Californian filmmaking.
It felt like the
derivatives
market before the 08 crash.
No one quite knew how any of this was supposed
to make money or work. But it was working.
For everyone involved, the thing
kept ticking over because we had faith
in it. It was just, it was, look,
I'm going to go out and film a stream today. Cool, what's your
movie about? My movie is about race cars. Why are you filming a stream? i'm going to go out and film a stream today cool what's your movie about my movie is about race cars why are you filming a stream i'm going to sell that to a
stock footage website and then buy with the money i make some race car footage it was it was a
functional economy yeah it was and a lot of good movies got made that way every movie that's been
made since the release and i think two months preceding the release of We Are Your Friends, especially in California, 80% stock footage.
They didn't shoot that footage,
and that's why I think in the upcoming Oscars every year,
you're seeing more and more people going on stage to accept the awards.
Are the Oscars such a foreign concept to you, Maximum Joseph,
that you forgot what they were called?
They're not a foreign concept to me, okay?
They're just something I'm not interested in.
I don't care about awards.
I'm not in it for the prestige.
I'm in it for the love of filmmaking.
I'm in it for the art.
You're in it for the stock footage.
You're in it for the petrol vouchers.
You're in it for the rhyming slogans.
That's what guerrilla filmmaking is all about.
Now, I would like to draw attention to the fact that the movie's still on,
and right now we're dealing with
two men. Zayce Fron
and a white
coloured from head to toe.
His call, not mine. All the costume
departments, they were furious.
You look like you're off. You've had enough.
No, not quite. I'm just grabbing a
beer from the beer fridge. Oh, a brewski.
A cold one. Would you like a cold one?
Yeah, I'll grab a cold one.
Thanks, matey.
No worries, no walkers.
Beauty foot.
What are we dealing with here at Pills now?
Oh, that's far more interesting than the film.
Thing is, we've seen this film a couple of times already
on account of the fact that we made it.
A lot of people, when they ask about filmmaking,
they say, how long does it take?
As long as it takes to shoot it?
And for a long time, I'd say, yes,
it's exactly how long it takes.
And then someone talking about the editing process process i just thought it sort of all happened
over the weeks afterwards in and of itself you just kind of put the footage in a room and then
you came back to the room later and it just kind of arranged itself similar to a uh how do you say
is it a flambe that you put in the oven
for a little bit
and it just sort of rises
by itself
you don't have to
a loaf of bread
tell it to rise
or you know
show it how to rise
or fill it with air
you don't pretty much
you don't need to hire
a so called professional
to get in the oven
and make the dough
rise it's fucking self
yeah
which turns out
is exactly what
you've got to do
with the
oh and
the petrol
vouchers involved with getting
that process across the line. I mean, everyone
was getting around on the cheap, but I tell you what,
they were not earning on arrival. Not
at all. Now, this
young man happens to be my
son. This is
Josh Oppenheimer.
He was a little bit sensitive
about us including a joke about him dressing like Hillary Clinton
because when he was in junior high,
his nickname in kind of a cajoling and bullying sort of a way
was Hillary Clinton.
Yeah.
That was based on the fact that his boyfriend in junior high
was the president of the school council,
so he got called Hillary Clinton, as you can well imagine.
I remember speaking to him about it,
and it did sound obviously not the way he told it,
he was the good guy,
but he sort of brought it upon himself, I think.
I mean, he would go to school dressed as Hillary Clinton
every day for a term.
That's correct, and he insisted on everyone
calling him Hillary Clinton.
So there was, there's a few layers.
There's a few layers to what happened.
It's just such a specific thing to demand.
You can imagine how people would get used
to that oh day at the beach this was a fun day to shoot we all just got fucking ripped and went to
the surf yeah and then we thought oh two weeks to the hand-in date we should probably film some of
this so we got squirrel and we got zace fron in front of the camera and uh just said
go basically that's right i scrawled a couple of notes down on a napkin you punched them up added
some lines of dialogue and there we were uh i don't know if there's much more to tell you than
that to be honest the lighting was just sensational we got there right on golden hour i thought you
said dialogue so i sort of got a... That was all improvised.
I just got a big old bit of wood, just an ugly bit of wood.
Right.
And you coloured it, didn't you?
Yeah, I coloured it in.
We also actually, sadly, that day in memoriam,
we lost one of our soundies.
They were wading out into the ocean,
sort of looking back and laughing.
I think they're on quite a lot of PCP,
which he insisted he was taking for research purposes,
but we assured him,
you don't need to take PCP to research the film.
We've already done that.
But he pretty much wandered out
past a few of the breakers
and got caught in a huge rip.
And he's either alive or dead,
but he's certainly not on speaking terms with any of us.
Some say he's off recording the sound for movies on the coast of Australia.
Have you ever heard of such a place?
Yeah, I have.
So in storytelling terms, we're sort of steering down the barrel of nothing still at this point.
We have established that Zace Fron likes to DJ.
We've established that James Reid from The Feelers likes to sink piss.
And we've established that Somaly is a very good-looking woman.
And at that point, we were sort of like, well...
We've done it all, haven't we?
Surely that's a film.
And that's when Jeff walked in and said,
Lady and gentlemen, we need to have words.
To his credit, that is the coolest thing,
the coolest entry The coolest entry
That Jeff made
In our entire time
Working with him
No calendar involved
That day
No wrist watch
Lady and gentlemen
We need to talk
You know
Balls to the wall
Business guy
Yeah absolutely
That guy
Do you know what
That guy wanted
Results
Do you know what
That guy wanted
A film handed in
That he had paid for
And bless him He really put the fire Under him That's his job That's his prerogative He's his suit You know Do you know what that guy wanted? A film handed in that he had paid for. Bless him.
He really put the fire under us.
That's his job.
That's his prerogative.
He's a suit.
He's got to take care of the business end of things.
He's not about the process.
And I feel like if we'd learned that earlier.
One thing about Jeff, circumcised.
That is one thing about Jeff.
And I feel like if we'd found out earlier in the process,
he didn't want to be a part of that process he just wanted to see
results he's a results driven guy
he wants a circumcised penis he doesn't want to attend
the brisk you know he's that kind of dude
I don't care how you do it I just want the foreskin off
is it called bris or brisk
did you call it a brisk
I think I did call it a brisk yeah
is it not called a brisk in my family
we always referred to it as a brisk
no a brisk you make a brisk in my family it was we always referred to it as a brisk no a brisk you make
a brisk you create ah well it's just another one of those confusing rhyming sayings that you
sort of carry around with you everywhere you go one which may have been explored by these uh two
jokers in new zealand who apparently were watching this film once or twice for a um a podcast i'd
rather not get into that j Jesus Christ. That whole situation.
The next person who I hear say the words podcast out loud to me
in this fucking town, I'm going to have their head on a pike.
Yeah, well, I'm going to have their guts for garters.
So between us.
I'm going to rip off their arms and beat them to death with them.
They'll just be a torso is what we're trying to say.
That's all they'll be.
But more or less, Jeff, after sort of, you know,
doing his great entrance and going off his rag at us,
we wound up learning that we have to write another two-thirds of a movie,
which was a huge undertaking.
Big ask.
Can I tell you something as well?
The pressure was really on us, and I'll tell you why.
