You’ve obviously seen the film many times – is there any scene that every time you see it, you just have to chuckle to yourself?
Dan Mazer: I’m the worst person in the world to laugh at my own jokes. I sort of have a reputation whenever we have any table reads, or with Sacha [Baron Cohen] whenever we pitch jokes, I always laugh loudest at my own jokes. It’s not even contrived. I just sorta find my own jokes funniest. Even now, I’m probably the loudest laugher in a screening. That often probably comes from wanting, willing other people to laugh so much that you can’t help but laugh yourself. In terms of scenes that I really like, and make me laugh every time, I would say I like the best man speech at the beginning, Stephen’s best man speech. It’s my daughter that he refers to having sex with, which is also nice as well, so that always gives me a bit of thrill that Stephen Merchant is talking about having sex with my daughter. That always makes me laugh. And, I also like the photo frame scene, that always makes me laugh. Because I know what’s coming, I sorta look forward to the anticipation of that.
Comedies are hard to do. How difficult was this to do?
Dan Mazer: The comedy bizarrely is not the hardest part for me. I’m always very confident I can make things funny, and sort of have done so for a while. What you have to do is keep a narrative, keep a story, that keeps people entertained for ninety minutes and drives the comedy along. So like I said, the comedy is the easy bit. What I find more difficult is the drive that sustains the comedy and keeps you interested because you can’t just watch laughs for ninety minutes – then you’re watching a sketch show or a stand-up. You have to invest in the characters, you have to invest in the story, and that to me, the combining of those two things, is the trickiest thing.
I was wondering if you could share a little bit about the dove scene.
Dan Mazer: The thing about the dove scene is that it’s not CGI, apart from I think there’s one CGI shot there of a dive flying near a fan because we didn’t want to actually hurt the doves. It was relatively easy, the doves sorta fly and they’re in a room. The doves were easy to handle, Rose Byrne, less so. What she actually hadn’t revealed to us, despite that she had he script for months, and we’d rehearsed it, was that she has a morbid, crippling, paralyzing fear of birds. So basically we turned up on the day and she said “I can’t do this,” and we said “What do you mean you can’t do this? You have to do this! You’ve seen the script, you know what’s happening.” She couldn’t get her words out – if you see shaking it’s because she’s quivering. She’s totally, absolutely afraid of these things flying toward her. The scene wasn’t really about Nat, her character, originally being scared of birds, it was sorta about her being distracted by it. But, we had to embrace the fact that she was petrified. A scene that should have taken a morning to shoot ended up taking two days because she had to recover from every take for about thirty minutes – sit down, have a cup of tea, get it out of her system, and then start all over again. That was the challenge of that scene.
What are your next projects?
Dan Mazer: I’m writing a couple of things. I’m just deciding really which ones I like. It’s a difficult thing, especially when you write and direct something, it’s basically three years of your life, so you have to be completely sure it’s something you want to spend three years of your life on. In fact, even longer because then you have to do the press and talk about how much you like it afterwards. Basically, it’s a slightly paralyzing thing where you have to sit down when you’re writing a script at the beginning and think “OK, am I going to be willing to talk about this in a room in Los Angeles to four strangers in three and a half years time? Will I still be able to muster the enthusiasm?” So I’m working on what that thing is.
A big thank you to Dan Mazer for sitting down with us, it was a real pleasure! Don’t forget to check out I Give It A Year when it hits theaters on August 9th.
