latest features
Hard Knocks
With recent reports that life for the residents of Toomelah has reached crisis point, Ivan Sen’s feature about the troubled Aboriginal community hits home even harder.
From A Faraway Land
The inaugural Indian Film Festival of Melbourne will attempt to show audiences that there’s more to their thriving cinema scene than song and dance… though there’s that too.
Last Dance
Director Martha Goddard gives us the back story on shooting her experiential short film ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ which is vying for a Dendy Award at Sydney Film Festival.
Trolls and Tribulations
Having raised the funds via crowd-funding, Snowgum Films are bravely attempting to bring Terry Pratchett’s short epic, ‘Troll Bridge’, to screen.
search the site
newsletter
Enter your email address below to receive the weekly Filmink newsletter
Pineapples and herbs
For slacker icon Seth Rogen and his new best mate, budding star Danny McBride, stoner action-comedy Pineapple Express offers a happy respite from the stresses of too many hats.
While playing a steady stream of laconic, acerbic funny men on screen, Seth Rogen has been quietly playing the field behind the cameras, writing for television and film and frequently producing for friend and boss Judd Apatow. Buying into that same self-determination, Pineapple Express co-star Danny McBride has similarly written one feature (The Foot Fist Way) and has another pair on the way. When it came time to shoot, however, each was able to get back to what he loves best – acting.
Although Rogen both executive produced and penned the screenplay of Pineapple Express, the character he’d written for himself – Saul Silver – was nabbed by co-star James Franco, leaving the actor in the curious position of playing a part he’d always intended for someone else. “That’s worked out really well,” he enthuses. “Because it made the character a little bit more outside myself and outside of what I intended. At this point, if I write something and really want to get it made, it probably will, which means I have to try not to think about that while I’m writing; try not to be too aware.”
McBride similarly embraced the freedom of acting in a film he didn’t write, especially coming off Jody Hill’s The Foot Fist Way, which he starred in and wrote. “In that film, the director would have certain ideas of what to do with the script and I’d always be saying, ‘You know, I can’t see myself pulling that off’, whereas here, I am not the master of my destiny and it was a lot of a fun,” he says. “I’ve never been squibbed before, and that’s fun – weird, though – and on a project like Pineapple Express, you don’t mind being just an actor, because it’s new and it’s pushing it. That’s the stuff I like to write and be involved with when I haven’t written it.”
“I’m writing the Green Hornet and keep thinking, ‘Woah, I have to do all of this?!’” Rogen adds. “I keep writing things like, ‘He runs up the block’, and realising that I’ll have to spend a week running up a block! So, from now on, we’ll just shoot in the car. Those are easy…” McBride laughs loudly: “He sits around in this scene!”
Being at the mercy of their director – David Gordon Green – allowed the boys to experience the joys of untethered weirdness, which came, often enough, in the form of squibs, explosions and all manner of physical comedy. “I feel like people will like it, because there’s so much physical comedy,” Rogen says. “It’s less based in pop culture, and more just guys hurting each other.” And the guy getting hurt was, for the most part, McBride. “The first time I got shot with the squibs, they laid them all in and were really serious,” he remembers. “And then the special effects guy said ‘Alright, we’re going live!’ and everyone turned their backs to not get hit in the eyes and I was sitting there with all this crap strapped to me!”
“Yeah, that was weird,” Rogen seconds. “Weirder than things most people do. One of my favourite parts of the movie is when you get shot in the stomach and go ‘Whoo…’ – I just thought that was a really funny noise to make when you get shot! Usually when we shoot, we take a lot of time to improv, but it’s hard to improv when you’re squibbed and holding a live machine gun…”
As happy as Rogen was to be relatively responsibility free on the Pineapple shoot, he’s even more excited about Observe and Report, a comedy from McBride’s friend and Foot Fist director Hill that he describes as “a really crazy, insane movie – a blast – like a comedic Taxi Driver with Ray Liotta, Michael Pena and Ana Faris…it was so much fun just to jump on and just try to bring what they do to life,” he explains. “I would be happy when there were intense conversations going on between the producers and director and stuff and I didn’t have to go anywhere near the conversation. As an actor, I could just go get a diet coke and relax, talk to the camera guys for a little bit…” McBride again cracks up inexplicably, before deadpanning: “Go wack it in the trailer…” to a hearty guffaw from Rogen, both men clearly enjoying their clowning.
Neither, however, fesses up to driving his career in any specific direction, only toward the fun. “Seeing who you will have a good time working with seems like a good way to go,” McBride shrugs. “No, it’s all about who you can stand doing press with,” Rogen laughs. “But really, I don’t ever think of a career plan, I just think of what would be fun to do. I’m sure people who work with me do think about my career, and I’m ignoring them and doing whatever weird movie that comes along, but it’s 100 percent what will be fun.”
Pineapple Express is released on August 7.