We weren't getting paid in petrol vouchers.
We were getting paid in millions of dollars to make a movie,
and there's nothing that'll put the shits up you
like a seven-digit check from a studio
demanding a feature film at the end of the process
where you've just been skiving off going to the beach
and clubs in LA.
It's amazing.
As soon as you get the money,
for how good you feel and how much you enjoy it,
as the deadline looms nearer and the
amount of money goes down it sort of you know it becomes worse and worse really doesn't it you sort
of feel guilty that's not what i expected that is something in filmmaking i didn't expect sure
as my name is megan oppenheimer co-writer of we are your friends i did not expect for there to be a situation wherein my mood goes
down as i spend more money what i was expecting is we spend more money we get happier that's how
i thought the relationship worked especially when you're spending your money on scratchies
um which we did a lot yeah scratchies for the uninitiated is a form of lottery
whereby you get a ticket that's got some panels on it
and you scratch this crazy grey stuff off
and it shows you if you've got three Liberty Bells or not.
And if you do, you win.
And if you don't, which is what usually happens,
you've just paid two bucks for nothing.
Turns out the odds are really against you on those things.
I mean, what even are the odds?
I'll tell you what I found infuriating.
When we were at our lowest ebb financially
and in terms of budget constraints,
the fact that Zeiss Front would insist on us filming him
putting huge amounts of cash in a shoebox,
not even for the film.
He just said, I need you to film this.
He was getting some Baywatch uh it's what we call
hook money so in the film industry when you're trying to lure a star to agree to a project you
really want them you just start sending them cash in the mail lots of cash wads of cash called hook
money because you're trying to hook them into the project and uh he was receiving a lot of
from was really you know flaunting there that. And that's fair enough.
If you got it, flaunt it.
That's what they say.
But the idea that-
We never said that on set, though, because it doesn't rhyme.
No, we had to-
We said, if you got it, hot it.
That's what we would say.
A lot of people would correct us, but we'd say, don't correct us.
Who's in charge here?
Megan Oppenheimer and Maximum Joseph.
That's us two.
Anyway, the joke's on Zay's from because we wound up using his private footage for the
movie anyway.
And that's what you just saw there.
Now, if you're mapping a graph of a plot in a film, you know, you want to, you want to,
you want to, you want to, what you want to do.
Okay.
Act one.
Here we go.
The intro.
You want to start, you want to start low.
Okay.
We did that.
Then you want to get on A steep incline
Add some story
Absolutely
Then come down
Quite a bit
At the end of the first act
Which in this film
Has happened
About now
Okay
So
So we're adding things
We're adding
We're adding characters
Plot
Struggles
Things that characters want We've got DJsjs wanting to make music they don't need names
don't worry about that uh we got dance explanations of genres and then we're coming we're coming we're
coming down and and here we are at the end of act one uh with zeus frond taking a woman from behind in a dive bar. That's how I like to end an act in a film.
It's called an act break.
And yeah, it was
exactly that. So everyone
well, we caught on set. Let me tell you about how I learned how to
make films.
I did a bunch of coke and then I watched
at
10 times normal speed on YouTube
a series of film tutorials.
Because I thought that the best way to get the information in a timely manner was to get it at 10 times normal speed.
But then I thought to myself, these videos are designed for a brain going at its maximum.
So I need to increase that.
And the way that I'll do that is a lot of cocaine.
I got to say that as someone who attended film school and spent a lot of cocaine i gotta say that that uh as someone who attended film school and spent
a lot of money doing it um it doesn't hear it doesn't feel good to hear that you know because
i felt when we were on set that i was leaning on you quite heavily as someone who knew what
they were doing and had a really firm handle on the situation which is very unusual given you
are just credited as a writer but to think of the amount of time and
you know financial investment i put into learning how to make films you just took a bunch of cocaine
and watched tutorials at 10 times speed i mean it sounds so much more efficient in terms of time as
well and do you know why it sounds more efficient it is yeah i guess you can do a lot of things um
better on cocaine i think not everything mind you but a lot of things better on cocaine, I think.
Not everything, mind you, but a lot of things.
But do you know what is not better on cocaine?
Cocaine.
Highly addictive.
Very Moorish.
And a bit expensive.
Don't do it.
I'm serious.
Don't do it after you've already taken it.
That's right.
Once you're on the cocaine, stop doing it. You don't want to top up every now and then. That's fine.
But just don't do more cocaine when you're on the cocaine.
Now, this was another party scene, but we went for a slightly different vibe
because we were using the same extras as before,
and they had sniffed what we were up to.
So we had to adjust the tone of the party from a very happy, jovial affair,
which we tricked them into the first time, to a more somber
I'm not sure if this is a slave labour
if we should be getting the unions involved type of situation
which is the morose overtones
which you can feel permeating
off the screen. Yeah, absolutely.
We went around the university, we rounded up the same
people, we said guys, we know we
promised you everything at our last party
we're sorry we didn't execute, we've thrown another
one, it's a wine and cheese affair.
Come on over.
It's our apology.
And they said,
It's a way for us to say sorry to you.
It's really important that you ignore
all the cinema cameras that are around.
And they said,
Megan Oppenheimer and Maximum Joseph,
the two people for whom I understand,
you know,
will be a film made.
It really feels like you're trying to put us in this film.
And we said,
Absolutely not. We're trying to apologize in in this film. And we said, absolutely not.
We're trying to apologize in the form of a wine and cheese party.
Have you never been apologized to before extras?
And they said, yes.
But they also said the fact that you're calling us extras suggests that we are in fact being used as extras on a film and not party guys at a party.
To which I replied, where is your self-esteem?
Extra is when you're even more than the thing.
Yeah.
You are extra.
You're all extras to me and you always will be.
And miraculously, that persuaded all of them simultaneously to come back to the party.
It was after I regaled them with a heartwarming tale of how my father would constantly call me an extra.
That's how I was raised.
Not a heartwarming tale.
It is a heartwarming tale because what he was saying is that I was so much that I was extra.
He was calling you a burden, Megan.
We shot this scene at night because we had one day to hand in the film.
We were against the clock.
We were against the calendar.
Things were getting very tense indeed We'd run out of cash
Petrol vouchers
And most importantly, cocaine
So we took a film crew out at night
In the dying hours of March 31st
Just before
April 1st
If I remember rightly
Which I think you do
And we shot this scene Against the twinkling lights April 1st. April 1st, if I remember rightly. Which I think you do.
And we shot this scene against the twinkling lights of LA.
Yeah.
Beneath us.
And it actually turned out pretty good, I think.
Yeah.
If you get past the fact that nearly all of it is out of focus,
just in terms of coherence. Does anyone notice does anyone even notice that stuff i have found yes and the conversations i've had with my sort of
i call them peers um they don't really call me a peer uh steven spielberg you know when i talk to
them about filmmaking they say that is a that is tantamount to making a good film,
is trusting the audience is intelligent and that they'll try and piece together a story from whatever you give them.
To which I said, if they're just going to try and do the work for us, why do we have to do the work?
And that one left Spielberg, I stumped, I'll tell you.
Hard man to stump.
Tell you one decision we made correctly in the film project that was we are your friends and
that was hiring uh to do our music same man who uh it came second to the guy who did get selected
to do the soundtrack for train spotting yeah second place and you know what they say about
second place first place loser and we love people in first place.
