ShowBizCafe.com was very excited to get invited to Grand Rapids, Michigan back in September 2010. We spent a chunk of the nighttime in a scrap yard seeing the cast of 30 Minutes or Less film a couple of pretty neat scenes. A few of us film junkies were picked up at our hotel by 7pm the day we arrived and were taken to a secret location.
We saw Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride, Nick Swardson, Michael Peña and Dilshad Vadsaria making the movie directed by Ruben Fleischer. The action-comedy arrived in theaters on August 12, 2011.
The plot follows Nick (Eisenberg), a pizza delivery guy who has no real goals set for himself. He is forced to get himself together when two small-time robbers (McBride and Swardson) make him rob a bank. This makes Nick realize how much life has to offer.
Chet (Ansari), his best friend, comically helps him along the way. The final push is given when the love of his life (Vadsaria) is put at risk. Meanwhile, Peña is given a task to accomplish from the bad guys themselves.
This is a dream team with Eisenberg’s silly/serious comedy skits and McBride and Swardson’s jokes bouncing from one to the other. With Ansari and Peña’s nonchalant crazy behavior, this is a laugh-out-loud comedy with bits of good action.
When we arrived on the set we walked to the scrap yard. We got to see the main character, Nick, struggling to keep his cool as a bomb attached to him is about to explode. He is trying to get the main lady to safety since she plays the damsel in distress.
We hear the bad guys who are dressed in monkey suits (to avoid getting recognized) screaming, cursing and making jokes as poor Nick tries to man up. Fleischer takes various shots of this scene from different angles and distances. He even lets the actors play with their own lines to make their own script as they ease into character.
In another scene we see a struggle between the bad guys dressed in monkey suits and Michael Peña. It was a cool, clear summer night and the lights on the set cast beautiful shadows off of the mountains of scrap metal set around the lot. There were even some fake metal deer, computers and funky machinery.
We were quiet on set and could see from the camera and a TV set up close to us how the scene plays out. Vadsaria’s screams are loud as are the laughs of McBride and Swardson. Eisenberg’s character breathes nervously and tries to find the right words as cool sweat fills his forehead.
We got to interview the entire cast along with the director, props, visual effects, stunt coordinator and special effects guys. After a great buffet dinner we got to see the coolest thing of all, a flame thrower getting used! It was the first time it was being used on set by Swardson, and you must have been able to see that thing from space.
The 30 Minutes or Less Cast Interview
Jesse Eisenberg‘s character is closer to what he was in Zombieland than on The Social Network, although here he looks more grown up and mature. Eisenberg cautiously and kindly approached us as we bombarded him with questions late in the night.
ShowBizCafe (SBC): What was it like working with Ruben (director) once again and how was it compared to Zombieland?
Jesse Eisenberg (JE): It was great! Ruben has a great kind of sense of how to create a comedic movie and not compromise the characters and he does that really well. I mean the tone of the movie is a little bit different from Zombieland since this is set in more of a real world context.
JE: In that movie my character was more heightened comedy, here my character is pretty straightforward. The comedy in this is a little less winking to the audience. Zombieland constantly was playing on the absurdity of the real characters whereas this movie is genuinely scary in a real way.
JE: The stakes in this movie are legitimately high and the characters, at least Aziz and my character, are real world characters.
SBC: Can you tell us about the toughest scene to make and about the love story in this film?
JE: Every scene kind of has some challenge logistically. I’m wearing this bomb throughout the whole movie, but as I said, the movie kind of takes place in this very real world setting. It’s occasionally been challenging because there’s so much action.
JE: There are also so many things that are comedic elements in the movie but it’s my job to kind of maintain the emotional honesty. At the risk of being pretentious, that’s my job, so that’s occasionally challenging. As for the love part, I’ve been in love with my best friend’s twin sister.
JE: I’ve spent the last several years not doing anything important in my life and never taking control of my life. Jesse Eisenberg fans know I play characters who need a push. The bomb lights a fire under me and I’m inspired to confess my love to this girl.
SBC: What do you have coming up after this movie?
JE: I’m not sure. I have a lot of publicity engagements which last until like October and then I’m trying to do a play in New York City. I write stage plays.
The director, Ruben Fleischer, made sure to give us a full run down on what we were seeing. He showed us pictures and sketches of the scenes and explained to us how certain things work, such as the flame thrower and car chases. He also spoke about the freedom he gives actors with their lines and their characters.
SBC: How much liberty do you give the actors and how are you able to control that at a certain point?
Ruben Fleischer (RF): We work together. Aziz who is basically the co-star here has helped write some scenes for himself. We worked on them together to try and get a nice voice that suits him.
