By: debbie lynn elias
When one thinks of comedy, somewhere in the mix, the names of Dax Shepard and Tom Arnold always emerge. Both long established funny men with differing styles, each is always able to elicit a laugh, be it with outright mania or nuanced subtlety, so it seems only natural that these two long time friends, together with producer Nate Tuck and other familiar faces like Ashton Kutcher, Bradley Cooper and Dave Koechner, finally partner up in a film. BROTHER’S JUSTICE is that film. Perhaps the perfect mockumentary, writer/director Shepard wrangles a multitude of A-list friends onto the screen as he embarks on a journey to abandon comedy and fulfill a life-long dream – that of becoming a martial arts motion picture action star. Intending to sell the idea to any investor or studio that will have him, Shepard turns to his pals for wisdom, help, money and, ultimately, hilarity. BROTHER’S JUSTICE is a perfect blend of life and art, celebrating friendship, life and laughter, resulting on one of the weirdest and most awkwardly entertaining films of the year.
I had a chance to sit down for an exclusive 2:1 interview with Dax Shepard and Tom Arnold and amidst ongoing non-stop all around laughter, talk BROTHER’S JUSTICE, comedy, moviemaking, friendship and the shape of indie comedies.
I fell in love with BROTHER’S JUSTICE when I screened it at 3:30 this morning.
DS: Hmmm. An early morning viewing of BROTHER’S JUSTICE! Oh, you do crystal meth (laughing). I did that!
No, no. (Laughing) This is pure insanity that has me up at 3:30 There is so much charm and so much heart in this film, where does this come from? Your chemistry together, your friendship, all of you – it just shines.
DS: I’ve been a part of a bunch of different movies. A lot of them didn’t work. Some of them worked. One of them that worked the best was this movie “Without A Paddle” that I did, which is not a great movie. The script was not great. Nothing about it’s great, but the three of us loved each other, for real loved each other, and that was palpable. I think there’s something about that when you see a movie; you can actually feel it. I think that’s what was the success of that movie. Then I’ve done other movies that were probably funnier but we all hated each other. And that you could also tell intangible. But, yes, everyone in this movie actually loves each other. We’re all friends for a really long time and it was people come out to just have fun. There was one goal and that was to have fun [in] each scene. There was no expectations. We weren’t trying to get distributed. We weren’t trying to sell it. We weren’t trying to do anything but make a whole movie in our backyard, but there happen to be movie stars that are in it.
And Tom is the biggest movie star.
TA: Yeah!! I just wanted Dax to finish it. After he worked so hard. He was a burst of energy out of the blocks, kicked butt. Then I hadn’t heard anything for a couple of months. What was happening. I go [to Dax] “You just have to finish it.” I think with Dax, and I’m not speaking out of school, but he maybe didn’t know how it was going to end.
DS: By design, originally, I was supposed to fight Chuck Norris in the third act. That was the whole thing. It was all going to lead up to me fighting. We were exhausting all these avenues to get him. We were offering insane things, like being in his work-out videos, that kind of stuff; that’s all real on the talk show. I really was offering to do that. Ultimately, we couldn’t get him. We spent three months trying really hard. Then I was just distraught. Now what is it? But that ended up being the best thing, because then it turned more into this friendship story.
It also added an entirely new comedic level.
DS: Yes. And we got to everyone back together for “Jeung Guns” and stuff. Ultimately it was a great thing that we didn’t get Chuck Norris.
TA: It really was.
And now he looks like a schmuck.
DS: That’s exactly what was always my goal (laughing) to kind of piss on the trail of a hero.
How was it for you, Dax, with your “directorial debut”? Nerve wracking or still just fly-by-the- seat-of-your-pants casual filmmaking?
DS: Very very fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants. I do my best when I am flying by the seat of my pants. My best acting is when I’m improving or when I’m just listening and something crazy happens. I’ve made a career at trying to capture a moment or get lucky and get a moment, so filming this was done the exact same way. There are vignettes in the movie that required a lot of pre-planning and shot selection and all that stuff, but, by and large, the best parts of the movie are where we’re just trying to capture the chemistry that we all have. That didn’t require a whole lot of technical or tactical planning.
Where you were actually pre-planned certain scenes, did you storyboard? Did you shot list?
DS: Shot list. Not storyboard. It’s helpful that I’ve written them and I’m gonna direct them. So when I would write these scenes, I would just write it with all the shots in it already. So we already knew going in what we were gonna grab. We had no money and I was paying for this thing.
And Nate [Tuck] wasn’t splitting it 50-50?! [Part of the running joke within BROTHER’S JUSTICE is a pro rata financial partnership between Tuck and Shepard, right down to the condoms and coffee]
DS: [Laughing] No, Nate wasn’t in a position to actually chip in.
