BEERFEST SET VISIT PART 1: STEVE LEMME & KEVIN HEFFERNAN

Beerfest is a return to form for the Broken Lizard guys. They’re the comedy troupe who had a cult hit with Super Troopers and then a massive bomb with Club Dread, a film that had the awful luck of opening against The Passion of the Christ. Things looked bad for them until they were brought on to rewrite Dukes of Hazzard and their own Jay Chandrasekhar directed the film to some good box office. Warner Bros snapped them up for a three year deal, which includes scouting for new comedy talent.

CHUD’s been a long time supporter of Broken Lizard, especially Nick, who loves them. The night before the set visit the assembled web types gathered in a hotel room with a couple of beverages of choice and chuckled our way through Super Troopers; if the guys can recapture that vibe, Beerfest will be a blast. I don’t know what vibe they have captured exactly, but the tone on set was chill and relaxed, or chillaxed as the kids today might say.

Over the next few days I’ll be bringing you on-set interviews with every member of Broken Lizard as well as the aforementioned Jurgen Prochnow – interviewing this often menacing German in his beermeister outfit was surreal, to say the least.

First up is Steve Lemme and Kevin Heffernan. Lemme showed up wearing a cap, which we soon learned covered a very bad perm and self-inflicted balding patch to more convincingly create his character. Heffernan wasn’t actually working that day but had stopped by the set to visit.

Lemme: Hi. I’m Steve Lemme. Right out of the gate. Well, as you cannot see on the tape recorder, I play a guy named Charlie Finkelstein, who is sort of the geek who’s figured everything out scientific about beer. The anatomy of beer, the physics of beer, the geometry of beer. I’ve even figured out a way to align the body in such a way that the spine and the organs and throat align to create the perfect chugging instrument. So that’s really what I’m here for. Of course, as a scientist, I needed to get a perm.

Q: This is actually your real hair.

Lemme: Right.

Q: How much science did you learn to prepare for this role?

Lemme: Quite a bit actually. I learned a word. It’s one of the longest words in the English language. You know that word antidisestablishmentarianism? This one’s longer. It’s pneumonoultramicroscopicchillicovolcanokinesis. I throw that around pretty liberally in this film.

Q: As in pneumonia, right?

Lemme: No. No. It’s actually the passage – it’s sort of like osmosis. It’s the passage of tiny particles into something else.

Q: A friend of a friend is going to brewmaster’s school in Germany. He has to take physics and chemistry. It is a real science. Did you learn how to brew?

Lemme: Have I learned how to brew? Oh yeah. Since the day I was born, motherfucker!

Q: How did you end up with that hairdo anyway?

Lemme: We were talking about this a little bit yesterday. When we were making Dukes of Hazzard, my original scene got cut. So I was going to do the reshoot, the idea was thrown around about me doing male pattern baldness, which I latched onto and so did every one else, quite a bit. When that didn’t happen, it just seemed like a natural fit to do it for this thing

Q: Now you’re going for the Larry Fine look.

Lemme: Oh yeah. Actually I was modeling it a little bit on Sean Penn from Carlito’s Way.

Q: We’ve heard that a lot of this was sort of based on the beer culture at you guys’ college. Can you tell us about some of that beer culture?

Heffernan: Well, they say write what you know. So we decided we would make a beer movie because that’s what we learned in college, beer drinking. Right?

Lemme: Yeah. You’ll see quite a bit of the things we did in college. There’s – we did a bit of beer drinking in college. I think we drank so much that we got so bored with it that we came up with, like everybody, new ways to do it. Like we have the monkey chugs in this movie, which is upside down and you race drinking beer in the roof of your mouth, which is easier said than done. You realize every time you try to do it, that you instinctively put it up to your chin and then you spill the beer all over your face.

Heffernan: I think the real inspiration was this trip that we took to Australia. When we were doing Super Troopers promotion they sent us to Australia. One of the promotions that they sent us to was a beer festival, which I thought was kind of interesting because we don’t really get that here. But they sent us there. We ended up having a chug-off against five Australian guys.

Lemme: They wanted us to get up there in the cop uniforms. They were getting so ridiculous about the cop uniforms. Like they sent us on a radio interview in our cop uniforms. We were like, ‘But nobody can see us.’ They were like, ‘For the energy!’

