By Dov Kornits & Marina Coletta
According to Brit, Dan Mazer (I Give It A Year), the director of Dirty Grandpa, he didn’t expect a great critical reception for his sophomore film. The outrageous comedy follows a grandpa-grandson duo making their way to Florida. While filled with gratuious sexual references, nudity, profanity, alcohol and drug references, Mazer insists that it’s all in good fun, and not for the snobbish. “If you make a film called Dirty Grandpa, in which within ten minutes you see Robert De Niro masturbating, then you can’t expect it to be critically well received.”
Mazer explains that Dirty Grandpa is an outlandish, over the top comedy, and that’s all there is to it. “It’s not a film with tremendous artistic merit, and it was never meant to be that,” he says candidly. The negative critical reception hasn’t dampened Mazer’s enthusiasm for the film. “I genuinely think that it’s a really funny film,” the director asserts. “I sat in on enough screenings to hear people really, really laugh, and what’s great is that despite its critical reception, audiences really love it.” And for a movie that was so negatively reviewed across the board, for it to pull in an astonishing $99.7M in the US alone is quite a feat.
Apart from the negative reviews, Mazer describes his time on Dirty Grandpa as a life changing experience. Represented by the same agent as Robert De Niro, Mazer’s first read of the script had him laughing out loud, and upon further investigation, he was thrilled to find out that Robert De Niro and Zac Efron were already on board. Although the initial attraction to work on the film was the opportunity to direct De Niro, the process was very different than what Mazer had expected. “I thought that he’d be feared, and that he’d make life difficult on set, but he couldn’t have been more collaborative and amazing.”
Mazer claims that his legacy to the movie world will be directing De Niro in the aforementioned masturbation scene. De Niro was so determined to understand Mazer’s vision for the scene that he had Mazer coach him through it in excruciating detail. Another odd situation that Mazer found himself in was trying to explain new slang sexual terms to De Niro such as “blumpkin.”
In addition to De Niro and the supporting cast of comedians including Aubrey Plaza, Adam Pally, Jason Mantziukas, Henry Zebrowski, and Mo Collins, Mazer also told us about his experience working with heartthrob, Zac Efron. “You imagine that he’d be the equivalent of a model, a female model, just happy to coast by on his looks. If I was that good looking, I wouldn’t put any effort into being funny, interesting, charming, or any of those things. I’d let my face talk for itself. But fantastic credit where it is due. He’s much more interesting, funny, and intelligent, than he has any right or any reason to be.”
The incredible directing experience on Dirty Grandpa is unlikely to be Dan Mazer’s last. The 44-year-old started his career as a writer and producer for Sacha Baron Cohen on the infamous Da Ali G Show, and continued with the groundbreaking comic on the films Ali G Indahouse: The Movie, Borat and Brüno. Mazer went out on his own as a director with the boundary pushing rom-com, I Give It A Year in 2013, which he also wrote. Of directing, Mazer says, “I really enjoy it, and it’s nice to be at the top of the food chain.” And regardless of the negative critical reception roused by Dirty Grandpa, Mazer is eager to continue on to his next directing job. “It’s definitely what I want to keep doing.”
Dirty Grandpa is available now on DVD, Blu-ray and Digital.
