Author: rb809rb

[This story contains spoilers for Pizza Movie.]

Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, the creative duo known as BriTANick, are keenly aware that a movie called Pizza Movie is not the most compelling title for their now well-received feature directorial debut. The former SNL writers hemmed and hawed over what to name their “stoner comedy for theater kids” starring Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo, until the internal working title of Untitled Pizza Movie officially became Pizza Movie. 

It’s weirdly on-brand for the Atlanta natives and NYU classmates considering they also struggled to name their sketch comedy partnership two decades ago. They settled on the fusion of Brian, Nick and the word Titanic. (If you’re a devout reader of my byline, then you might recognize Nick from one of the 21st century’s most remarkably honest images.)

The title only endeared itself to Kocher and McElhaney when they wrote a joke about it that pays off in the most unexpected way. I won’t give the game away here, but they do get into the weeds of it during the subsequent Q&A.

“We had all these polls we’d send out to our friends, and there was no unanimous title idea that everyone loved,” McElhaney tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I remember shouting, ‘We cannot call this Pizza Movie! That is the worst title in the world.’ And I still do feel that way. But then we added the joke in the movie. Now I deeply love it because it is all the setup for this punchline 83 minutes into the movie,” Kocher adds.

Pizza Movie chronicles the hallucinatory misadventures of Jack (Matarazzo), Montgomery (Sean Giambrone) and Lizzy (Lulu Wilson), as they journey to the lobby of their college dormitory in order to eat a pizza that will alleviate the effects of an experimental drug they all ingested. The film is a Hulu release, continuing the rather unfortunate trend of comedy no longer being the box office powerhouse it once was. BriTANick knew they were making a streaming release from the start, but they did broach the theatrical subject to no avail. 

The collaborators then decided to poke fun at the lack of a theatrical release by taking a page out of Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Supreme playbook. Instead of the Las Vegas Sphere, they had Matarazzo and Giambrone stand atop a random picnic table to explain that their wish for a theatrical release was rejected. Kocher and McElhaney credit Hulu for having a sense of humor about it all. 

“Hulu was totally down for it. They knew that we wanted it to be in theaters; we’d had the conversation before,” McElhaney explains. “Hulu has been really cool the whole time about us making fun of the things we want to make fun of and making the movie we wanted to make. So we knocked that spot out in an hour while we were in between press during South by Southwest.”

Kocher believes that one of the contributing factors to comedy’s box office decline is the fact that the genre has become so prevalent across social media. And given that the duo were at the forefront of internet comedy via their BriTANick YouTube channel and various other comedic web sites, they know they’ve contributed to the genre’s current predicament.

“We’re complaining about the thing that we began,” McElhaney says. “It’s a double-edged sword. It’s an undeniably good thing to remove a lot of the gatekeepers so it’s much easier for young people to break into the industry. But it has also created a ton of noise and distraction,” Kocher adds.

Fortunately, the duo does have a theatrical release coming out this month. They wrote Jorma Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body, starring Samara Weaving and Jason Segal. It’s a remake of Tommy Wirkola’s Norwegian dark comedy-thriller, The Trip (2021), and the experience was a dream come true for the long-time admirers of Taccone’s own sketch comedy trio, The Lonely Island. The latter group left SNL four years before BriTANick arrived.

“When we first met, [Taccone] didn’t know that we had written for SNL, and I was like, ‘We actually wrote for SNL.’ He then gave me a huge hug — the hug of war veterans who’ve been in the battles trenches together,” Kocher recalls. “So he’s been such an influence on us, and we all had an immediate shorthand. We would love to work with him for the rest of our lives.”

Below, during a conversation with THR, Kocher and McElhaney also discuss how Daniel Radcliffe wound up voicing a butterfly in Pizza Movie.

***

As someone who dealt with overzealous RAs, thank you for shining a light on their tyrannical ways. 

BRIAN McELHANEY It needed to be said. 

NICK KOCHER Democracy dies in darkness. 