Q: Who won?

Heffernan: Never drink against a stranger.

Lemme: Good question.

Heffernan: We were foreigners.

Lemme: They were shouting, ‘Oz! Oz! Oz! Oz!’ That’s what they call Australia down there. Oz. They were yelling at us. Unfortunately they beat us.

Heffernan: But that’s why we did this movie, so that we could beat everyone else in a scripted way. We lost, but we beat the Australians in the film.

Lemme: Okay. I will say this though, the guys who play the German team in this movie did challenge us to a similar race and we beat them. And it’s going on the DVD. If we had lost it would not be on the DVD.

Q: Is [Saturday Night Live’s] Will Forte on your team?

Heffernan: No, he was on the opposing team and he is quite the beer chugger. A shockingly fast and confident beer chugger.

Lemme: Did they tell you – they must have told you about The Chug?

Heffernan: Well, it was funny though because Will Forte… I think you come in and it’s all bravado in the beginning. We were all like, ‘We’ll chug the beer ourselves.’ Then by day three, you’re like ‘Oh my God.’ So he came in and did the same thing – chugged a gigantic beer incredibly fast. Wow. Then he went outside and puked in the back parking lot.

Q: Who do you play? Can you tell us a little bit about him?

Heffernan: My character’s name is Phil Crundle, aka Landfill, which is a little play on words. Basically Land… Phil, because I’m the guy who like drinks and eats anything and everything.

Lemme: He’s Bruce the Shark.

Heffernan: License plates and shoes and stuff.

Lemme: Yeah.

Heffernan: So they get me on the team to be that guy, that anchor guy who can drink fast and a lot.

Q: So if you bring your experiences from college to this film, do you bring some of your bad experiences too? Obviously people who drink a lot of beer have some bad nights too.

Lemme: No, it’s all glorified. In a beautiful glow.

Q: There’s no beer goggles?

Heffernan: There is. There’s a little bit of beer goggles in there actually.

Lemme: We have a very intense beer goggles scene actually.

Heffernan: Very, very funny.

Q: Are there any big physical stunts?

Heffernan: I think in this there’s a lot more physical comedy than in the other movies. Like for example I get into a huge fistfight with Mo’Nique, me and Mo’Nique going at it. It’s actually – I was talking to the stunt guys the other day. She’s going to do karate. She’s going to fight. We’re thinking she’ll break out some karate on me.

Lemme: Yeah. Because Mo’Nique is a karate expert.

Q: We watched Super Troopers last night. There’s a German –

Lemme: That guy’s in this movie.

Q: Is he part of the team?

Heffernan: No, he plays like at the beer fest, there’s kind of like a circus guy.

Lemme: An emcee. Master of ceremonies. Ring leader.

Heffernan: Yeah. Yeah. So he’s kind of the guy who runs the games and whatever. He’s flamboyant and has this funny costume.

Q: Is he actually German?

Heffernan: He is actually Dutch, but he’s a big TV star in Germany. He’s on a show called Girlfriends.

Lemme: Girlfriends.

Heffernan: No. Sisters.

Lemme: Sisters?

Heffernan: I think so yeah.

Lemme: He gets so mad when we’re like ‘How’s your show Girlfriends?’ He’s like, ‘It is Sisters, you imbecile.’

Heffernan: It’s funny because he was raised in England. He’s Dutch, he speaks in an English accent and he speaks like eight languages. So he’s completely fluent in German. So he plays our German master of ceremonies.

Q: You have the German guy and then at the end of the movie, at the end of Super Troopers, there’s all the beer stuff.

Heffernan: The keg party or whatever.

Q: Coincidence?

Heffernan: Right where we left off. We came back to that.

Q: Steve, your girlfriend Blanchard Ryan [Open Water] is in this, and she plays Kevin’s wife? Is that true?

Lemme: I will say this, yes it’s true. But I didn’t really get her into the movie. In fact, when you see her, she’s actually the perfect girl for the part. Wouldn’t you say?

Heffernan: She is perfect. We actually have a love-making scene. Me and Steve’s –

Lemme: They’re going to go at it animal fashion.

Heffernan: Right. That’s really why she’s in the movie. No, I’m just kidding.