That's why this film.
We want to be adjacent to that.
We want to be as close as possible to first place as we can get.
You can't always afford first place,
but if you can't afford first place, get a first place loser.
And that is second place.
And I feel like he spent most of the time bitching about
how he didn't get the train spotting job and really phoned it in.
He just had his Spotify discover on
shuffle
and then every third
song
yeah
to be honest
I mean we did get
exactly what we needed
but it still feels like
you know
for what he was getting
paid in petrol vouchers
we didn't quite get
our money's worth
on that one
he did fly to work
every day
so I mean the petrol
vouchers were really
flowing thick and fast
absolutely they don't get you far when you're making round robin trips to work every day so i mean the petrol vouchers were really flowing thick and fast absolutely
they don't get you far when you're making round robin trips betwixt lax and scotland
tell you that for free this we shot first this was the first scene that we laid down
as they call it in the biz which i'm a part of myself megan oppenheimer uh this is at a music
festival in los ang, which we created.
We spent quite a tremendous percentage of the budget putting this on,
the majority of which was actually installing the portaloos,
which you can see at the back there.
We didn't want to repeat what happened on the last music video
that we worked on together, which obviously we can't go into the details of.
No, we absolutely will go into the details.
Now, we got...
Okay, I'll ask you this question.
For 500 people, how many portaloos do you think,
this is for the listener at home,
how many portapotties does that sound like to you?
For 500 people.
Because if you think the answer is anything less than five,
it turns out you'll be wrong.
Yeah.
Here's what happened.
It turns out you'll be wrong.
Yeah.
Here's what happened.
Eminem, Marshall Mathis himself, gets Joseph Maximum and myself.
I was going by a different name then.
Yeah.
Yeah, you were.
To come in and do the music video for 8 Mile.
And we said, we've got a great vision for this. We know exactly what it needs.
He already had plans for the movie so
it was kind of just going to play itself
out. Here's some footage, it's essentially
stock footage, my understanding is you've got experience
with that, I just need you to kind of fill in gaps with me
tell me what to do, tell me
where to go, what kind of backdrop you want for the rest
of this to pad it in. We were like, fantastic.
So we get a
whole lot of extras.
We load them all in there.
And what do you know?
Half a thousand people, five porta-potties.
The place is stinking of human excretion in record time.
And I mean, I still have nightmares about that shoot.
As well you should.
We insisted on making all of the catering
uh incredibly spicy food which i thought would just sort of add to the electric atmosphere of
doing an eminem music video but what it turned out to be was a disaster situation particularly
in light of the fact that we didn't pay as much as maybe we should have for the food
and i tell you what some of that beef and fish had turned.
I thought spice was the way you get around that.
You know, it kills bacteria.
Embarrassingly for us, it turned out that the guy we were dealing with wasn't even Eminem.
It turns out that the video for Lose Yourself was made way back when the song was released.
What we had done was, you know, listened to and taken money from a white skinhead
who wanted a video of a white skinhead rave uh but what he wound up getting was a lot of footage
of a lot of white supremacists shitting themselves yeah and i mean can we really
getting violent food poisoning can we be blamed can we
listener to this audio commentary of We Are Your Friends
with myself Megan Oppenheimer
co-writer of We Are Your Friends
joined by Maximum Joseph co-writer and director
can I ask you in all seriousness
can we be blamed
can the blame be laid at our feet
for assuming
when a white man with a bald head
comes up to us and asks us to make a music
video that it's Eminem. Am I familiar with hip-hop music? No, I'm not. But I am a man of the cultural
zeitgeist. I know that Marshall Mathers is a man who exists in the world. He specifically said he
wanted to lose himself. I put two and two together. I then put a very very good value indian catering service together with
500 and by good value megan means cheap this thing was so cheap we pocketed a lot of cash
let me tell you how cheap it was 500 people how much money how much money do you think it costs
to provide catering for 500 people uh if i had to guess, I'd say, look, at least you're looking at $10 a head if we're doing
dinner.
So sort of $5,000.
Divided by two.
$2,500.
Divide that by two.
$1,250.
Divide that by two.
$675.
Divide that by two.
$387.50.
Divide that by two.
It's not a lot.
It's about $162. $150.
$150.
Yeah.
I was really hoping
if we kept dividing by two
we'd get there
but it didn't quite work out.
No.
$150
for 500 people.
So we're dealing with about
I want to say
$0.35 a person.
We couldn't believe our ears.
We said,
how much is it going to cost
for you to provide
food and catering
for all these people?
He said, for you, today, this
day, $150.
And we said, absolutely yes.
Didn't ask any more questions.
And I mean, I tell you what,
it was kind of like we got tricked twice.
In retrospect,
oh, now this scene was a joy to film.
We decided, because we had just been living it up
on the first day of shooting in Las Vegas
at a music festival that we put on with Ample Portaloos,
we decided we'll take the morning off,
we'll take it nice and easy,
we'll hire ourselves a whole floor of a hotel,
and I want to get presidential suites for the cast and crew.
I want, like, the works.
I want everything.
And the first thing we asked,
Zeiss, Fron, and Somerly,
when they arrived on set,
was have you guys improvised before?
They said no.
We said perfect.
That's exactly what we're looking for.
Eat that fucking food right now.
And they said,
I don't know about that food.
We said, trust us.
We provided catering
for up to 500 people before at the low low price of 150 we know what we're doing um so they did
and i'll tell you what mixed reviews on that scene yeah film came out mixed reviews is how i would
describe it and uh we actually got a review we've got a catering company on yelp and zomato uh trip advisor uh and in addition to to the mixed reviews on the scene
we've got some pretty scathing reviews from uh zace front and somaly on the on the on the catering
um obviously we can't tell you the the name of the catering company or their user handles on
yelp or zomato unless they'd be bombarded with do you make user handles on Yelp or Zomato, lest they be bombarded with
Do you make friend requests on Yelp?
I wouldn't know anymore. I've stayed
off there after all that negative feedback.
But let's just say the company rhymes with
Arsed. Mood.
Adering. That's right.
Cast. Crude.
Bakery.
It's for crude casts
And it's baked goods
And curries
Now this is a classic red herring
What we inserted here
Because I had just watched
A delightful BBC remake
Of the classic Sherlock Holmes
I was watching a lot of
Murder Mysteries at the time
What you do is
You put something in to trick the audience
And then you reveal that you've tricked the audience.
So what we did is we threw a text message at them
which said, come over, big fight.
Now, this is after Zeiss, Fron and Somerle in the film
have performed coitus.
Well, we wanted to leave a question mark on that.
Yes, we did.
You're absolutely right.
You never actually see the act
No, and that was intentional
But for some people, what some people notice
Which we didn't intend to happen
Is they think that they've had sex
What other people think is they haven't had sex
But either way, what we've done is created tension
And that's exactly what that twist that you were referring to just before
That's what we were playing into with that
So you throw them a text and then you reveal immediately that the red herring's wrong.
Now it turns out in retrospect
I found out from reading a few of the
reviews, you want to string a red herring
along for a little bit longer than
instantly revealing it's a red herring as it
turns out. So if you insert something in
the film that's going to be revealed to be a little trick on
the audience, sometimes you want to string them along
a little longer than 30 seconds.
