Always a Bridesmaids Director - An Interview With Paul Feig

This weekend the most rewarding broad comedy I've seen in a very long time is playing at a theater near you.  It is the Kristen Wiig vehicle Bridesmaids and if you were looking to take your wife or girlfriend to a movie that won't make you want to commit seppuku like those Matthew McConaughey rom com atrocities, this is the one.

I had the good fortune to speak with the film's director, Mr. Paul Feig, who is also the creator of Freaks and Geeks and has directed the best episodes of everyone of your favorite shows (The Office, Arrested Development, Bored to Death etc.)  Below are the highlights of our conversation.

Jordan Hoffman: Let me start with a compliment.  I was at the premiere of Bridesmaids at SXSW, and I sat in the back row. I had been drinking, eating BBQ, it was past 1 AM and I thought I might have had to slip out. This is honesty, now, Paul. When we get to the scene, and I think you know what scene I am talking about, I was within inches of vomiting, vomiting with laughter and disgust.

Paul Feig:  I love it.  I love this.

Jordan Hoffman: How you knew that audiences were ready to see women acting disgusting?

Paul Feig: We just figured if it’s funny, it’s funny. When we were in the rewriting process, where you say “we need some bigger scenes here.” We just need a little more outrageous stuff to really showcase Kristen’s talents, and just give us a bigger comedy. It was really Judd [Apatow] to blame for the dress shop scene.  He just said, “fu*k it, they should just get food poisoning.”  Then we kind of embraced it, and put together a lot of the versions of it.

Paul Feig, readying your lulz.

Paul Feig (Cont): It was always fraught with peril, the whole time we were going: this could blow up in our face, if it does we’ll just cut it out, but we got to go for it, and we really went for it, knowing that you want to have it all in the can, you want to have all the footage for it.  It was lot of math that went into figuring out the final formula, there’s stuff that we cut out, there’s a whole other sequence when Ellie Kemper's character runs out of the bathroom, and runs down the hall with the woman who owns the place chasing her, and Becca thinks that the door down the hall is a bathroom and she opens it and vomits, and it’s the women’s hallway to her office. And it was like, “okay, I think we’ve pulled the chain a little far.”

Jordan Hoffman: Bridesmaids is a great script, has great ensemble scenes, but for me it really is Kristen Wiig's movie.  She is just fantastic in scene after scene, so likeable and, if I may speak for the 18 to 34 year old demographic that my site represents, totally smokin' hot.

Paul Feig: Totally, that’s what I love about her. In Unaccompanied Minors, a film I'd rather not talk too much about, she was going to play this stripper mom, but you cast Kristen because she’s funny, and then she came out dressed in this short skirt, and I was like, “Holy sh*t! She’s hot.” Like, hotter than I expected, wow. That’s what I love about her that she’s not unattainable - wait, that doesn’t sound right.

Jordan Hoffman: She’s not fake.  She's a real person, but gorgeous, yet not a false creature invented by a special effects house.  Now, the airplane scene where she’s on Valium. Do you just have a mountain of takes?

Paul Feig: Oh totally. We shot for four days on that. That was a scene that I was like, “How are we going to cut this?” Because there are just mountains of funny stuff that she was doing. It was just like, “Okay lets go again.” I think I would do too many takes because I couldn’t wait to see what she was going to do next.

Jordan Hoffman: You must've known this was an opportunity to just let her do her thing.  Did you just show up and say "go?"  Where do you start on a sequence like that?

Paul Feig: There was definitely a road map to it, how she was getting nervous, how its handled, then once she’s drunk - there was definitely stuff written there, because Annie Mumolo wrote the first pass of it that really cracked me up. It was such a jumping off point. That’s what we love to do - if you get the emotional story right and get all the story points and blueprint right, then you can have fun, and let people go on top of it, but you never want to go and do it where it’s just "this is just a scene where she’s funny, and it doesn’t serve any purpose."

Jordan Hoffman: Then it’s a movie that has individually good scenes, but doesn't culminate to anything.

Paul Feig: Yeah, then you get a ridiculous end reslut - then there’s the maudlin scene. And you’re like, “Yuck, where the fu*k did that come from?” It’s clear they’re like: we got to get some story, we got to get some heart in there, just shove it into one scene.

Jordan Hoffman: With those outtakes, do you think we’re going to get a big Blu-ray feature for them?

Paul Feig: Well yeah, we already do, now the window is so short for when DVDs come out, the only thing left to do is the commentary track. There’s really funny stuff, strung together, Greg Cohen, who does a lot of the DVD stuff for us, he went through it all and really - my favorite thing that they do are these line-o-ramas. They really show off how talented each member of the cast is, just hearing their ad-lib jokes or jokes we gave them to play with, all in a row, and you are like, “wow, these are really funny people.”