Lemme: Why don’t you say something nice about her?

Heffernan: I think she’s great. I fought for her to be in this movie. It’s beneath her. She should be doing Shakespeare in Moscow.

Q: So Kevin has a love scene with Blanchard – what about you, Steve?

Heffernan: Steve gets seduced by the Swedish drinking team.

Lemme: They are women. Yes. Well, when you see me – when you first meet me, my occupation is that I’m in cloning. I work for the National Institute of Health and I extract frog zygote manually.

Heffernan: The gamete.

Lemme: The gamete. Yeah. I do it manually. It’s actually – it’s a true thing; a good friend of mine does that for a living. He masturbates frogs for a living. I’m not kidding. I don’t want to say too much about what happens in my sex scene, but let’s just say I frog the Swedish girl. Oh yeah.

Q: Of the five guys in the group, who’s the one that gets picked on the most?

Heffernan: In real life or in the movie?

Q: In real life.

Heffernan: [points at Lemme]

Q: Why is that?

Heffernan: He’s the shortest. The shortest guy always gets the most heat and he does. Right?

Lemme: Or some could say the most “successful” looking fella. [points at Heffernan’s belly] Right?

Heffernan: I bulked up for the movie, man. Come on.

Lemme: I know. I know it’s true.

Q: There was a little Super Troopers bit in Dukes of Hazzard. Are there any other callbacks in this film to your other movies? Is there a Broken Lizard universe?.

Heffernan: We brought some guys back. We brought – a couple of the guys played the local cops, are guys in different scenes.

Q: But they don’t play the characters they played.

Heffernan: They don’t played the characters they played.

Lemme: I don’t think we have any callbacks.

Heffernan: We have a call back on Puddle Cruiser, which was our first movie.

Lemme: What’s that one?

Heffernan: Domingo.

Lemme: Oh, right. Domingo. I don’t know if any of you have seen Puddle Cruiser, but there’s a little Flamenco dancer.

Heffernan: We brought him back.

Lemme: He puts pickles on the table. [Spanish accent] “Pick-lays”.

Heffernan: We brought a bunch of the actors back, but not necessarily in the same parts.

Lemme: Nat Faxon plays one of the Germans. He’s great.

Heffernan: He’s in Club Dread.

Lemme: He plays one of those Manny and Roy characters. They’re sort of like the two homophobic guys who run around and get stoned. He’s one of those guys. I think you’re going to like him in this movie. He does a great German accent.

Heffernan: Great German accent.

Q: What about your own acting career? You’ve been going solo – is there more of that for you?

Heffernan: I think so yeah. I did a movie right before this called Strange Wilderness, which is really funny. With Steve Zahn and Justin Long and Ashley Scott, Allen Colbert. It was a Happy Madison movie. I think it’s going to come out probably in the fall. It’s about a late night wilderness show and they go in search of Big Foot.

Lemme: Who wrote that? Who wrote the movie you’re talking about?

Heffernan: This guy Fred Wolf and Peter Galke. They both used to write for Saturday Night Live.

Lemme: Like how I prompted him?

Q: Good job.

Lemme: Who directed that?

Heffernan: Fred Wolf and Peter Galke.

Q: How excited are you guys about this production deal with Warner Bros, where you have three pictures with them and are looking for new talent?

Heffernan: It’s great because they gave us an office. It’s a good place.

Lemme: It was nice. After Club Dread we sort of thought we might have one foot in the grave. I guess with Dukes of Hazzard – the one guy that we really needed to impress was Jeff Rabanoff, who is the head of the studio. Somehow he took a fancy to what we were doing.

Heffernan: He saw the truth!

Lemme: Yeah. We walked out – in fact we had walked out of a particularly distasteful meeting at a place – I won’t say where – and we walked out and got the news and we were like, ‘Oh God. This a terrible situation we’re in here.’ And we got the news, literally, as we walked out, that Rabanoff who said he wanted to greenlight a film and give us a three-year production deal, which we couldn’t believe. All our managers and agents were like, ‘Take it. Take it.’ We were like, ‘Well. Maybe we should go over to-‘ ‘Take the deal!’