But this is the
beauty of filmmaking we live we learn we spend petrol vouchers we forge signatures wrap this
thing up you know we we we have turned at this point in the writing process we turned the script
in five times to say it was finished and jeff had said no it's not and we would say uh yes jeff it
is we're finished writing on it i miss jeff and jeff would say what would jeff
say jeff would say it's not done till we've got sun which was his way of saying unless the reviews
are glowing uh i'm not accepting this again i feel like you've reappropriated or misappropriated
one of jeff's sayings there he didn't say it's not done till we've got sun he said it's not done
till i fucking say it's done
Now lock yourselves in that room and finish this script
That doesn't rhyme at all
Didn't seem relevant to Jeff at the time
Sure didn't, should've
Did you just cheers Jeff?
Is it what that was?
I always cheers Jeff
Even when he's not in the room
Just a little cheers Jeff
Jeff, the fresh maker.
Oh, I tell you what.
Zeiss Fron's running form was just so eye-capturing.
We kept watching him doing laps around
because he was getting ready for Baywatch
while he was shooting.
And we were like,
God damn, someone pick up a camera and film this boy.
Because it is stunning to watch.
Before the running scenes,
we'd hire a psychologist
who we'd get Zeiss Front to work with and they'd
record, well not knowingly for Zeiss Front, but they'd have a two-hour conversation about his
darkest fears, just sort of everything that he felt vulnerable about. And then what we'd do
is at the start of the scene, we'd play the recording back on a giant Bluetooth speaker
and we'd hire Usain Bolt at no small cost to run behind Zeiss Front
holding the speaker aloft.
Zeiss Front, of course, not knowing it was Usain Bolt, he was dressed as the Grim Reaper
and we'd put quite a lot of PCP in his water.
But pretty much what you see, the speed at which he's running, that's not a coincidence.
He was really hoofing it.
No special effects, no anti-circus legs used in that particular shoot that was real fear that we
were harnessing and from the power of acting and pcp yeah and and the power of psychologists
usain bolt there are a lot of moving parts that was the power of um we shot those scenes the days
before we found out what you could do with CGI and found out about Andy Serkis.
So we hired Andy Serkis
after we'd shot those Zeiss front-running scenes.
I would like to, for a moment,
dive into where we are in the film.
A moment of real drama and high finance,
which is something I was very set on getting into this script.
Now we've got Tanya Romero,
a woman at the end of her tether. I was very set on getting into this script. Now, we've got Tanya Romero,
a woman at the end of her tether.
She has been trying to negotiate with the bank through an intermediary called Gold Star Realty Solutions,
stick full of diamonds, mouth full of concrete.
It has not gone well.
Why?
Because Gold Star Realty Solutions is a bit of a sham.
It's a giant sham.
And we base that on the company
that my father made his fortunes
with um which it turned out was he called it a triangle scheme uh but it was pyramid selling
is what it was if you're gonna listen to the fbi he was selling pyramids to anyone who would lend
them a couple of minutes just a chat a brief chat is all he needed just to get his foot in the door and then he'd say,
listen, I've got a shape for you.
You don't look like a square to me.
You look like a cool dude.
And you know what cool dudes like, Byron?
Fucking pyramids.
And then usually the person would say,
sir, can you please exit my property?
Or alternatively, I'm pretty sure that's a triangle.
He would say, this isn't a triangle, friend.
Who knows more about triangles?
Than me.
Pyramid Pete.
His name was Pete.
Anyway, I'd rather not dredge all that up right now.
I feel like if we just telescoped that out a little bit,
it'd be more comfortable with you.
Then you've got the floor doing a bit of the heavy lifting.
I really don't mind.
Are you good?
For those of you listening along wondering what exactly,
my good friend Megan Oppenheimer, co-writer of the film
We Are Your Friends is referencing.
Thank you.
I'm having such a good time here with Maximum Joseph,
co-writer and director of We Are Your Friends.
That's who I am.
This is a director's commentary where we talk about the film,
ostensibly.
Ostensibly.
What's going on? I I mean it's his birthday
because you gotta have a birthday in every film
very important
it's like how you can't say the word Macbeth
in a theatre
you gotta have a birthday in every movie
every movie you ever see
there will be at least the opportunity
for someone to be having a birthday
who's like an extra
is that an hour there's one one hour the film's been running now okay we're just
gonna take a quick um photo if you look i need to worry about that oh we'll keep keep going that's
the beauty of it so this pilsner's going down a treat probably not as well as james reed's
several whiskeys that he's consumed already this evening
while he's been out for his birthday dinner with Somaly,
it has not gone well.
We didn't know how to write a conflict relationship scene.
It's hard to do, to create fake conflict.
Chuck it in the too hard basket, mate, if you ask me.
So sure as my name is Megan Oppenheimerheimer co-writer of we are your friends i
said i've got an idea that's exactly what you said i said what we'll do is we will simply insinuate
there's been a fight which we won't need to script and we will just see unfold on screen
the aftermath and that's exactly what we did and i think we got away with it
well yeah i thought so too but again if you read the reviews, people...
They didn't buy it?
Not everyone.
You know what shits me about critics?
Oh, here we go.
They'll say anything to sell newspapers, won't they?
They'll just say their entire opinion.
They won't hold back.
It doesn't matter how much cash you send them,
how many petrol vouchers you put underneath the windshield wipers on their car.
Oh, I hear you, Maximum.
You know?
I hear you.
And I don't know what to tell you, Megan, but I find it infuriating.
One moment.
Can I just say this, Megan?
I think one person at a time are keeping the people updated.
So phone down for you. Oh, I thought you'd already keep the people updated so phone down for you you tell i thought
you'd already keep the people updated i apologize so what we decided to do after the birthday party
scene is we went you know what let's go to a strip club it was actually zay's fron's idea and i hate
to throw one of our cast members under the bus but i tell you what there's two things that guy likes
strip clubs and pretending he
likes strip clubs because there were there was a lot of chatter flying around on set and every
time the chatter would start he would say oh i feel like going to a strip club to look at boobies
yeah it's out loud so everyone on set could hear it was like it was insecure about being perceived
as cool and so i want to go look at boobies at a strip club those are the two things i like
boobies for me please booby one and bo two things I like. Boobies for me, please. Boobie one and boobie two.
We'd say those aren't individual things.
You can just call them boobies like you were, Zach.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
We were worried that this would look like a cheap storytelling tool
to have Zace Fron, like the ignoramus he is,
upload a photo of him and the woman who he's having an illicit affair with
as his profile, sort of as her profile photo when she calls.
And we were right to do that.
Again, we got roasted for that.
We got told off.
It's a weird thing to describe.
You know, the job of a critic is not necessarily
to tell off the filmmaker, but that certainly...
Got me very hot under the collar.
You know, eventually that's what it felt like.
In a sexy way.
Oh, really?
That turned you on?
Absolutely.
Wow.
That's what I love about our friendship, is we finish each other's sentences.
And also, I've always been fascinated by what arouses you, but that's entirely separate
to what makes our friendship great.
If anything, that's what threatens to derail the friendship.
You've really taken a full journey in two sentences on your relationship
between my sexual fetishes, huh?
