By Gill Pringle
Robert Pattinson, Mickey Rourke, Anthony LaPaglia, Paul Rudd, Sam Rockwell, Uma Thurman…they’ve all filmed scenes for movies and ended up on the cutting room floor, usually never to be seen or, at best, featured in the deleted scenes section of said film’s DVD. Now, Bad Neighbours 2 director, Nicholas Stoller, fills us in on why Girls creator and star, Lena Dunham, and Trainwreck breakout, Amy Schumer – two of the biggest names in comedy right now – failed to make the cut in his comedy sequel, Bad Neighbours 2. They were included as part of a montage in which wild girl, Shelby (Chloe Grace Moretz), pitches for new members for her start-up college sorority by giving a speech about great women through history.
“It was just purely a story thing,” Nicholas Stoller tells FilmInk. “Lena and Amy were hilarious obviously; they’re both geniuses. The scene made Chloe appear too confident and in charge at that point in the movie, if that makes sense. She’s a freshman, and she’s just starting this thing, so it didn’t make sense that she would give this speech that had a ton of confidence behind it. It just didn’t work. The movie is about Shelby and her friends getting more and more confident as it goes on, and this scene happened at the very beginning. The sequence was awesome and funny, but we just couldn’t figure out how to make it work in the context of the story. It’s always the story that determines set pieces and whether they end up in the movie. I cut so many different versions of this thing. We tried so many different things, and suddenly we were like, ‘Oh, it’s not working because these characters wouldn’t talk like this at this point.’”
Despite being comic titans, Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer shrugged it off without any fallout. “I told them,” Stoller tells FilmInk. “They get it. They make movies and TV, and they understand when stuff doesn’t work. The worst thing that you can do to an actor is put something in a movie that doesn’t work. That would have sucked for everyone. I didn’t want to do that to them. I hope that they still want to work with me in the future! [Laughs] But they were awesome, and it was really fun. It was really game of them. Lena spent the whole day in armour jumping around killing things. And Amy Schumer was really funny. She played Rosie The Riveter and she kills all these Hitlers.”
Mr. Stoller, please put this scene on the Blu-ray…
Bad Neighbours 2 is released in cinemas on May 5.