Heffernan: It’s good though. It allows us to write movies for Warner Brothers and Jay can direct movies for Warner Brothers and then at the same time, we can make these kind of movies, which we prefer. Budgets are low enough.

Q: What does it mean to be on the Warner Brothers payroll?

Heffernan: It’s so great because the interesting thing is Warner Brothers, admittedly on their side, has been more like kind of the big blockbuster action movies. They haven’t been in the comedy world so much. They really want to be there. So it’s kind of flattering that they would like us to come in and help them find things. Last year the 40 Year Old Virgin and Wedding Crashers showed that you could make big budget rated R comedies that are appealing to a lot of people. I think they want to get into that business and we are happy to help them.

Lemme: For us, personally, I think this is no disrespect to Fox/Searchlight, but when they bought Super Troopers and then they gave us the chance to make Club Dread, I don’t know that they exactly trusted us so much, but here and it’s a perception thing because we’ve done it and Warner Brothers is taking us now as an established entity. They actually have trusted us quite a bit and I think it’s been a great relationship. Like with this movie, they haven’t really given us notes since we started shooting.

Q: Jay said that he was honored and flattered at the Razzy nomination for Dukes. How do you guys feel?

Heffernan: I can see that. He didn’t win though.

Lemme: I’m sorry he didn’t win.

Heffernan: Yeah. We had fodder for him. It would’ve been great if he had won.

Q: What would you have said?

Heffernan: I think we would send him a nice basket of flowers. Maybe some muffins.

Q: It was director, it was writer.

Lemme: The script for Dukes of Hazzard was up for worst screenplay, but John O’Brien – you know we had a particularly nasty arbitration and did not get credit for it. We were kind of hoping it would win worst screenplay and then we had nights where we would spend the entire evening discussing what we were going to send him as a gift.

Q: Kevin, you’re point man on this film and Greek Road?

Heffernan: Yeah.

Q: Why is that?

Heffernan: I think it was a matter of how it fell. Steve was a point man on another script that we wrote, which we did not make. Whenever we’re working on them, we try to make it, each guy – it just happens that these two came together. Eric was point man on a script we wrote for Paramount last year that didn’t get made. It gets shifted around.

Lemme: The Greek Road is something we’ve been working on I think since a couple years after college. We have 25 drafts, and it’s kind of the one we’ve been dying to do forever. After Club Dread we came up with a contingency plan which was the we wrote a low budget script that we could do for 2 million bucks, we wrote this as something we could do for maybe between 5 and 10, and so we were all writing these scripts, point manning these things simultaneously and Beerfest is the one Warner Bros decided on.

Heffernan: Yeah, we wrote a 1 million or 2 million dollar one after Club Dread just in case we couldn’t get the money, which he was the point man on.

Lemme: Which we’d still like to do. It’s a fun thing that takes place in a restaurant. Essentially Mike Tyson owns a seafood restaurant and we are the waiters in the place.

Heffernan: He rules by fear.

Lemme: He rules by intimidation and fear.

Q: I know that Paul Soter is a horror buff, and that’s why he got Club Dread. Is there a specialty you have?

Lemme: Former waiter.

Q: Was Mike Tyson going to do it? Did you talk to Mike Tyson about being in the movie?

Heffernan: We would lose production days.

Lemme: We should be careful what we say here. [in Tyson voice] “I’m tuning into Aint It Cool News to see what’s up with Broken Lizard. WHAT? Steve Lemme, who’s he? I’m gonna get him. I’m gonna eat his face.”

Q: Can you talk about recreating Germany in Albuquerque?

Heffernan: It’s weird. New Mexico is giving filmmakers lots of rebates and breaks and stuff, so Warner Bros said, “You will go to Albuquerque and shoot Beerfest there.” We looked around to see if we could make Munich here. Ultimately the art design guys did a great job.

Lemme: In our research for this movie, we looked up Oktoberfest and we found out a number of surprising things: It is a carnival atmosphere, they do not have beer until the beermeister taps the ceremonial festival, and interestingly Oktoberfest is in September. It starts in September I guess because October is too cold. It starts in the last two weeks of September and carries over to the first week of October. But so this is actually more accurate – people will see it and go, “I don’t know about this,” – but it is fairly accurate with oompah bands and schnitzel, and like spleen eating contests and all that. The chicken dance is a real thing. But in terms of Albuquerque, the crew here is without a doubt the best crew we’ve ever had, and the art department has, I think, taken this movie to whole other level. If you visit the Beer Fest set tonight, you’ll see the scope of what they’ve done.

