The Broken Lizard comedy troupe has come a long way from its humble beginnings at Colgate University. While Jay Chandrasekhar and Kevin Hefferman serve as the ring leaders, Broken Lizard tends to play by its own rules, with no singular executive producer who chooses the team’s material. It’s worked for the boys, as they’ve created the funniest film in the last decade with Super Troopers, and have thrived today making many comedy pictures.
One of those Freeloaders, about five guys and one girl living in the home of Adam Duritz free of charge, but when Adam sells the home, they do everything they can to ensure they keep the place. Mr. Chandrasekhar was wonderful enough to sit down and discuss the film and what’s next for Broken Lizard with us recently.
Q: How did you get involved with Broken Lizard?
I started a comedy group back in college called Charred Goosebeak, and we performed at Colgate University in upstate New York for about a year. Then we graduated and moved to New York City, and reformed as Broken Lizard.
Q: Where did the idea for Freeloaders come from?
When I moved to L.A., a friend of mine was living in Adam Duritz’s house. Adam met a bunch of people on the road, and at the time Adam was touring the country. When you tour you meet people on the road, and my buddy said ‘Oh I’m moving to L.A.,’ and Adam said ‘you should stay at my house.’ And it turned out, six or seven people were staying at this mansion in Beverly Hills. One day my friend called me up and said ‘Hey, I’m having a party.’ He was just a small time writer and he hadn’t had any success yet, and I went to his house, and it was just this monstrous mansion. There were gold records all over the walls, and I ended up going to like five or six parties at this house. I slept over there, and then about five or six years later, we had a deal at Warner Bros.. We found out that Adam Duritz had scheduled a meeting with us, and it turned out another guy who lived there, and Adam, had hatched an idea to make this into a movie. The guy, Dan Rosen, wrote a script, and Adam agreed to produce it and they brought it to us, not even knowing that I’d been to this house seven or eight times. They already had financing, they just needed someone with filmmaking know-how and they were fans of Broken Lizard.
It was Dan Rosen’s idea, and he took it to Adam, and Adam had agreed to produce it, because Adam had already produced a while back so he had already dabbled in the independent film world. What they built on was what they agreed to do.
Q: How do you select who’s going to play what characters in your films?
When you have nice houses in L.A., porn companies will occasionally ring your doorbell and ask to shoot there. They have this sort of limited porn scene, and they let us work out what we wanted to play, so it was pretty clever in that scene.
Q: Did you do any research for your role as a porn director?
No, I was trying to pretend to be M. Night Shyamalan. I don’t know, I’ve shot my share of nudity before, I am not really that shy about sex. It was fun because you got to go all the way.
Q: What’s been your favorite character to play as a part of Broken Lizard?
Probably in Super Troopers. It’s really fun to have a crew cut and a mustache, and carry a fake gun. I had a good time on that.
Q: What’s next for you guys?
I don’t know. There’s some discussion about trying to make Super Troopers 2. We’ll see, but we also may make Potfest. You know, this film, we produced, but the other films we wrote and directed and all that stuff.
Freeloaders releases in January.