Did you guys have your own blood feud with NYU’s RAs? Is that the basis here? 

KOCHER We actually had cool RAs. Some of our friends did not, but ours were great. Our freshman year RA was named Nora, and she was very cool. 

McELHANEY Yeah, she was cool. We didn’t really have any crazy RA experiences. It took a minute to figure out where to set this movie, and once we set it at a college, it just became so obvious that RAs were the natural antagonists. They break up parties and tell you not to drink. So we said, “Let’s treat them as if they are the Orcs of the Lord of the Rings world or the roving Nazis of Inglourious Basterds. Let’s exacerbate them to their full antagonist extreme.” It just felt like the right choice. 

KOCHER Yeah, we love scenery-chewing villains who luxuriate and enjoy being villainous. It was just such a fun vessel to include one of those [in Jack Martin’s Blake]. I love that he’s wearing a “spread love” t-shirt the whole time while he’s doing all this psychological torture on people.

Yeah, Jack Martin’s highly committed performance as Blake did remind me of Hans Landa in Inglourious, especially when he busts the kid with the pickle-jar bong at the beginning. We had a lot of Blakes at my college. My roommate once jumped out of a second-story window to avoid being written up, and the experience inspired him to install a secret kegerator in our huge entertainment center/TV cabinet.

McELHANEY Oh my god. 

KOCHER When RAs busted up a party freshman year, I ran into a bedroom and hid in the closet. I was a little drunk, so I ended up passing out while waiting there. Then I woke up several hours later and came out of the closet to find the person whose room it was. I was like, “Are the RAs still here?” And she was like, “There were RAs here? What are you talking about? Who are you?” The party had long since ended. (Laughs.)

That sounds like a funny sketch. Maybe you should look into that.

McELHANEY I think so!

KOCHER Yeah, put that on YouTube.

Did you direct Jack to play his character as straight as possible?

McELHANEY Yeah, that was always the intention. 

KOCHER That’s also why we cast him. We auditioned a ton of people for Blake, and Jack was in the first readthrough of the movie. We hadn’t seen anybody else read. One of our producers knew him and thought he might be good for this. He killed it at the table read, and then he had a great audition [afterwards]. A lot of the people who read for Blake were really big comedy actors, and while they were really funny, Jack Martin actually scared us by playing it so straight and so serious. It became so much funnier to us than someone who was just hamming it up in the part.

McELHANEY Yeah, we wanted to shoot it and have it be performed as if it was from a different film. Blake does not exist in a college comedy; he exists in a prestige film. So Jack Martin really delivered on that challenge. 

The main characters take a fictional drug without food, and that mistake puts them through a half-dozen nightmarish phases. They can curtail their bad trip if they can make it to the lobby of their dorm to pick up a pizza. Were either of you inspired by a warning label on your own medication?

KOCHER To some degree, yes, and also just drugs in general. The first time I did shrooms was on an empty stomach. It’s what you’re supposed to do because it makes it so much more intense. If you have food in your stomach, it’s a less intense shroom trip. So I’ve had some horrific trips on shrooms that definitely inspired elements of this movie. 

McELHANEY We were trying to figure out what drug they should take, and we realized that we wanted to turn the drug into different genres and sketches. So the nature of this drug’s different phases — and its in-between moments of sobriety —  were structural choices. We didn’t want them to be high all the time, and the actual highs are nothing you’ve ever seen before. So we realized early on that it couldn’t just be LSD or mushrooms. It had to be a fictional drug, and those side effects and phases just felt right in terms of working in these different types of genres and scenes and styles that we wanted to do. 

Pizza Movie is Gaten Matarazzo’s first post-Stranger Things project. You can see the tonal swerve that likely appealed to him, but he’s again playing a character who plays fantasy board games or tabletop games. Did you ever ask him about what he was going for on the heels of Stranger Things?

McELHANEY We were just like, “Why the hell this, buddy? What are you doing, man?” So we talked a little bit about it. 