RF: But Nick kind of customs everything to himself. It’s more in the performance than the page I guess. Some scenes are very improv-y, there’s scenes where Danny and Nick just go off into their own territory.
RF: Those guys are so funny and they can come up with hilarious sh*t all day long. When you have really funny people being really funny sometimes it’s hard to control it, but we try and get through it. Nick has a tendency to break more and laugh, but Danny it’s really hard to get him to laugh in a scene.
SBC: Besides the entertainment factor, would you like the audience to get something else out of the film?
RF: Jesse plays this pizza delivery guy who just sits on his couch and has let life pass him by. He’s kind of never really done anything and when he’s faced with the circumstances of the bomb he’s forced to prioritize. He essentially has one day to live, so it forces him to get off his ass and do something.
RF: He also has to tell the girl he’s always loved how he feels and finally to be real with his best friend about some sh*t he’s never talked about. It’s really about if you only had one more day to live, what are you going to do with that day? More than anything else, that’s what hopefully the audience will take home from this.
Danny McBride and Nick Swardson make up a necessary component of the film. They seemed to also have formed a tight friendship outside of the film as we interview the two together behind the cameras. They continued to finish each other’s jokes.
SBC: What kind of bad guys are you?
NS: We are almost like dumb and dumber bad guys, we’re not pure evil. We are just bored and don’t know what to do with our lives.
DM: I don’t know, we are motherf*&*ers in this thing. We’re making some bad choices but we have goals and ambitions, you know. Maybe people will root for us, we wanna change the world.
SBC: Talk to us a little about your improv skits and freedom.
Nick Swardson (NS): Well they let us improvise a lot, we definitely got the scripts as much as we could but we were given free rein to add stuff. We have to stay in check though. It’s bad because when I look at Danny and Jesse, and Jesse cracks up, I’m susceptible to it.
Danny McBride (DM): The cool thing about working with Nick is he isn’t like one of the improvisers where you are just doing stand up comedy in the scene. We never take it too far off the page. The scene is always what it’s about and we’ll just try to come up with different ways to spit the jokes out.
NS: Yeah, you don’t want to be self-indulgent. You want to make sure to stay in character. It’s not just us doing fart jokes in the middle of a drive-by shooting.
DM: That’s not to say that there aren’t.
NS: There are. But, it’s in the context.
SBC: What brought you to this project?
DM: For me it just seemed like a cool project and I liked everyone involved so you just kind of make time for the things you want to do. You know Diliberti and Sullivan, the same guys who wrote L.A.P.I., it’s kind of a throwback to movies like The Long Goodbye and Chinatown.
NS: My reason for this project was perfect timing, I just finished a romantic comedy in June so it was perfect timing to jump into something completely different. I have a show coming out in October, a sketch show. It was a perfect window before doing press for that.
We also caught up with the co-star Aziz Ansari. We continued on with the comedic strike as he spoke to us about his character in this film along with some of his more known characters.
SBC: Tell us about your character in this film.
Aziz Ansari (AA): Well my character is just a guy whose best friend is given this impossible situation. They have a rough time in the beginning because he confessed to being in love with his twin sister and they are forced into this situation when they are robbing a bank together. Jesse did stunt driving and I’m just kind of driving in the car with him.
AA: Other than that there’s the bank robbery but the stunt driving was fun because I never did anything where I had to be in a car chase and it was pretty cool. They have these rigs that like pull the car and stuff. Action is very easy it’s a lot of “Ah! Look out!” so it’s fun.
SBC: What are some of your favorite movies?
AA: When I was growing up my favorites, the ones that I watched all the time, were Die Hard and Terminator 2. In this movie there is a thing where these guys like Lethal Weapon a lot. So I brought that out in my personality.
Finally, we got to ask Michael Peña on his take on the movie and on his character.
SBC: What’s your character like?
Michael Peña (MP): He’s a professional assassin, or at least he thinks he is. Along the movie though it is proven he’s not. He is a little bit like someone I know from Chicago who’s always in and out of the pen.
MP: He loves Scarface, Goodfellas and The Godfather and he always talks like them and is always quoting them. He has a partner who is a stripper. She’s the one that basically sets me up with the other bad guys and we have a romantic scene.
SBC: How have you balanced the comedy and action in the film?
MP: It’s been interesting to me, because when I did Observe and Report, like you knew you were doing the comedy. This one is interesting because you have to do a little bit of drama. There’s just some that are drama and some that are comedic.
After a long night on set we were greeted off by the viewing of the flame thrower and left the cast to continue working into the wee hours of the morning. We had a chance to explore Grand Rapids the next day and even got to sneak into one of the museums across our hotel. This set visit gave us a pretty intimate look into the making of this film as well as the people involved in it.
For more movie interviews, check out our Movie Interviews archive.
