'Step Brothers': Q&A with Adam McKay, Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen
By Emily Christianson, Hollywood.com Staff
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Monday, June 23, 2008
Adam McKay’s latest comedy Step Brothers is all “sitting and talking” and the director couldn’t be happier. Scaling back from big-budget movie sets and car crashes of Talladega Nights, McKay is opting to focus on hilarious dialogue instead.
“We wanted to do a comedy in a home and getting to play house with characters seemed really fun just because they’re more grounded,” he says of the film about two grown men who still live with their parents.
With Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly signed on to play step brothers Brennan and Dale, McKay recruited Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen to play their parents Robert and Nancy. We caught up with McKay, Jenkins and Steenburgen to get the scoop on the story, their characters and more.
HW: Adam, can you talk about how this idea came up?
Adam McKay: We met and had dinner. We had like 60 ideas for movies and none of them were quite right. I went to the editing room the next day for Talladega and someone said bunk beds and I was like, ‘wait what if they’re adult step brothers' and I called them up and they’re like, ‘I love it.’
HW: We’ve been watching you guys shoot this scene and every take evolves and is something different. What kind of improv skills do you have?
Richard Jenkins: It’s hard. I don’t have any improv experience. It doesn’t mean I haven’t played around with scenes and things like that, but these guys are really fast. It’s been an incredible test.
Mary Steenburgen: I started in improv and went into different kinds of things. I guess I returned to it a little bit in the last few years, a little bit with the Larry David show (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and just fooling around with him. With these guys, I think my job is more to anchor it a little bit so they can do their thing.
HW: In improv there’s always a structure. Which of your experiences is more structured? Step Brothers or Curb Your Enthusiasm?
MS: They work pretty similarly actually, but I would say Larry is more structured than Adam believe it or not because even though with Larry there is never a script, you don’t start out with any lines whatsoever and with Adam you do, there will be scenes where we go so far from what was originally written that it doesn’t bear any resemblance. With Larry, once you get the shape of the scene, you say different things, but the shape of the scene kind of stays the same. With Adam, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you fly through a totally different planet and that’s fun too.
Photo: Will Ferrell, Mary Steenburgen, Richard Jenkins and John C. Reilly (Sony)