KOCHER A big thing for us when we were casting the movie is that we didn’t want to make any offers. We wanted everybody to audition. We knew we were going to have to move really quickly, and we wanted to make sure [ahead of filming] that everybody was a really good fit for their part. Sometimes, you’ll cast a great actor [without auditioning them], but for whatever reason, the lines sound weird coming out of their mouth. You then need to rewrite their lines or really work with them, but we didn’t have time for that. We also wanted people who were down to buy the ticket and take the ride for this movie. We didn’t want to have to convince anyone or sell anyone to do it. So we auditioned everybody. Gaten read for both Jack and Montgomery, and he could have been cast as either, but his Jack read was so special and great. We talked with him a little bit while he was signing on because we did a huge rewrite of the movie. And he, understandably, wanted to know why.  He was like, “Wait a minute, I liked the first script. What’s happening to it now?” So we went through it, one by one, and he was so smart about it. He knew the script so well. Finally, he was like, “This is going to work so much better.” His own suggestions were also great, and he was enthusiastic the whole time. I’m so glad he did this movie. As a fan of his, this is the type of thing I wanted to see him do.

McELHANEY We did ask him, “You have the keys to the kingdom from Stranger Things. Why are you doing this low-budget comedy from two unknowns?” And he was like, “Dude, I just want to do great stuff.” He really wants to do things he loves, whether it’s theater or weird indie films. The script connected to him, and I’m sure he had to take a massive pay cut to work with two wildcards in us. It was a gamble. And he was just like, “I just believed in the script, and it felt different, new and exciting for me.” To go from something so huge to something truly different that expands your repertoire, that’s the sign of a star.

[Spoiler Warning.] When you say you did a massive rewrite, how different is the destination from what it was? 

KOCHER The destination was the same, but there were different emotional beats. It used to be that Montgomery [Sean Giambrone] ended up with Ashley [Peyton Elizabeth Lee], and Jack ended up with Lizzy [Lulu Wilson]. [Writer’s Note: Montgomery ends up with Lizzy in the actual film.] To do those original pairings, it took more time, and they didn’t really feel right. The character of Ashley also wasn’t a very exciting character to us, originally. 

McELHANEY She was cardboard.

KOCHER She might’ve had more lines, but she was just this sweet journalism major who was the object of Montgomery’s crush. So we wanted to have more fun with this role, and then we made her fully insane. 

McELHANEY We wrote this in a weird way. We had the plot idea and the mechanics of all those drug phases. Then we slipped in the characters and the emotional story underneath it, which is not how you normally write a film. So we had to figure out these character arcs through all the new drafts we would do, but the plot always stayed the same. We also tightened up the stakes of the plot. It took us a while to figure out what would happen if they didn’t eat the pizza, and some of the drug trips changed at the last minute. The head-exploding trip was discovered a week or two before we started shooting. The “Make the Baby Like It” scene was kind of discovered on the day. So we pivoted on a few things, but the main shape and structure always stayed pretty much the same.

Comedies and all its sub-genres, including the raunchy stoner comedy for “theater kids,” have really gone by the wayside theatrically. Pizza Movie also does not have a theatrical release, and you and the actors have voiced your dissatisfaction in some funny ways. Whose idea was it to turn the lack of theatrical into a marketing bit? 

KOCHER Brian had the thought, and Hulu was down to make fun of themselves and us.

McELHANEY I saw the Marty Supreme promo [atop the Las Vegas Sphere], and I was like, “Let’s do this with our guys.” But it took us forever to figure out what they should be standing on. Then we went to Austin [for South by Southwest], and there was this picnic table next to a park. And we were like, “This will be perfect. Let’s get a drone and our DP out there.” And Hulu was totally down for it. They knew that we wanted it to be in theaters; we’d had the conversation before. But Hulu has been really cool the whole time about us making fun of the things we want to make fun of and making the movie we wanted to make. So we knocked that spot out in an hour while we were in between press during South by Southwest. 

KOCHER The movie was always going to be on streaming. We knew that going into it [despite having a theatrical conversation]. 