And I didn’t see you asking Tom to go 50-50 with you either!
DS: And you see where Tom’s living compared to where I am! [laughing] He could have done 75 and I’ll do 25. We’ll tell people, like studios that have seen it, that we shot that entire “Drilling Deep” thing [scene in film] in 2 1/2 hours as the sun was going down at Tuna Canyon. And that’s with locking the keys in the Lincoln and Nate having to drive quickly back to Los Angeles to get the spare keys. I get the guy out of the trunk and shut it and we do one take and then literally, reels cut and I do, “Fucking keys are in the trunk.” And we’ve still gotta move the car. [Tom is in hysterics at this point.]
The longest thing we shot at all was the “Jeung Guns” western at the end. We were there for like 8 hours. And that’s learning to ride a horse for an hour, and a fight scene…
TA: …lunch. Don’t forget lunch. That was our only lunch.
Well, you know how it goes on lo-budget/no budget! It’s bring your own. Brown bag it.
TA: That’s right.
DS: We set the bar super low so that when Subway shows up people are actually thrilled.
TA: Also, as he said, if this had been in the old days, if this had been a few years ago where everybody’s doing the kind of jobs they want to do, whatever, we couldn’t have gotten all the friends together and said, “Hey, we’re gonna pull together and do something fun. We’re gonna do it for Dax. It’ll be fun for everybody.” But now with the economy, it’s “let’s do this” and so I’m grateful that that came out of it. Like I say, especially that day, the last day out at the horse ranch…it was really a sweet day for all of us to just have an excuse to get together with the guys and do something silly.
I have to say, Tom, seeing you do that short little western snippet, I want to see you do a western. Dax, you brought something new out of Tom Arnold in that sequence.
TA: There you go! There you go!
DS: Tom was awesome. Tom knows how to throw it away like a champ. He’s great. Tom has the benefit of having been funny in the public eye for 20 years, so he’s not trying to be funny or make it a big to-do about being funny. He knows he’s funny at this point. He has a lot of faith in that. So he never pushes and that’s what I really loved a lot in his performance in the movie. He’s very calm and knows it’s gonna happen. It’s hard not to get into [pushing] especially when you get to a place and there’s like eight comedians and some of them are super well known. I can see where it’s intimidating for some people.
Something that really stands out is your use of a lot of close-ups and a lot of medium shots that develop some great intimate moments, especially the scene that escalates into a fight scene between the two of you. You still kept the camera tight and it personalized the film. Was that intentional, did that just happen to look good; what was behind it?
DS: There’s a practical and theoretical [answer]. One is, we didn’t have a lighting crew. We didn’t have anything. So the shots look better tight because you can’t adjust the lights. You’re not getting blown out by the background. So there was a practical reason for that. But also, we wanted to be voyeuristic. We wanted it to feel like a real documentary, so we mirrored how real documentaries are shot. In fact, there were two scenes in the movie that were shot on a tripod because I was sick of how ugly everything looked. I went, “Let’s get on a long lens for this scene. I want to look good in one scene.” And then when we tested the movie, we got these cards back with suggestions and they kept attacking these two scenes. It didn’t occur to me for three days. “I don’t understand why no one likes those scenes. Those are funny. I think those are funnier than all of ’em.” We were wrestling with this for a few days and then all of I sudden, I was, “Oh my God. Those are the only two scenes on tripods. That’s why people don’t like them. They’ve been told this is the language of the movie and then they go to those tripod scenes and they feel like it’s fake all of a sudden.” So all we did was we put a plug-in in editing on the tripod shots to make the camera move, retested it and no one had a problem with those. It’s crazy how much the technical aspect informs whether you like something or not. I only learned that through having done the test process.
Is that realization new for you?
DS: Oh yeah. I definitely know why you shoot hand-held versus why you shoot on stick but I didn’t think people were savvy enough, and in fact they’re not, but they know on a DNA, on a cellular level, there’s something about this that doesn’t feel right. They don’t know why it doesn’t feel right, but that’s for you to then figure out.
And Dax, don’t worry about not looking good. The butt shot was gorgeous. You looked fantastic!
DS: Oh thank you, thank you!! [laughing] I was very nervous about that.
You did your own ass work. This is a running theme in years of my reviews – actors who do their own ass work.
DS: I sure did! Okay, good! I’m in the realm.
Now we’ve got to get Tom in there.
DS: I’d love to photograph Tom’s butt!
Has K-Bell seen the film [Shepard’s fiancee, Kristen Bell]? Does she like it?
