Street: Did you have any inclination to do Wet Hot American Summer-type things with this film?
DW: Not really. You know, Wet Hot American Summer is obviously so different. It’s a completely different animal, and that was almost like a comedy experiment to see how far you could change the reality and undercut every possible emotional bit. The thing I think that they both share, aside from many of the same actors, is a certain similar point of view in a lot of the jokes. I think there’s more overlap than might be apparent on the surface between those two movies for me.
Street: A lot of your actors overlap with those in the Apatow films. Would you ever think about collaborating on a project?
DW: He’s a great guy. I know him very loosely and I would love to work with him.
Street: How did you meet Paul Rudd, Joe LoTruglio and the other actors whom you tend to work with?
DW: Joe LoTruglio, Kerri Kenney and Ken Marino were all members of The State, a group that I got together with when I was at NYU. All 11 of us performed at that time and continued to work together in different configurations over the years. I met Rudd a little later than that, after The State series ended in the late '90s. We met in New York a couple years before we did Wet Hot American Summer. We continued to work together just 'cause we enjoyed each other’s sense of humor.
Street: How much leeway did you give your actors to experiment with their roles?
DW: A lot. When you are working with people who are as funny and talented as this cast, one of things you try to do is get out of the way and let them go with their characters. All the actors, without question, had ideas for dialogue and jokes that would happen that we incorporated into the story. Elizabeth Banks’s character was added at the very last minute. We had a separate character who was the lawyer who kept them out of prison. It was her idea to combine the two characters.