Q: The crew is from here or you brought guys you worked with before?

Heffernan: It’s a mixture. We brought some of our guys and we hired from here. The more you hire locally the more rebates you get.

Q: Does that mean you can go anywhere and build a set and maybe you don’t always need to go to the real locations.

Heffernan: Maybe, but it’s hard to say. When we get to the editing room we might say, “You know what, we need to get some shots of real Oktoberfest and pop them in.”

Lemme: Interior-wise you can do it anywhere. They have built a ton of fantastic stuff, but it’s true – you can’t beat the one hundred thousand plus people who go to Oktoberfest. It would be nice to get one shot of that.

Q: So much of Club Dread was the atmosphere of being there.

Heffernan: We were really there.

Q: Where was that shot?

Heffernan: That was shot at a place called Tamarindo, which is on the west coast of Mexico, about four hours south of Puerto Vallerta. It was a really nice resort, and it was a time when tourism was down because of 9/11 and it was hurricane season, so we were able to go down there and take over the resort and shoot there a few months.

Q: I heard that every day you guys would just go jump in the ocean and hang out.

Heffernan: Super Troopers was shot in Poughkeepsie – which is a lovely place – we said let’s figure out a place to go shoot a movie, and that was a resort.

Lemme: We invented a game down there. Every day we were in the ocean and we came up with this stupid game called Wet Ball, which was you could play with a Nerf football or a bunch of tennis balls. The idea would be there’s two teams, no score, and you would just try to, from 30 yards away hit the other guy in the face with the wet ball.

One time we were in the ocean and Kevin and I were on opposite teams and I said, ‘Watch this,” and I heaved as hard as I could and I hit him in the left eyeball with the thing. I was very upset about it.

Heffernan: It was one of those things where he was ‘Hhahahahahaahahooooh,….ow!’ And to this day I can’t open this eye.

Lemme: Kevin Heffernan, everybody! But after that he was eyeballing me from the other side. But there was fear.

Q: Are you guys doing any beer contests at night after shooting?

Heffernan: After you drink 30 gallons of O’Douls in a day, you don’t want to drink anymore. It’s curing our beer drinking.

Lemme: You wake up in the morning, show up on set and realize the first shot of the day is you chugging an entire beer.

Heffernan: Shotgunning an O’Douls.

Lemme: You do the long shots and you can mime it or whatever a little bit, but then comes time for the close up, so you’re really doing this one. And Jay is a coverage freak, so you’re doing it at least four times.

Q: They were talking about making darker German beers by pouring Diet Coke in the O’Douls.. how foul was that?

Heffernan: It got a little ridiculous because some of the German guys were like, “I can’t do this anymore. I am done!” Plus, Diet Coke and beer – that would be a great drink to serve at a restaurant.

Q: Are you guys losing a lot of time on bathroom breaks? I thought I would see a hundred Port-A-Potties here on set.

Lemme: You see us running to the bathroom.

Heffernan: It’s weird because you’ll drink six O’Douls and you won’t feel drunk at all, but you go to the bathroom every fifteen minutes and you’re not even drunk. It’s like being 65, you go to the bathroom every 15 minutes.

Lemme: I think one of the properties of O’Douls was that it goes through you faster. That’s the price you pay for being sober.

Q: You only rent it!

Heffernan: You only rent it! That’s true.

Lemme: On these days when you do these chugs, between every take you’re like, ‘Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom. Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.’ And it’s real. You’re not screwing around. And you make it there in the nick of time.

Heffernan: They do have these beer chugging things they created with tubes, not for when we drink, but for the other teams we play against because they can’t drink as much as we can. There’s a little tube where the beer goes down.

Q: You would think with the budget they could have made animatronic heads for chugging.

Lemme: Have you heard of the Ubangi? It’s a real thing, like if you’re drinking out of a cup, you get your entire mouth around the whole cup and drink it down. He does a Ubangi in the film.

Heffernan: They have a computerized thing that I put in my mouth and it expands my face.