In 2019, when Booksmart and Long Shot failed to light up the box office despite great reviews, that’s when I knew the genre was in trouble theatrically. Superhero and action movies have also integrated a lot of comedy, so it seems like it’s just being packaged with other genres now. But what do you think is the root cause of the genre’s disappearance at the box office?

NICK KOCHER I don’t know the ultimate answer, but it could be because everything is a comedy now. Like you said, there’s comedy in action and superhero movies, but everything on your phone is also a comedy sketch. There are so many tweets or TikToks or Instagram posts that are genuinely very funny, and it’s all in your pocket. So that probably contributes to the barrier to entry of having to drive to a movie theater to laugh. But it’s so great to be in a communal setting with people laughing together. 

McELHANEY Yeah, people have been talking about this a lot in the last ten years. In the ’90s and 2000s, there were one-to-three huge comedy films every year that everyone would see and quote. They would become part of the zeitgeist, and that doesn’t really happen really at all anymore. I don’t know if it’s something that happened that made people not want to go see comedies, or if it’s just that people got scared and stopped making them. Is it a chicken or the egg thing where both are happening? But people still show up for horror and action movies. So everyone in comedy believes that comedy absolutely has a place in the theater. They should be trying to make big bold comedies and get them out theatrically. People aren’t done seeing comedies in a group because that’s the best way to see them. But it is a head scratcher as to why they’ve fallen off. 

KOCHER I think it’s ultimately what Ryan Gosling said. This is the world we’re in, and you now have to give people a reason to go see something. You have to make something so good and so undeniable that it gets people to the theaters. Everyone should do their part and support the theaters, but that’s not how we keep them alive. We keep them alive by trying to make the best, funniest movies we can. 

Nick, you mentioned that comedy is always at our fingertips through social media, so that makes you guys the J. Robert Oppenheimers of this situation. You were at the forefront of internet comedy.

BriTANick (Laughs.) 

KOCHER That’s true! 

McELHANEY We’re complaining about the thing that we began.

KOCHER It’s a double-edged sword. It’s an undeniably good thing to remove a lot of the gatekeepers so it’s much easier for young people to break into the industry. But it has also created a ton of noise and distraction. It’s the double-edged sword of social media too. There’s good and bad with these things, and you just hope that it’s all trending towards good, ultimately. 

Dan Radcliffe voices a butterfly named Lysander. Did he owe his agent a favor? Did he lose a bet?

BriTANick (Laughs.) 

McELHANEY That guy’s in trouble, man. I don’t know what’s going on with him.

KOCHER We knew Dan a little bit through some mutual friends, and initially, the butterfly was not as big of a character. Then it became a bigger character with a whole monologue at the end, and we immediately thought of Dan. So we asked our mutual friends if they would ask him, and they all braced us, saying, “He’s probably going to say no to this. ” But he came back with an immediate and enthusiastic yes. We just loved working with him. He tried multiple different voices. There’s a version of Lysander that is done as a British fop. That would be fun to release on the special features one day.

McELHANEY He was so eager. That guy’s a star. He just commits no matter what the project is. Clearly. He went into a recording booth and knocked it out of the park in 30 minutes.

[Spoiler Warning.] We have to talk about the fourth-wall break where Jack Martin is transported to your writers’ room where you’re debating various choices in the movie including the title. Was Pizza Movie actually a placeholder title that stuck? 

McELHANEY The title was our albatross the whole time. It took us forever.

KOCHER Well, we initially wanted to title the movie Oh God, No, Please Make It Stop. 

That’s written on the whiteboard in the movie.

McELHANEY That’s right. 

KOCHER We were told we can’t call it that. But some people were referring to the movie internally as Pizza Movie, and that was sticking. 

