Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the final installment of “Holy shit, I have a lot of OBSERVE & REPORT interviews to publish!” Seth Rogen and Michael Peña chats went up yesterday. This time we talk with Jody Hill, director of the flick as well as THE FOOT FIST WAY and co-creator of EASTBOUND AND DOWN, possibly one of the best things HBO has ever aired.

We talked about all of that in the below interview. At the time of the interview a second season of EASTBOUND AND DOWN was a maybe and as I publish this it has been made official that season 2 is happening. I can’t wait!

Anyway, here it is… Way too short, I think. We were just getting going when the interview was cut off, but I hope you enjoy the chat!

Jody Hill: Thanks for doing this interview. It’s good to meet you down here.

Quint: Yeah, finally. I have heard Drew speak well about you for so long, so…

Jody Hill: Drew’s the best, man. I love all of you guys. I’ve been reading the site for years.

Quint: Great.

Jody Hill: I met Capone. I gave him shit, because everybody on your site liked FOOT FIST WAY except for Capone, I was like “You wrote that fucked up shit about FOOT FIST WAY!” (laughs)

Quint: And he’s like “And I fucking hated this one, too! What do you think about that?!?”

Jody Hill: He was like “I like this one, but I wasn’t that impressed with FOOT FIST WAY,” he was pretty straight up, so I’ve got to give him credit. That’s fine though, I like that. It was kind of charming.

Quint: At least he’s sticking to those guns. That would have been really seedy if like “No no, I really like it now…”

Jody Hill: The best I could get from him was “Well, maybe I will revisit it someday.”

Quint: I really liked the flick last night.

Jody Hill: Thank you.

Quint: Where in the process did the story for OBSERVE & REPORT come up? Was it right after FOOT FIST?

Jody Hill: It was kind of like right after. I was going around… I didn’t have an agent Or anything with FOOT FIST and I signed with one at Sundance and they send you on these meet and greet sessions where you go around to the different producers and shake hands and I didn’t really have anything to pitch and I needed work, so I kind of just came up with the story as lame as that sounds… “I always dreamed of making a mall security guard movie.” It was a little bit of like “Okay, if I make something that I can pitch in a similar way to FOOT FIST, they might think that I won’t fuck it up and then I can use that as a springboard to make a movie that’s really way more fucked up and different,” you know what I mean?

Quint: Where did EASTBOUND AND DOWN figure in that, because I know that that pilot was shot a long time ago.

Jody Hill: It was.

Quint: I remember Drew talking about it and once again I’m like “You fucker, you can’t say that you have seen this!” That was like a year ago.

Jody Hill: (laughs) Yeah, we came up with that show a long time ago. That was even before FOOT FIST WAY, we were sitting… Ben Best had a kiddy pool in his backyard and we were like sitting back there drinking beer one day and literally trying to come up with show ideas and that was one of them. I think it was mainly Danny playing a teacher at a middle school was kind of like what we got. We pitched it to HBO and yeah.

Quint: I think it’s really funny watching Danny become this big star. AICN did a PINEAPPLE EXPRESS screening last year and he was just walking around the halls of the Alamo Drafthouse, without any fanfare and then the second the HBO show kicked off… I loved seeing him at the Paramount last night (watching DRAG ME TO HELL) and just seeing person after person come up.

[A Warner’s Rep walks up and asks Kraken not to take pictures while Jody is smoking.]

Jody Hill: Oh, is that not good? I told him I didn’t care.

WB Rep: We want you to have a clean image!

Jody Hill: Did you see the film? (laughs)

Quint: But I love that Danny is now…

Jody Hill: He’s like a rock star.

Quint: He’s coming into his own, man. I think it was TROPIC THUNDER… when he showed up people in the audience cheered when they saw him.

Jody Hill: Danny was always like the funniest guy in the room, like even back in college it was like the guy is just charmed, you know? He’s the kind of guy who can come into a room, not know anybody and by the time he leaves people are like “Yeah, see you later,” and high-fivin’ him and stuff. I’m not like that, I get weird around people.

Quint: Except for geeks! You seen to get together alright.

Jody Hill: I fit in okay.

Quint: So what I loved about the movie, and everybody keeps talking about the TAXI DRIVER comparisons, but I love that you have a guy who is extremely despicable, but somehow you are cheering for him by the time he is standing up beating cops with a flashlight. You have a character who is essentially… or you think is date raping Anna Faris... Like you were saying last night how “Thanks Warners for letting us spend you money on a weird movie.”

Jody Hill: I definitely liked those movies in the seventies, like KING OF COMEDY. It’s kind of cool to see these characters… Like Travis Bickle, he takes Cybill Shepard to a goddamn porno.

Quint: You don’t see that kind of a date in romantic comedies much.

Jody Hill: You just don’t see that anymore or like in STRAW DOGS where the girl kind of likes being raped. It’s like “Really?!?” I thought it’d be funny to make a comedy like that…

Quint: “A comedy like the rape scene from STRAW DOGS…” That should be on the poster.

Jody Hill: (laughs) Right! Also, just the themes of the seventies, like isolation, loneliness, absence of power… these kinds of things. Those always spoke to me when I was a kid. So, I don’t know, let’s put Seth Rogen in something like that and see what happens.

Quint: I love how his character is so surrounded by failure, essentially. The way his mother acts towards him, where it is that kind of weird love, but she almost doesn’t give a shit.

Jody Hill: We kind of hide it with comedy too, because if you look at the last scene between the two of them, it’s funny because she says she is switching to beer and everybody laughs and stuff, but he takes it as like a good sweet thing. I hope that people will think about this movie a little bit more, so that when the movie is over they will think of that and go “Oh wow, it’s kind of like a tragedy, because nothing is going to change.” Hopefully that’s the level that the movie works on, where you are laughing, but there’s that element of sadness or truth to it, where it works.

[Warner’s Rep asks Quint to ask his last question.]

Quint: Okay, sure.

Jody Hill: That wasn’t long enough.

Quint: Drew was telling me that with EASTBOUND, you had the six episodes and that’s what you guys wanted to do. Are you feeling any pressure for doing another season. Would you do another season?

Jody Hill: Yeah, we would maybe do one more season, but I think that’s going to be it.

Quint: Like OFFICE (UK) a little bit?

Jody Hill: Yeah, we might do maybe 8 episode, but I’m not sure. You could definitely end the series after these 6 and that’s it, you know what I mean? I’m excited for you to see next weeks, the season finale, because it fucks you up a little bit, like you really don’t need anymore. But I would maybe do one more season, because one season is kind of awesome, but then two is like “OK, we didn’t get cancelled…” (laughs)

Quint: “We are going way by choice on this one, they’re not forcing this out…”

Jody Hill: Maybe, but I don’t know. It’s pretty exciting though. It’s more like a chance to make a really long movie. That’s the way we looked at it.

Quint: I think Kenny Powers is probably one of the more iconic characters. People love the characters that don’t have a filter.

Jody Hill: People respond to that and I don’t know what it is, because I consider him pretty gross, but people come up to Danny all of the time “Kenny Powers! Let me buy you a shot!”

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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