Your relationship to my sexual
fetishes. Fetishes?
That feels like the plural
of that word, doesn't it?
Multiple fetishes?
Fetishes? Fetish?
Fetish. He, she, we
fetish? You fetish? I fetish?
He, she fetishes?
One fetish, two fetishes. He, she fetishes. One fetish, two fetishes.
A grip of fetishes.
A clutch of fetishes.
It feels like the plural should be fetish, like fish.
A bunch of fetish.
Yeah, well, that was one of your sayings.
You'd say, indulge your fetish.
Eat three fish.
I did say that all the time.
That's not a fetish.
That's a dietary concern.
It's a taste you've got.
You like the taste.
I don't know, actually.
Can you eat too many fish?
Oh, now I'm so glad you brought this up.
I don't mean ecologically.
I mean in terms of diet.
Oh, look, absolutely.
There is such a thing as too much fish.
You know what tuna's got a lot of in it?
Mercury.
And is mercury good? good no it's bad
mercury is very bad for you and tuna they love it they eat it up did tuna have a diet of metal
uh well that particular one they didn't really ask for it but thing is when we keep throwing
things in the ocean those fish will keep eating it they'll eat anything because they have to you'd
think if they wouldn't join the mercury they they'd write a letter saying, change the menu.
That's what you would assume,
unless you remember that fish have neither communicative abilities
nor cognition.
Laminators.
That's your problem.
It's also why they don't masturbate.
They always write it, but then the paper gets wet.
Yeah.
How much knowledge?
If we dropped a laminator in the ocean,
we could take care of this problem.
I tried doing that once.
Then the fish could finally communicate with us.
No, I'll tell you what happened when I dropped the laminator in there.
I electrocuted a lot of fish.
Did you eat them?
Short-circuited, and they just floated to the surface belly up.
They floated to the circus surface.
Andy Circus was there in the boat with me at the time,
and he just scooped them up and ate them whole like gollum.
Actually, no,
I remember this story.
If I remember correctly,
you sold all that fish
to a sushi restaurant
in the valley, didn't you?
Half.
It was half and half
Andy Serkis
and sushi restaurant
in the valley.
But the thing is
about electrocuted fish,
a lot of people
have qualms about it.
It's good to eat.
It's good to go.
And it's kind of pre-cooked
in a way.
Yeah, it is.
You don't need to cook that at all.
Sushimi.
Electric sushimi.
None of you asked the chefs we've worked with.
That's also the name of a club which Maximum Joseph and I co-opened
at the conclusion of this film, Electric Sushimi,
which was briefly lived, but we had a good time doing it.
We had a really good time doing it.
Let me lay on you guys what we would play.
A lot of funk.
Okay, funk from all countries.
We played a lot of Japanese
hip-hop.
I think where we went wrong was the capacity
of the establishment, which was
seven people at a time,
which, as it turns out, did not
become commercially viable. It also created
a lot of licensing problems, fire exits.
Health and safety were climbing up our arsehole pretty much.
There was so much red tape around it.
So have you been back there recently?
Yeah.
The new owners reopened it.
What's it called again now?
They renamed it?
It's called Janitor's Closet.
Janitor's Closet.
And they run it pretty much, it does what it says on the tin.
There's a lot of cleaning equipment in there.
Still in the middle of the same high school.
Hey, what are you good for?
You want some ammonium?
All yours.
We've got that.
We'll get you a nice shot glass of that.
I tell you, that's how you'd think the janitors would treat you,
but they don't even treat you like customers.
They say stuff like, get out of my closet.
Love it.
And stop drinking all that ammonium.
True to form.
I like to get wrapped up in the fantasy.
It's very hipster.
It's very detailed.
It's good.
Hey, now, this bit of the film was fun, wasn't it?
This is when the boys have gained some real estate for themselves,
a little piece of the kingdom for themselves.
And to let them know what that felt like,
we bought this house on their behalf.
And we said, throw a big party.
We pretty much can't get anyone around anymore for whatever reason.
Just ask your friends.
Burned a lot of bridges, dudes.
And they said, sure thing.
Is that it?
And we said, yeah, yeah, just don't let them know they're going to be filmed.
And before you knew it, this place was crawling with, you know,
attractive young Los Angeles types.
They were Los Angeles too.
This party got out of hand, but boy, was it fun.
Look, we're not legally in a position to say this,
but I feel like-
But let me say this.
We invited six midgets and only four midgets
left the party alive.
You do the math.
Sorry, little people. Thank you. You do the math. Sorry. Megan.
Little people.
Thank you.
Yeah, we unfortunately wound up killing four little people.
Two.
Well, yeah.
Two died at the party and then four threatened to blab,
so we had to kill.
Another half of those?
Four.
So the two that we killed at the party...
We didn't kill them, they just died incidentally.
And then half of the ones that threatened to blab,
but half we let live.
Is that your recollection of how this went down?
Six little people came to the party.
Six little people came to the party.
Two of them died at the party.
Two died.
And then the four others threatened to blab,
so we had to equalize them.
Yeah, but as I mentioned earlier,
four little people were fought.
No, wait.
Yeah, four.
Wait.
Yeah, you're right.
We didn't kill any more little people.
They were murdered.
This is why Maximum Joseph and I have such a good working relationship.
Because we finish each other's sentences.
No, not at all.
Because we've got a complimentary set of skills and recollections about parties that we both were at.
I've always thought that's what makes us good friends.
I never really thought that would make us good colleagues.
But it turns out it does both.
This was a rough fucking morning.
I'll tell you what.
This was filmed on a GoPro, which I had the presence of mind to install as the party was sort of experiencing its dying breath.
The last two lines of cocaine we had left ran around the house installing GoPros in every which angle you could possibly imagine.
Hit record on all of them and then passed out, almost drowned in the pool because I had my feet in there when I fell asleep.
sleep and um luckily the gopros really came through for us because when the dudes woke up in the morning uh we managed to capture their responses not great actors but very good at being
themselves hung over after an actual party yeah and that's what we're seeing unfold right now
sadly the actor playing skrill did i mean mean, he passed away.
He's no longer with us.
Yeah.
We didn't let the other actors know.
We thought it would impact their ability to focus,
their ability to remain professional.
And whether or not that's disrespectful to their craft,
I don't know.
But anyway, we told them that he was just going method
for a few hours.
And just join him, guys.
Just jump in the pool.
The water's fine.
We've got a lot of GoPros going.
They've got limited battery, so let's just roll.
Let's keep rolling on this.
Let's keep going.
Let's keep rolling on this.
Keep rolling on this.
All of this real footage, all shot on GoPros.
The four little people who survived the party,
we gave them, well, you gave them,
most certainly Megan the GoPro,
so they're all running around capturing this footage.
Yeah, and great angles.
That's why we've got a lot of crouching happening from our main actors as well.
Sort of some height issues when you've got the cameras running at that angle.
I tell you what, though, this next scene was emotionally challenging for me
because I've been to a funeral before and we were shooting a funeral
and I didn't like that and i didn't like that
yeah i don't like pretend no and it was i think it was also the lying you know we had zayas from
jahid and um the the young actor who's i forget his name it's not johnny depp no no no well that
was the character he was playing but i've got no idea what i didn't know his name the whole time
we were filming wasn't that embarrassing too yeah it The amount of times that it was a lot of bro, bro, bro,
brun, bruh, brun, dude, brie?
