With Intramural premiering at this year’s Trbibeca Film Festival I got the chance to speak with both the Director Andrew Disney as well as Writer and Producer Bradley Jackson. Together these guys have created a hilarious sports movie about a topic that absolutely didn’t deserve to get its own sports movie, Intramural Football. With an all star cast they prove that something as preposterous as Intramurals is the perfect launching point for oddball humor.
CH: how is everything going over at tribecca?
AD: Ah man it’s beautiful it’s a dream
CH: Andrew I have to ask, your imdb picture what is that all about?
AD: Yeah so, one of my friends in college was like do you want to be in my NYU photo shoot, I was like sure and then he had me put on a bow tie, no shirt with flippers. It’s really weird but I just kept it. People seemed to like.
BJ: It’s the only reason we hired him to direct this movie
CH: Well that is as good a reason as any I suppose, he did rock that little tie. How did this whole project come about?
BJ: This is Bradley. I wrote the script and this was actually my very first screenplay, when I was in college at the University of Texas. I was 21 years old and I knew I wanted to write, I wanted to write features. I had taken a couple of stabs at other scripts and they didn’t work and then I came up with this idea and though it was a funny idea. I had friends who were playing intramurals and they were talking about how awesome they were and how epic they were and it just made me laugh, there is nothing epic about an intramural sports game. I took my love of movies like ‘Hot Rod’, ‘Wet Hot American Summer’, ‘Major League’, ‘Remember the Titans’ and boiled them all into a comedy. I would rewrite it like every other year, Andrew can take it from here.
AD: Yeah Yeah, Bradley and I met at a film festival where he saw my first film ‘Searching For Sonny’ he sent me the script and I just fell in love with it. It was just insanely horrible and so fun and just had a great nostalgic like 80′s or 90′s sports movie feel to it and I grew up loving those. ‘Teenwolf’, ‘Cool Runnings’, ‘The Sandlot’ we would pull from everywhere for inspiration.
CH: How did you land so many people from SNL?
AD: That was a happy beautiful kind of accident, at first going into production the only person we had from SNL was Kate McKinnon who we were so thrilled to have her, we were over the moon to have Kate. then two weeks into production Jay Pharoah signed on to play the announcer we only shot him for one day. And then at the very end, Beck had been during the shoot auditioning for SNL and then on the last day of shooting he got the call that he was going to be on SNL. So we started with one and ended with three. That was kind of the weird magic of the shoot. That doesn’t happen all the time.
CH: So where did the idea of being paralyzed from the Dick Down come from?
BJ: I don’t know, I think it was the idea of a lot of the sports movies a big moment is when someone gets paralyzed. ‘Friday Night Lights’ the TV show or ‘Remember the Titans’. I knew I wanted to ride a comedy. I thought it would be funny if the only thing he cared about getting paralyzed was his penis. That’s how he prioritized his life so I thought it would be funny. All those dick jokes are funny to me.
CH: I like the montage where you deconstruct the entire the genre. Where everything is explained and the music builds up.
JB: That was always in the script from draft one. I always loved that montage. That was when the movie became real to me.
AD: I know when I read it, I could see it. I thought it would be great to have these great weird beautiful sports montages for intramural sports. We thought it was an epic movie for the guys that didn’t deserve one.
JB: From day one Andrew knew it would be funny if we shot this in a way that made them look awesome. John Landis said when he shot and scored the movie (Animal House) he wanted to have a proper collegiate score even though it was such a raucous crazy movie because he thought the contrast would make it so much funnier. We wanted to make the visuals pop, and the score very orchestral and big, a 90′s sports score.
CH: Since you did so many drafts of it how much did change from the original concept?
BJ: It changed a good amount; there are probably five or six key scenes that were always in there. He always got paralyzed from the balls down, there were always two announcers who are not really announcing but they are announcing. There was always the montage, the dueling epic speeches. But what Andrew did was, he saw that there were two or three characters that needed a lot of work to make them interesting for actors to play. We added a lot once Andrew came on board. Kate proposing, Becks tragic accident a lot of that came from Andrew pushing me. Trying to make a character more exciting for an actor to play. In the end 80% made it, our actors are so good at improv.
CH: How did Sam come about he was great in ‘Zero Charisma’?
BJ: Sam is a local hero and actor in Austin. I saw ‘Zero Charisma’ at ‘South by Southwest’. I love it when people bring up Sam he is a true gem of an Actor. I don’t see how he couldn’t be the next great character actor. He is really young and really gets it.
CH: What is it about Texas that people that come from there are obsessed with the place?
BJ: Over all it’s a maverick sensibility, we will do whatever it takes. We don’t know what we are capable of.