ARTICLE
Q&A with 'The Campaign' director Jay Roach
By InCinemas / 24 Jan 2013 (Thursday)
Are you following the four-cornered fight in Punggol East by-election closely? Time to cool off before the polling day on Saturday!
How about watching a political satire movie starring comedians Will Ferrell (The Other Guys, Step Brothers) and Zach Galifianakis (The Hangover, Due Date) on Cooling-Off Day?
Thanks to our friends at Typhoon Creations, we have here below a Question-&-Answer with The Campaign director, Jay Roach. Read on and find out more about his working relationship with the two comedy actors!
Source: Warner Bros
Distributed by Typhoon Creations
Jay Roach (Director) DVD Q&A
Q: Your last political comedy was Game Change.
- Jay: Yeah, a hilarious film. Hilariously serious; this one's hopefully seriously funny. That's my catch phrase.
Q: Right. Was the intent with this film to show just how absurd politics have become?
- Jay: Yeah, but also, like a documentary, to capture exactly what it is like. It is crazy, and occasionally very funny, how we were shooting during the GOP primaries. It just looked like an episode of “Survivor” and who would spear the opponent, or smear the opponent, fastest and most effectively before one would get knocked off by the next debate.
Q: Initially, the filmy was called Dog Fight, wasn't it?
- Jay: Yes, it was called Dog Fight partly because we knew it would be just down and dirty - two guys with too much ambition, too much pride, corrupted by billions of dollars, doing what politicians do. Which is just go at each other; turn your opponent's strengths into a ridiculously exaggerated negative thing, and your weaknesses into some magic plus.
I love that the politicians are so skilled at competing for who's the least educated, or who has the most guns, or who's the most religious. So those kinds of battles, I thought, just throw them into that pressure cooker and see what happens.
(Read our review for The Campaign - By Yun Huei)
Q: All aspects that matter for the leader of the free world, right?
- Jay: Exactly. It doesn’t have anything to do with statesmanship or making anybody's lives better. It's just a show now. It really is a show. It's almost hard to exaggerate it too much because it's like professional wrestling or cage fighting.
Q: Yeah, this was one of the easier pictures you've had to make, is that right?
- Jay: It was really fun. I will say I've wanted to work with these two guys together for a long time. I worked with Will Ferrell. He was in Austin Powers, and Zach was in Dinner for Shmucks, and it's hard to describe how relaxed their process is, to good effect. A lot of people seem to feel like the more tense and uptight you are, the better your work may be.
I feel like that's how I go at it sometimes. I'm driven by fear and terror. And these guys, they're just so cool about it. They make it look so easy. So it was really easy shoot.
Q: Now, Will, obviously, has mined politicians for comedy for years; but not Zach.
- Jay: Yeah, it's interesting though, Zach has a rich political history in his family. His uncle ran for the United States Senate, I think in the '60's, against Jesse Helms. So there's a big deal politician, and Zack's worked on campaigns. He just hadn't done it comedically yet, but he had a perfect approach.
When he shaved off his beard and he wore this lopsided mustache, and got his hair kind of perfectly slicked back, he took on a kind of character of an old-time Southern politician, and he has that odd energy that people always misjudge. So it's always fun to unpeel that onion a little bit.
Q: He was really unusual and quite curious in the beginning. How that voice and the mannerisms did come up?
- Jay: He has work shopped that character a little bit on his internet show “Between Two Fern's.” He has a character Seth Galifianakis who is his sort of bitter evil twin, who always trashes Zach Galifianakis. That voice had been attempted and it was actually popular; a lot of his fans noticed that right away that he was riffing off of that.
Q: I read somewhere that he based it on an old character called the Effeminate Racist.
- Jay: Yeah, I heard him say that as a high school student he used to do that in the halls of his school, and say incredibly offensive things in this strange voice. He must have led a very interesting childhood, Zach Galifianakis.
Q: It's so disarming when you hear that stuff come out of the mouth of someone like Zach.
- Jay: Exactly, like Zach. The great thing about his character is that he starts off wanting to do what's right and yet he's completely ill-equipped for it. He's the least likely guy to run for office. So, of course, we put him with Dylan McDermott, the campaign manager who is like a combination make-over artist and assassin, like a Rasputin or something. He transforms Zach's character with the help of millions of dollars of campaign funding into a kind of a menace for Will Ferrell's character.
Q: It was funny to see Zach as Marty try to step up, and, the exchange of trash talk. You could see that he's woefully inadequate.
- Jay: Yeah. That came out of a workshop session we did. We brought them both in with the writers, and just let them mess with each other. I was explaining a moment that I'd learned about in Game Change where Sarah Palin walked up to Joe Biden, and she had mispronounced his name a bunch of times in the debate prep and so she said, “Can I call you Joe?” while they were in their handshake.
It just looked sort of threatening the way she did it. It was a kind of an interesting moment. It was sort of innocent, but it was also sort of messing with his head. So I was pitching that to these two guys prior to this debate, and then they started turning it into this trash talking thing. So a little bit of real life leaked into our film.
Q: Right. Well, you have that tendency. You're subversive by nature, I think. Were you ever inclined to be a little more partisan in this an election year?
- Jay: No, we wanted to do two things. One, we didn't want it to be partisan, so we made one a Democrat, one a Republican, and had them equally dysfunctional. They're both sort of losers in this story. And we also tried to make it not too American, if you will. This is a universal problem, this whole notion of the media driving candidates to be even more outrageous to get attention. So it's more personal. It's more about greed, and selfishness, and pride, and ego, and negative campaigning, which I think is a pretty universal thing.
Q: One scene that's getting a lot of traction is the baby-punching scene.
- Jay: Yeah, we shot that in a kind of an unusual way. We made Zach and Will and all the background people act in slow motion. So if you wandered onto that set it must have just looked like insane people, on some kind of medication, because everyone was moving really slowly and Zach, Will had to take his hand very slowly towards the baby.
Well, the baby liked it. The baby started laughing every time the hand got close. So, I had to cut, go again. We just had to keep shooting until the baby got so tired it couldn't keep up the smile anymore. But the baby was never really in serious jeopardy. What we didn't see coming was how funny the visual effect would be when we finally took the digital baby and just made its face ripple across, as it took the punch, and the pacifier and the spittle flew out into the air.
Q: It's just a slow-mo.
- Jay: That's sick. It's so sick. Yeah, super slow-mo.
Q: It's like that golf show. Have you seen that with the three thousand frames per second?
- Jay: Yeah, so basically the speed of a scientific camera or something. But because we couldn't do that, we just had to make them act in slow motion. It was a really bizarre way to do it but it worked.
Q: Are politicians fairly easy targets these days?
- Jay: I think because of the pressures on politicians to tear each other apart, they resort to ridiculous propaganda, the things they do to each other. They're under so much pressure and their sex lives keep getting them into such trouble. For both parties - some weird rendezvous in a bathroom somewhere that gets out into public. Or some guy tweets his private parts to the world, basically, by mistake.
It's hard to top that in comedy. You want to be able to exaggerate things, but reality is so exaggerated; you have to be a lot more inventive.
Q: Stranger than fiction, right?
- Jay: Hence the baby punching. But that'll happen eventually too.