Yeah, you would always insist on using variations of bee,
which I think sort of gave up the goat.
But, you know, you can say these guys aren't good actors,
but for what it's worth,
they believed that that was a false funeral,
and I thought they played it pretty straight pretty well.
And I think that just speaks volumes about us as filmmakers.
And I tell you what,
sure as my name is Megan Oppenheimer,
co-writer of We Are Your Friends,
I may have overstepped the bounds.
Can I ask you a question, Megan?
Sure.
Did you change your name by...
There have been rumours going around.
Did you change your name by There have been rumours going around Did you change your name by Deedpole
From Megan Oppenheimer
To Megan Oppenheimer
Co-writer of We Are Your Friends
Absolutely not, it's a title not a name
But it is one that I insist
Upon reminding people
It's the full version of my name now that I changed it
From Deedpole, at Deedpole
With regard to my old name
It's my new name. The answer's yes.
Thank you for your honesty.
Ah, boy.
This was, this scene,
our boys are at their lowest ebb.
They're next to an empty pool,
which is a metaphor
for the emptiness of life
when a friend departs you.
In this case,
because of a tragic death at a party.
So the tension's afraid, relationships are strained,
they're at each other's throats.
And this is a scene that I wrote
based on an experience I had as a child
where at, tragically, a birthday party
of a friend of mine
who was turning nine years old,
one of the attendees died at the birthday party.
And then we all started blaming each other.
Until the cops showed up and blamed...
The parents, whose fault it legally was.
Undoubtedly.
Pretty dark chapter in my life,
but let me say this before we move on.
That was just also for the legal buffs out there.
That was the last recorded version.
That was before the PC Brigade
made Catch the Mongoose illegal everywhere.
The party game Catch the Mongoose,
where parents would release a mongoose at a child's birthday party,
and the birthday girl or boy would get the first shot at catching it.
This is what law is all about.
You've got to test the waters.
You've got to figure stuff out.
You've got to experiment so that we know what to make illegal in the future.
Mongoose don't mix with kids.
Now we know.
We didn't know that before. We tried
it. It turns out it doesn't. I say it was the last as though there was a... It's just
a shame that legal culpability has to be added to what is essentially a social experiment.
It's a nanny state. It's not even a social experiment. It's just a personal family event
for those who attend. Hey, guess what kids do every now and then? Sometimes they pass away.
It's a part of life. Guess what mongoose do
sometimes? They attack the person
who's trying to touch them. What do you
expect? It's a wild mongoose.
This bit of the film
is
what I like to call Act
2.
This is the meat and potatoes of the film
because it's in the middle. So Act 1 finished
all that time ago and
all that stuff was just intermission and now this
is Act 2 starting? No, no.
We're kind of almost towards the end of Act 2
now. I just haven't quite had an
opportunity amongst all of our chat about
parties and tragedy
to just remind
us of where we are in the film. Also,
interesting tidbit, James Riefenfield is there.
He says, oh, great, it's my favorite person.
That's not true.
With the characters, in relation to the characters,
Zicoli's not his favorite person at all right now.
The amount of times I had to stop you putting that on IMDB
because you thought people didn't understand sarcasm.
I'm a writer, Maximum Joseph.
I understand people.
I understand how they talk
unless i tell someone i'm not sure they get it so the audience got it trust me loud and clear
we all got it ah so zeus fron looking great as always read from the feelers and a heavy knit
sweater looking great he insisted on wearing that cardigan god
damn i wish i had you know he spent 480 on that cardigan yeah he bought it on a whim yeah he said
in a duty-free shop it's entirely merino oh that's so good 100 merino it's which is not usually a
chunky knit it's so much merino. A lot of sheep died,
if I understand how wool gets collected correctly.
A lot of sheep died.
That's how you shear a sheep.
You kill it first.
You cut it off with scissors.
So what you want in a second act in a film,
I'm going to throw a little bit of script writing
at you now.
We've had Headyady heights which is the party
we've had lows immediately afterwards which is all right squirrel dying um now we want to let people
see a break of sunlight through the clouds we want to have a ray of hope a carrot dangled in front of
our audience that things despite the fact that they're pretty bad at the moment, might
improve before we get to the end.
Yeah.
And that's why we have Zeiss Fron traveling to his mentor and friend that he got offside
by having sex with his girlfriend, maybe, James Reed from The Feelers, to tie up these
loose ends, to apologize, to move us forward into the third act of the film.
And Jeff's not going to like us revealing this,
but we crowdsourced a lot of the plot points
that we used in this part of the film.
Yeah, ever heard of a website called Reddit?
I sure have.
And it has a system of up and down votes.
So we were just chucking plot points up there.
No context, nothing.
Our subreddit, we are your friends, pick a path,
and people would just determine what turn or twist would happen next.
It's pretty great.
Plus, we were using other people to write the potential plot points,
so the whole thing was outsourced.
It was a really great way of getting
work done can i say this also the cafe we shot at here it's called romancing the bean it's in
burbank california yeah and i have walked past this place so many times never been in and i don't know
what sort of made me think to do it but i just i've wrote some reviews online of it just sort of
assessing what i imagine its service would be like.
Don't know why anyone would find that interesting. Who directed this scene if you
weren't in there?
That was in my own time. I directed
this scene. Don't worry about that. No, wait a minute.
I will worry about this. You said that you've never been
to the cafe. I've never been
inside it. Oh, I see. This is an
exterior shot. For those of you not watching the
movie along at home, we're actually
outside of the cafe. Inside the cafe? i don't know who directed those scenes okay so zeus fron is inside
at some points yeah so that could have been anyone huh yeah that was just i just found that on a stock
footage website again couldn't believe my luck it all synced up perfectly with the costuming and
whatnot and in terms of dialogue it also almost makes perfect sense now here's some good stock
footage there's a reason why half of these shots,
you can only see Zeiss Fron from behind,
because it isn't Zeiss Fron.
It's a stock actor.
A stocky stock actor.
So we changed the screen to look like it was his phone dying,
but what it actually was was a text
from someone we'd saved in his phone as the Grim Reaper
saying, you're next.
And what you can't see in all these shots,
what we had just off screen,
was Usain Bolt not chasing him at full speed,
but just sort of holding the speaker aloft
so that he'd occasionally catch whispers of it.
But he wasn't quite sure what was happening.
And he had every right not to.
I mean, you know, again, we'd given him a lot of PCP.
All these scenes where he's running,
you can bet your bottom dial,
this guy is absolutely loaded on PCP.
Along with our sound guy, obviously,
who, as I mentioned earlier,
may or may not still be alive.
We lost a lot of good people on set on this film.
Too many, if I'm being honest.
I've worked on a lot of film sets.
I've worked on a lot of music videos.
Never in my life have I seen such bloodshed
and needless loss of life than the We Are Your Friends.
I'll tell you what, it was a relief to me
when you told me that you sort of had quite a good open area
on a hill atop the valley
where you knew you could hide a few bodies.
Sometimes it's just lovely to hear you talk
for an extended period, you know?