McELHANEY It was called Untitled Pizza Movie on our slate, so we just removed Untitled. That’s really all we did. But people were already calling it that. We kept pitching other ideas around, and then it got so out of control. We had so many ideas, and everyone had their opinions on what the movie should be called. We had all these polls we’d send out to our friends, and no one could decide on anything. There was no unanimous title idea that everyone loved. People loved and hated each one. So we were just like, “For the next movie, we’re just going to title it, and that’s the title. No one can give their opinions.” It was so annoying. 

KOCHER I remember shouting, “We cannot call this Pizza Movie! That is the worst title in the world.” And I still do feel that way. But then we added the joke in the movie where we get to say that. 

McELHANEY We got to dunk on it.

KOCHER And I was like, “Now I love it.” It’s purposefully a horrifically bad title, and now I deeply love it because it is all the setup for this punchline 83 minutes into the movie.

McELHANEY Aside from Oh God, No, Please Make It Stop, which we really liked, every other title just sounded cheesy. They all sounded like a teen comedy trying to be funny. So nothing was really hitting, and Pizza Movie just seemed to work for everyone. And like Nick said, when we found this joke about it, it became the only option. 

[Spoiler Warning.] Was that your actual writers’ room?

KOCHER It was the room, but it was production-designed by our production designer, Frankie Palombo. Throughout prep, Frankie came into the room and took photos of what we’d written on the dry-erase board. So all of the things on the dry erase board were actually written on the dry erase board at one point. 

McELHANEY It’s a very organized version of our room. Our room is messy, and we don’t have stuff on the walls. It was white-walled like an insane asylum, but that was the room. We filmed ourselves having real arguments about real problems we had with the film. We have many, many minutes of footage of Nick and I literally arguing about all our problems with this film, and they will be in the DVD specials one day. 

[Spoiler Warning.] You guys would usually perform in your sketches, so did you feel like you had to give your existing fans something with the two of you just to make it a proper BriTANick project? 

KOCHER I wouldn’t say we felt obligated. 

McELHANEY I wanted to appear.

KOCHER I didn’t want to unless it made sense. And when we came up with this early idea about the “true, horrible nature of reality” being that they are characters in a movie, then it was like, “Oh, this is a really fun way we can come into this story.”

McELHANEY Like Nick said, if we didn’t fit in, we wouldn’t have done it. But it did feel nice just because people know us as writers and also as performers. So for anyone who has followed us over the years, it’s nice to give them a glimpse of us. It felt like an important thing to do if we could make it work, and I’m glad we did.

You somehow made me feel something for an AI robot named Snackatron 3000. 

KOCHER Yes! 

McELHANEY Good!

But I’m conflicted about it because we live in a time where corporate America is trying to force-feed AI down our throats.

KOCHER Look, this is a movie that is meant to challenge the audience. 

McELHANEY I’m sorry about that. It’s a complex idea. I think Snackatron is the best version of AI. If AI leads to Snackatrons, I’m okay with that. But Snackatron has, low key, one of the best arcs in the film. For a D character, he’s got a beautiful little story. 

When I saw that you wrote Jorma Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body, I figured you’d worked with Jorma and the rest of The Lonely Island at SNL, but they left long before you guys got there in 2016. So how did you end up on that remake?

KOCHER Well, we were actually on it before Jorma was. We were brought on by XYZ Films to write the script for the remake. And after we wrote it, they were like, “Great, Jorma is going to direct it. ” And we were like, “This is a dream come true.” The Lonely Island is one of the single biggest influences on our sketch comedy. We’re such massive fans of MacGruber and Popstar, so it was incredible to get to work with Jorma. When we first met, he didn’t know that we had written for SNL, and I was like, “We actually wrote for SNL.” He then gave me a huge hug — the hug of war veterans who’ve been in the battles trenches together. So he’s been such an influence on us, and we all had an immediate shorthand. We would love to work with him for the rest of our lives.

Did the collective name of Lonely Island inspire BriTANick? 

KOCHER No, we knew that sketch groups and duos need a name, and so we came up with our name when we were 19 years old. We didn’t think about it very hard, and we didn’t realize we would be going by it for the next 20 years of our lives. 

