STACK #121 Nov 2015

EXTRAS

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03/ Do you have any crazy or fun stories from set? CM: There’s a scene where this helmet car explodes on a football field, but it exploded at about three times the scale that anyone thought it would. It melted the end zone and we almost got kicked out of the football stadium and we had to replace all the turf because of this massive fireball that burned up the football field. PL: So that was like a cute thing that happened. We had some people almost burned alive. It was fine. It was hilarious. We all had a good laugh. There’s a scene where this helmet car explodes on a football field, but it exploded at about three times the scale that anyone thought it would. 04/ Was there room on set for improvisation from Channing, Jonah and Ice Cube? CM: There was a lot of room for improvisation. The first cut of the film was four hours long because of all of that improvisation. But we got great stuff out of it and those guys always find a way to surprise one another, and it helps us find ways to surprise the audience. 05/ Who are your influences as directors? There are so many.The movies we grew up loving are The Jerk , Raising Arizona, Harold and Maude and Young Frankenstein . We like comedy directors who reach for things that are deeper than just jokes. And what all of those

JUMP TO IT

What better than having two mates co-directing a buddy movie. That’s exactly what Phil Lord and Christopher Miller did on 22 Jump Street. They’re still friends and happy to talk about it.

01/ What do you think the key is to keeping an audience engaged with a sequel? Christopher Miller: It’s true for sequels and for all movies; the real important thing is to have a character relationship that you care about driving you through the story. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of jokes and you’re living joke to joke. So the thing that was key for us was finding a place to take these two guys’ relationship even further. Phil Lord: In the first movie, they fell in love for the first time. In this movie it’s, how do you sustain a relationship over a long period of time? That also seemed to be a lot like, how do you sustain a

franchise over a long period of time? Once we realised that those were the same thing and that we could have a lot of fun with those themes, we got really excited about the sequel.

02/ What are the challenges of making a sequel?

CM: I’d say that sequels, by their nature, are bigger and more expensive and crazier, so you have to do bigger, more ridiculous things, so the challenge was scale. So we were having crazy helicopter chases and things exploding and all sorts of shenanigans like that, and all the stunt work. It was a lot, lot harder.

movies have in common is that they’re really funny and they’re really meaningful.That’s what we aspire to.

22 Jump Street is out on DVD & Blu-ray on November 6.

AUGUST 2014 JB HI-FI www.jbhifi.com.au

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