Q: Have you guys thought of any good drinking games to go along with the movie?

Heffernan: There was talk about creating our own drinking games, but then we thought about the different drinking games and there are so many you don’t have to create them.

Lemme: People came up to us after Super Troopers and said, “Oh we invented a drinking game – anytime one of you swears, you have to drink.”

Q: You’d last eleven minutes of the movie.

Lemme: I know that Warner Bros suggested creating a drinking game for the movie, just a dot that appears every few seconds.

Heffernan: The new one is that we reused a lot of extras, so you put a picture of the extra up, and every time you see that guy in the movie, you drink.

Q: Do you ever hear about cops doing the games from Super Troopers?

Heffernan: We get guys coming up to us all the time. There were two [California cops]who got suspended for doing the Meow Game. When I was shooting another movie in Pasadena, two cops came up to me and said they do it all the time.

Lemme: I had an experience where I was driving on the freeway – I just gotten my new car. I was on the 5 and I was doing about 120. if you’ve ever been on the 5, it’s about 300 miles of straight, perfect highway.

Q: So it’s not your fault.

Lemme: I’m not to blame. You get hypnotized, you see the black dog. I was doing about 120 and it was night time and I realized I had been doing this for about 4 hours and hadn’t been pulled over by a cop yet. I was reveling in this when I looked up and saw the rollers basically in my back seat – they get right up on your ass to pull you over at that speed. I was trembling, I was going to jail and looking at a big, heavy fine. I rolled down the driver’s side window and I waited and I waited and the tap came from the other side, I rolled down the back window, I finally got the right window. He looked at me and said, ‘Mister, do you have any idea how fast – Super Troopers?’ I was like, ‘You got me,’ and he was like, ‘We do all those games! We do the Meow Game, we call dispatcher Radio, he hates that.’ Glad to see that we have a good influence on you guys, and he said, yeah and I said yeah, and we had an awkward silence.

And then he says, “Oh yeah, I had you at 110.” I was like, “Yeah you sure did.” And he said, “I’ll tell you what – I’ll let you off with a warning on this one. Are you in a rush to get someplace, you were going so fast?” And I was like, “Uh, no, no, honestly, I was just driving too fast.” And he says, “Good, can I trouble you for a photo and an autograph maybe?” I said, sure, sure and I got out and he came to me and his hands were trembling as he brought like a carbon copy of the speeding ticket he wanted me to sign. He had his camera and he put his arm around me and took a photo of the two of us.

Heffernan: As cars are blowing by you.

Lemme: Cops have a sense of humor, which is how the idea for Super Troopers came about. That’s why they love us.

Q: There’s something about the monotony where you do the same thing day after day. Even if you’re not a cop you get that – we’ve all had jobs where we try to figure out something to make it interesting.

Heffernan: And it’s because those guys are so maligned that you think they don’t have that, and that’s why they like it so much.

Q: Everybody has their moment in a Broken Lizard film.

Lemme: Speedo in Club Dread, and my naked ass in Puddle Cruiser and Super Troopers. Nobody wants to see Finkelstein naked.

Heffernan: Nobody wants to see me naked either.

Lemme: We had a very funny experience when we were making Club Dread. This guy Mike Weaver, who was one of the local cops in Super Troopers, left the dinner table and came back 15 minutes later laughing, howling. You could hear him down the hall. He told us this story about how he has a gay friend who’s into bears. You know what bears are? In the gay community they’re big hairy guys. This gay friend of his was a bear lover, and had been on a bear site, and saw that Mike Weaver was in this photo of the Bear of the Day. What it was, was a still from Super Troopers of Mike hosing and brushing down Kevin in the tuna can scene, so Kevin was actually the bear of the day.

Q: That’s almost as good as a Razzie.

Heffernan: I didn’t get a trophy or anything. Some other guy the next day was Bear of the Day. It’s cruel.

Lemme: We have a friend of ours who is a bear himself and a bear lover who corrected us and said that Kevin is not a bear because he doesn’t have any hair on his body. He’s an otter. And then I was like, what am I, what do I get characterized as, and he was like, “You’re a twink. They’ve got gym – actually a twink could kick your ass, since a twink works out really hard. You’re just a short gay guy.” There’s no category for me.