McELHANEY I thought we would be. I was like, “This is us till the end, baby.” But we did think of combining our names with the word Titanic, and we capitalized the T, the A and the N so that people might pronounce it correctly. 

NICK KOCHER No one ever pronounces it correctly. 

McELHANEY They’ll say, “Brittanic,” or “Brit and Nick.” They think my name is Brit. 

KOCHER They think there’s a British association or a genuine Titanic association or Encyclopedia Britannica association. And there’s none of that.

McELHANEY At the time we started, we loved a group called Derrick Comedy that was huge on YouTube. It was Donald Glover’s group with Dominic Dierkes and DC Pierson. I loved that their name wasn’t a comedy-sounding name; it was just Derrick. A lot of improv and sketch groups try to be funny and call themselves The Zany Bow Ties or whatever. 

KOCHER We did, for one second, consider naming ourselves something like that. Brian’s roommate at the time was like, “You can’t call yourselves BriTANick. You should call yourselves The Mustache Diaries.” So we entertained that for half an hour, and I don’t know what our careers would be like if we were The Mustache Diaries. We would’ve had to change the name at a certain point.

McELHANEY It’s now whatever you guys want it to be. We’ve given our name up.

Tommy Wirkola, who directed the Norwegian version of Over Your Dead Body, was originally going to helm the remake. Did he have another movie go at the same time? Or did he realize that it would be unwise to remake himself? 

KOCHER Tommy was amazing. He was like, “I made my version of this. Do your own thing and change whatever you want.” He trusted the whole creative team. He was a big proponent of Jorma directing it. He’s also a massive MacGruber fan. And it’s incredible to hear that he loves the remake.

Besides changing the names, what was the key to adapting a Norwegian film for the States? 

KOCHER We didn’t really think too much about the States, per se. There’s a lot of inside Hollywood jokes that we added. 

McELHANEY I would say the lead couple’s relationship and careers are more specific to acting and filmmaking.

Jason Segal’s character directed an indie film years before languishing in commercials. The character is a soap opera director in Tommy’s The Trip. 

KOCHER Yeah. We loved the structure of the original, and while we did change some stuff at the end, Jorma wanted to revert back because, “We don’t have enough money to do that.” (Laughs.) So the main things we focused on were tweaking dialogue and character arcs. We put our weird brand of humor in there and threw Jorma some alley-oops that we knew he would be able to slam dunk.

McELHANEY Changing the gender of one of the main antagonists was a pretty big move we made, and that opened up a different perspective of how we could write those characters. It gave us another relationship story to parallel [Jason Segal and Samara Weaving’s characters’] relationship story. So there were little details here and there, but like Nick said, the original is so well structured that the foundation was already laid for us. That can be the hardest part to write.

What’s the plan going forward? Go through whatever door that opens? Or attempt to steer things in a particular direction? 

KOCHER We’d love to continue writing and directing movies — and specifically both. There’s certain things we would love to write and hand off to different people. Then there’s other things that we want to write, direct and really make our own. We’ve got some stuff lined up that we can’t really talk about. Who knows if they ‘ll end up happening, but we’re writing scripts. We definitely don’t want to go through whatever door that opens, but we love changing things up and challenging ourselves. We’ve had a lot of good experiences writing stuff that we didn’t think we were right for. We’ve got a movie at New Line, and we’re doing a rewrite on that right now. It’s in a very, very different area than any of these current movies, and it was a fun challenge to write. So we want to keep changing it up and playing in different genres, and we’ll see what comes.

McELHANEY This month is actually a good distillation of what we like to do. We have two movies coming out. One is our film, and it’s very much our BriTANick style. The other one is something that we wrote and collaborated on with other people. It’s in a style that we had to learn a bit how to do. So we want to ping-pong between the two. Our very unique sensibility that we’ve developed over so many years is always in our back pocket. But we also want to branch out and try to do new things before coming back home to do what we do.

***
Pizza Movie is now streaming on Hulu. Over Your Dead Body opens in theaters on April 24.