DS: Oh yea, yea, yea! She loves it. Thank God! Because it is out there. And again, there were some previous edits that had a lot more gratuitous package shots. She didn’t love those.
Another big part of this film is the music. You’ve got some really great melodic throwback to old Cinegrill, smokey jazz trio, torch song kind of music that really sets great emotional tone for the friendships in the film.
DS: Thank you! Well, we made a huge mistake initially. Again, we had no money. So the whole time we were testing, I just put all my favorite songs in there. I had Coltrane, I had the Talking Heads, I had Chuck Mangione, I had all this amazing music and we had now all seen the movie 20 times with this great music. Then it came time to clear it. We would have had been absolutely screwed but I had just done this movie “The Freebie” which this kid Julian Wass scored, and my favorite element of the movie was his score. So, luckily, I had just met him. He’s super affordable and he could see all the music we had and knew what feel we were going for and then he did a lot of that music and really killed it. It was all just luck that I happened to meet him.
The music just fits so well with the whole cycle of friendship, which itself is analogous to how you made BROTHER’S JUSTICE. The film is about friendship and it was made out of friendship. Nice little parlays.
DS: Yes. Yes. Thank you. We had the Talking Heads “Naive Melody”, which is that beautiful song at the end of the “Wall Street”. Unfortunately, that had been our theme song, which is my favorite song in the history of music. So, I was like, “How are we ever going to replace this song? Nothing’s gonna feel right.” But Julian did a great job.
After Joaquin’s hoax, and even “Catfish”, are you afraid of people not finding and seeing the genuine heart in BROTHER’S JUSTICE?
DS: You know, I don’t love those comparisons because, frankly, it just made it heard to sell [this film]. So, I don’t love that. But at the same time, I’m not overly concerned with how people are, what baggage they’re bringing to it. I had one objective and that was, I’m gonna do exactly what I think is funny in scenes, Tom’s gonna get to do what he thinks is funny in scenes. We’re all gonna get to do our true voice without being told by a producer, studio or anyone, what is sellable and what is not sellable. The whole goal was just to do it for the sake of doing it and to do our voice. Now, if that gets confused with other movies, there’s nothing I can do about it. This happens to be our voice. I think our movie’s much different that the Joaquin [Phoenix] one in that I’m the butt of every joke of this. I’m not trying to fool people for my own kind of grandiosity. I’m the idiot. I think it differs in that respect.
TA: Also, this movie is opened up so much more. That movie is a very tight feel, inside story, dark. This is opened up to everything.
DS: Westerns, car chases…
TA: This is looking at itself inside out whereas that one was very aware of what it was.
DS: I’m not resentful about being a celebrity. I think that’s the big difference. It paid for my house, so I am very grateful actually.
It will pay for a nice wedding, nice honeymoon.
DS: Yes, let’s hope!
If there was one word for each of you to tell an audience to come see BROTHER’S JUSTICE, what would it be?
DS: Mine would be weird. If you’re attracted to weird, I think you’ll like this.
TA: Is “oddly hilarious” one word?
In my world it is!
DS: Or “awkwardly”?
TA: Yes, there you go. “Awkwardly” and “Hilarious.” Because on paper none of it works. As we’re sitting here describing it, I feel like we lose a little something. But then you put all these guys into the situations out there, and in spite of itself, it works. The heart is really important and the nice thing about it was, you get the heart in there but then he [Shepard] kept the humor. He didn’t dump it in the third act. We’re all heart. He’s still trying to get money from Nate [Tuck]! At his core [Shepard] is still the same guy. He’s grown up a little bit, but he’s still the same guy.
DS: The only thing that we got really lucky about and that we did succeed at is that it is so many weird elements in one movie. The tone was established early on and it stays consistent throughout the movie which is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you’re shooting for as along as we did. I think that’s the one thing that saves us is, we commit to a certain world and we were able to stay in that world and stay true to that tone no matter what was happening or as weird as it got or as out there. I think it’s semi-consistent even though it’s so weird.
What would you guys do if you couldn’t be funny? Tom, we’ve seen you in some charming, dramatic roles like “Moonlight & Mistletoe”, but for the bulk you are known as a comic actor. What would you do if suddenly told you could not do comedy anymore?
DS: How well does that new job pay? Are we Jack Bauer on “24”? I’ll do it and then I’ll just be funny at birthday parties.
TA: I wouldn’t mind at all. Like you said, at birthday parties. And I go on the road about once every six weeks just to nurture the stand up side for when I do my next special or whatever. And just to keep that going. You can be as funny as you need to be on a Wednesday night at the laugh factory. I don’t need to do comedy.