It's just so nice to just just sit back
watch the film
that we made together
and just listen to you
talk about it
reminisce
yeah absolutely
you know
you know what I'm saying
Max
oh I know
you on board
you don't need to worry about me
I know
do you know though
do you know what I'm saying
yeah
let me tell you this
I'll tell you a little story
about what happened
when we were filming in Zace Fran's actual bedroom which is where this was shot on this particular uh
sunny afternoon in los angeles california now he had been researching for the role he was
about to inherit in uh baywatch we had been getting all that fabulous hook money
and he was listening to that iconic yeah let this be a lesson to you hook money salespeople.
It works, okay?
When you start sending hook money to superstars...
Be careful.
They're going to work on your projects.
Yeah, be careful if they're working on other things
at the time as well because he was very distracted.
What we were shooting just then with his headphones on,
with him grooving along to his laptop,
that was the iconic intro to the 90s smash hit series Baywatch.
Some people stand in the darkness,
afraid to step into the light.
It was spoken word as well, obviously.
We didn't play in the original theme song.
Sometimes you need to have somebody
to remember that hope is in sight.
Oh, don't you worry.
It's going to be all right.
And that's, I think, why Megan and myself work so well together.
As we finish.
Because I'm always ready.
I won't let you out of my sight.
Each other's sentences.
I'll be ready.
I'll be ready. I'll be ready.
I thought it was there.
Oh, maybe it is.
Nah.
No, that makes way more sense because the next line is don't you fear.
And that rhymes with there.
Yeah, but ready and fear.
Different syllables.
Similar.
Dang.
Anyway, we're building to a crescendo now.
That's what I love about us working together.
We finish each other's sentences
Songs that we sing
The lyrics are different
But often we get it right
Not always
Certainly
Among
You know in the muck and the mire
Stock footage
Act 3 at this point
Stock footage
God damn we were rescued by stock footage
Weren't we
I'll tell you what is a
Very interesting tidbit to consider
As you're watching along with us
For this director's commentary
Is that the people you're about to see At the summer fest music festival uh after we'd turned our backs
on them for the house party scene we said to the guys could you ask the same people back for the
music festival they said are you kidding at least three people died at that party no one's coming
back we said well don't worry we've got just the thing we went back to the same dormitory that we'd
got our extras from for the previous two party scenes, and we said,
guys, we know we messed you around before.
Yeah.
But please, we're begging you, come to this make-up party.
It's going to be a great time.
We're throwing it in a car park.
Yep.
We promise there's going to be enough water, enough catering.
We've learned a lot in our years.
Do you know what we've got plenty of?
Portaloos.
Now, for everybody, one-to-one ratio.
Yeah.
There's 6,000 Portaloos waiting for you,
along with the greatest catering anyone's ever seen
from a cut-price Indian dealer.
And what we wound up with was more Portaloos in the crowd than people.
So a lot of the people, and I'm using inverted commas here in the studio,
a lot of the people, and I'm using inverted commas here in the studio, a lot of the people you see are actually-
Are they racist?
No, are actually portaloos that we painted bodies onto.
Okay.
Okay.
Now that was a challenge to fix in post.
Yeah, they said it would have been easier if we hadn't painted all over the green portaloos
because they could have just turned them into people themselves.
But we insisted we were trying to help.
The sensational thing about this scene is when you see it come up,
you know that the end is in sight.
Because I tell you what, myself, Megan Oppenheimer, co-writer of We Are Your Friends,
and my friend here, Maximum Joseph, co-writer and director of We Are Your Friends.
We finish each other's sentences.
We've seen this film once or twice.
I'll tell you that for free.
And as soon as we're in the flea market,
the back of an American apparel, RIP,
pour some out for our fallen homie,
we know that the end is in sight.
Stock footage.
Stock footage.
We know that the movie is in sight. Stock footage. Stock footage. We know that the movie which we have painstakingly put together
through blood, sweat, tears, and too many deceased little people,
we're finally drawing to a close.
This whole thing's been worth it.
We're getting to our conclusion.
That's how we felt about the journey.
When we presented it that way to Jeff, can I tell you this?
Yeah.
Jeff said,
I could give two flying fucks about the journey.
What about the movie?
We said,
Jeff,
if you can't appreciate the amount of heavy lifting
we've just got stock footage to do
in place of the awful cast and crew
that we assembled for this movie making project,
then you aren't about the journey
at all and he said fucking exactly i'm about the end result this is a hot mess yeah he wasn't happy
so what did we do megan we hired andy circus again to play every single crowd member of this last
scene it took the remaining total of our petrol vouchers, and he did an incredible job.
He was creating such a varied array of concert goers,
it boggled the mind that it was all coming from one man's brain.
Incredible.
You know, without context of the larger film itself,
what Andy Serkis did is Oscar-worthy undoubtedly.
However, we learned that was a huge misuse of time and resources
because the problems mostly lied with everything we'd gone into
working together on before.
All of the movie preceding this scene,
where Andy Serkis is a scene stealer,
if I need to get credit for his hard work.
It doesn't build to anything and it doesn't arrive anywhere.
It's a train going around in circles
isn't it there's no stop but there's also no start and that is why we made the movie it's a metaphor
for life life doesn't really have clean beginnings and endings and lessons and good people and morals
and things resolving and the universe rewarding villains with bad outcomes and heroes with good
outcomes it's just a hot mess and
that's what we were trying to capture in celluloid until we were stripped of our budget to film this
in film and had to use digital yeah but that was the message we were trying to put out there
this film is reflective of the fact that nothing makes sense the universe owes us nothing There is no rhyme or reason Nihilism is absolute
And there are no consequences
Through our actions
Absolutely
And when people say
If that's what you wanted to make a movie about
Why didn't you make a good movie about that
Instead of a bad movie about nothing
We said because of that question
What you just said to us
That's exactly why we did what we did
Poindexter And you push them over And what you've said to us that's exactly why we did what we did point dexter yeah
and you push them over and what you've done before you push them over is cleverly put a friend of
yours to crouch behind them behind them so they'll fall right over yeah are we ever going to be
better than this and the answer is no that's i mean that this is the central thesis of the film
are we ever going to be better than this what is better seems unlikely what is, this is the central thesis of the film. Are we ever going to be better than this?
What is better?
Seems unlikely.
What is this?
This is so nonspecific, deliberately so,
that this is a nonsensical question.
It's a non sequitur.
Are we ever going to be better than this?
Might as well be.
Are we ever going to be better than what?
That's why I wrote it that way, baby.
I know, you did.
You get it.
You get it.
You get it.
We both get it. Oh, we get it. Pioneer DJ. I know you did. You get it. You get it. You get it. We both get it.
Oh, we get it.
Pioneer DJ.
Yeah, she shouted to Pioneer.
We promised them everything and gave them very little.
We gave them a lot of stock footage.
Yeah, but as they said,
you know, at the time,
certainly in court,
we don't want stock footage.
We want petrol vouchers.
But we'd, I mean,
you know, as we've discussed earlier,
we'd already given them all away.
They were all gone.
They'd evaporated like so much petrol.
Stock footage.
Stock footage.
Stock footage.
Stock footage.
Stock footage.
Stock footage.
Stock footage.
Stock footage.
Stock footage.
Stock footage.
This is not stock footage.