DS: I think Tom and I are the same in that as long as we’re on a set and they’re yelling “action” and “cut”, we’re in heaven. It doesn’t really matter what it is. People get very hung up on the product when, for me, it’s about the actual doing is so darn fun. We have friends that are on tv shows that they maybe don’t love and it’s like, “Who gives a shit. You still go there. You get to act.” Your life is the acting part of it.”
TA: And they pay you!
DS: Yeah, they’re paying for your mortgage and you get to act every day.
You guys love what you do so much, you’d do it if you didn’t get paid.
DS: I would. I was just saying I want a raise next year on “Parenthood”, but at the same time I also let them know I’d come for free. Not a great bargaining chip!
A rarity to play festivals and whatnot, is a comedy with name actors. We have lots of comedies at festivals. Some are charmers. But they never really go anywhere. Everybody talks about the dramas at the independent level.
DS: The really sad part of that is that the result ends up being that big dramatic actors have a place to go try weird stuff and they don’t get hurt at all. Will Smith could do a Sundance movie and it could make $5.00. It’s not gonna affect what he gets paid for a studio movie. If Will Ferrell goes and stars in a $1 million comedy and it comes out and makes $1 million, he’s actually in trouble. He’s not going to be able to ask for “X” amount when he does a studio movie. I don’t like that. I feel like that’s a double standard and I feel like what we would love to do is lead a movement of indie comedies where big actors can come from around, do stuff they don’t get to do in big movies, and be safe and have low expectations, and try different stuff. I think some of the best dramas end up coming out of that freedom and the experimental nature of it. I think that comedy actually needs that. “Bottle Rocket” was that. I don’t know why there hasn’t been a “Bottle Rocket” since “Bottle Rocket”; to my knowledge there hasn’t been. I would love to see Sundance actually embrace indie comedy and have a couple “Bottle Rockets” a year come out. That would be wonderful for everyone. We would love to be a part of that movement if it could happen.
LA Film Festival always has some outstanding indie comedies, but they rarely take off.
DS: But again, they don’t typically have stars in them. The one thing is in a drama, if you’ve got great, great writing, you can get competent dramatic actors to sell that. Comedy is a lot more performer specific than drama, in my opinion. You can’t have an okay funny person sell a great joke and have it work. You need the really talented, also good actors.
TA: When you see [BROTHER’S JUSTICE], you see Dax and I arguing. People go, “That guy Shepard and Tom Arnold, they’re ****ing arguing. They’re at Tom’s house, his Peter Max is right there. They’re really going at it. Oh, I know who those guys are. I know them.” So that’s also in [BROTHER]S JUSTICE] too, our comedy personas, it’s who the public thinks we are. There’s not like two guys and you try to figure out what’s their relationship. You just know. There’s a bunch of information that you know right when it starts, whenever that scene starts. “Oh, I know a little bit about this guy, this guy” and then it gets weird from there. You may be going, “Why are they together, why are they friends”…I’m sure people do that a lot.
Watching all of you connect on film, it never enters my mind for a moment why any of you are friends, what is the connective tissue. You are all so cohesive and synergistic. You see all of you up there on screen and it’s a given. You just know that these guys belong together as friends in the grand scheme of life.
DS: I like that. That’s very nice.
TA: I do, too.
DS: It is a weird group.
A very eclectic group – Ashton [Kutcher], Bradley [Cooper]…
DS: . . .America’s best director, Favreau.
What do you hope the audience takes away from BROTHER’S JUSTICE and what did each of you personally get out of doing this?
DS: I can’t even imagine what I want [the audience] to take away from it, other than they can get the thing they’re looking for. It doesn’t have to come in the package they’re used to it coming in. That would be nice if people were like, “Oh, I can be really satisfied by this thing I didn’t know I was going to be satisfied by.” I remember not going to see one of Sandler’s movies in the summer and I felt like summer hadn’t happened. Like Fall came and I was, “Wait, Summer didn’t even happen. What was missing? Oh, I didn’t see the Sandler.” I would hope people would see it, love it and take more risks and see more weird stuff and look for it.
TA: What I take away from this is that I got to hang out with my buddies, be part of Dax’s buddies, and be a part of something so then I’m looking forward to the next thing. What I hope people take away from it is just that they do, “Oh yeah, that is so weird.” We can talk about things. We can talk about talk shows, we can do this, but you have to see it to get that this is just a bunch of guys…
DS: …this is yet another brand of comedy. There’s the Judd [Apatow] brand, there’s the Happy Madison brand, there’s the Todd Phillips brand, and like, okay, now here’s this other brand and voice.
Personally, I like this voice better than the others.
DS: What if they gave us $1 million bucks next time?
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