This is, we filmed, ah, that one's stock footage. That Burger King crown, stock footage This is We filmed Nah that one's stock footage
That Burger King crown
Stock footage
Yeah
Now this voiceover
We had to get
Zace Fron to record
In an ADR booth
At the time
He wasn't speaking with us
So we got a
Zace Fron voice lookalikey
Can you imagine
How embarrassing it is
When you have to
Hit that into Google
A lot of
Do you mean this suggestions?
No, I know what a Zeiss Fron voice lookalike he is
and that's exactly what we got.
Stock, that's stock as well.
That one's stock.
Oh no, that one we found.
In the same way that original members of the band The Doors
said they couldn't distinguish Jim Morrison's singing voice
from Val Kilmer's after the movie The Doors,
a lot of Zeiss Fron's closest friends
when played this audio footage didn't correct us to say, hey a lot of Zac Efron's closest friends, when played this audio footage, didn't correct us to say,
hey, is that Zac Efron?
They mostly said...
I mean, why haven't we been talking more about that
on this director's commentary of We Are Your Friends?
Val Kilmer's conviction and dedication to achieving
the exact tonal reference and vocal range of Jim Morrison,
who was a man who was
like a once in a generation
voice, for an actor to go
yep, I'll emulate that and then to
actually do it to a
point where one of the Doors producers
basically broke down in tears when he heard a recording
I mean, like
I mean, why
is Val Kilmer not
a king of some sort? Why are we not talking is Val Kilmer not a king of some sort?
Why are we not talking about Val Kilmer all of the time?
I think Val Kilmer got really excited after he did that.
He was a Batman, wasn't he?
Yeah.
I didn't direct that one.
I've done some directing in my time in addition to writing.
You haven't directed any Batmans.
No, no.
So you don't need to specify you didn't direct that specific Batman. No, no, no. I was just asking, was he a Batman? I haven't directed any Batmans So you don't need to specify you didn't direct that specific Batman
No, no, no, I was just asking, was he a Batman?
I haven't directed any Batmans
You don't need to bloody remind me I haven't directed any Batmans
Oh, and that's the movie
So this concludes our detailed retelling
There's your name in bright lights
I wish
And there's me
Our names together
Hey, it's really good
to see you Megan
oh it's so good
to see you again
Maximum
oh
cool
cool
Maximum Joseph
thank you
thank you so much
so I mean
I hope everyone's
got a real deep dive
into the film
I hope we've
got a lot of fans
we are your friends who have managed to extract a lot of fans of We Are Your Friends
who have managed to extract a lot more value out of
surely saying the thing 20, 30, 40 times.
I think we added a lot of value to that film.
And I tell you what we chucked in here.
We took a little leaf out of Marvel's book,
and we went, you know what?
We're going to chuck some more story in the credits.
Yeah.
So that's coming up.
There's still a lawsuit pending with Marvel on account of what we did in these credits. Yeah. So that's coming up. There's still a lawsuit pending with Marvel
on account of what we did in these credits.
And we sort of then brought up the idea of Rush Hour
maybe doing it first.
So now Rush Hour's embroiled in it too.
Of course, everyone remember the outtakes from the film Rush Hour.
I believe it was in Rush Hour 2 when one of the stunts...
Hold on for a second.
I really feel like you're crossing some streams now, Maximum.
We're talking about inserting plot, not outtakes.
Outtakes are plot.
Or they are in this movie, in this movie alone.
But this is what I was referring to.
Yeah, and a lot of people think that all of the cash...
Tanya Romero.
All of the cash that Zeiss Forum was putting in that shoebox
is in that shoebox.
That's not true.
It's a dog shit. It's a dog shit.
It's a dog shit, that's right.
But fucking Jeff might as well take it out.
God damn it, Jeff.
He's a real bus kill.
I mean, to be honest,
the whole movie was leading up to that one killer gag
of here's a woman who's trying her hardest
to raise a kid by herself.
She's been at the mercy of the 2008 global financial crisis is about to get her
house revoked due to the bank being a bunch of cunts oh i'm so sorry and uh and and and and
what do we call it a dog shit no no no no no no what do we call it the aristocrats you know it's
like a big old build-up and then a release and the release was the
dog shit and then jeff made us take it out anyway look all of that to say seagull for the original
score we thank you pyramid bring in the schemes with cole's music thank you so much them jeans
who was the pool party set and dj technical advisor love your work yeah additional dj mixes
done by seagullgel were just top notch
a big shout out
to Studio Canal
for giving us
all the money
whose line is it anyway
for all of those
petrol vouchers
Shannon Kemp
on the art direction
you had a lot of dicks
in this movie
and I'll never forgive you
for it
Siobhan O'Brien
set decorator
you were in on
the penises too
I don't think I've found
all of them yet.
If you're going to just keep reading, Megan,
do you mind if I go and take a piss?
Absolutely.
You do what you need to do.
Just make sure that you take a piss.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing.
Kelly Stevens, additional second director.
Isn't that a funny term of art that we've got in the filmmaking business? I they used to be called fourth but then we went you know it's funnier second second
um
credits were originated by the marx brothers who got so many people involved in their skits
who you couldn't see on film
that demanded to be acknowledged,
that they had to come up with an innovative solution.
And the first man's name was Joseph Credit,
which is where we take the term from.
Joseph Credit worked with the Marx Brothers,
predominantly setting up the safety protocols
to make sure that they wouldn't kill themselves
when a house would fall in on them
and they'd otherwise injure themselves.
And we owe a lot to Mr. Credit.
And to his credit,
he really kicked a lot of good
kind of safety procedures off in the film industry.
We owe a lot to him.
And I would also additionally like to thank Little Rome,
who did the post-production services
uh on this film which in our particular case involved a lot of cutting together of stock
footage that we purchased on the fly um a lot of songs were used in the making of this film
and from the bottom of my heart i can't express what a mediocre job our sound guy did uh who we got in on the soundtracking
who we got from scotland every single day hardly seems worth it in retrospect now that soundtrack
by the way is available nowhere because we didn't bother putting it out as an album because
according to every review we got of an early cut of the film the song's really stinking up the
joint and the licensing alone would have just bankrupted the rest of the petrol vouchers we had so decided against it some people
will tell you interscope records put out the soundtrack there's a fucking lie uh don't believe
those people so pioneer dj summerfest is credited uh we thought we'd give them a shout out because
we'd used that as a name check so many times.
We thought we'd better chuck them in the credits
lest we'd be sued.
YouTube is another...
I'm going to get out of here.
And you know what?
I'm done.
See you later.
Very well.
See you later, Megan.
I'm going to...
Actually, I think we should both get out of here
and bring in our friends and yours.
Well, not our friends.
Almost our arch nemesis.
Plural of nemesis.
Please welcome to the microphones the shitheads themselves, Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery.
Ow!
This movie's still fine.
It's a cold little bastard.
One of them dies.
That guy's a squirrel.
One of them's a hottie.
His name is Jay. One of them looks like Johnny Depp a squirrel. One of them's a hothead, his name is Jay.
One of them looks like Johnny Depp, and his name is Johnny Depp.
Classic Maximum Joseph.
Agree!
Agh!
You forget that films are supposed to have a point.
Today.
You ready?
Okay, let's go.
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