“Gorgeousity:” Andrew Fleming & Pam Brady Explain It All

Q: Why goose Hamlet? Why not Othello, or Romeo and Juliet? Those are “downers,” those are “bummers,” like Dana Steve Coogan calls Hamlet.

Andrew Fleming: You make a very good point –

Pam Brady: I think we may have made a mistake –

AF: Actually, it was that we just liked saying “Hamlet 2.” It made us both laugh.

PB: Especially since it’s territory that Mel Gibson has covered already; we might do “Apocalypto 2” too. It’s worth emphasizing that we truly believe that a Hamlet 2 would be one of the worst ideas ever.

Q: A lot of people don’t know that you had worked together prior to Hamlet 2.

AF: We worked on a couple of pilots that didn’t get picked up, perhaps wisely, by the network.

Q: Did you only meet when you began working together on these pilots?

PB: That was the first time we ever met, at the…

AF: Meeting.

PB: A meeting that just became magic.

AF: You started crying and laughing and dancing around the room.

PB: We held each other by the wrists. That was over five years ago.

Q: What was it that led you both to say, “Enough with the pilots, let’s write a feature script,” and how did that come about?

PB: I think it may have been through frustration. The pilot process is a hard process –

AF: There are a lot of rules.

PB: -- yeah, and we figured that if we wrote something that we thought was funny and just kind of did it for ourselves, that would be more satisfying in the end.


AF: We didn’t want to pitch it or try to sell it ahead of time; we wanted to spend our time writing it ourselves, and so…we really spent a lot of time – five years. Six, by now.

Something that Pam and I have in common with each other is “high and low” – we love highfalutin literary allusions, but we also like to see people get kicked in the head.

PB: A rake to the nuts! Leave it on the ground, see somebody walk up to it and…

AF: At one point, the movie was called “Mr. Holland’s A--s.”

PB: That’s true! But then we realized that the title had already been used by a popular pornographic film.

Q: Besides the title, what was the entry point?

AF: It was about drama class, and the production that they were putting on wasn’t as prominent. The show, in the script, was vague, and we kept putting off deciding what it was actually about, or if it had any meaning. We wanted it to be a bad idea.

PB: Our main character is haunted by his dead father, too. One of the early inspirations, too, was just how aggravating inspirational-teacher movies are, how badly they talk down to the audience…

Q: Andrew, many of your movies have dealt with people – often high-school or college-age characters – groping towards a better understanding of themselves. Is this a mindset you like exploring?

AF: I do feel like I’ve yet to get out of high school. Emotionally, intellectually, I’m really still there.

Q: But a number of your films are about people who are deluded, kidding themselves about something, or looking for something –

AF: I think it’s because I’m deluded and I’m looking for something. No, I don’t know; it isn’t like I’ve set out to create an oeuvre. It’s whatever strikes my fancy.

The thing that Pam and I were clear about early on is that we wanted Dana to be an insane idealist, to have this optimism in the face of absolutely no positive feedback. Even though he doesn’t have any of the goods, his enthusiasm always carries him through. The first thing we thought of was that character. We loved that character and wanted to follow through with that.

Q: Pam, you’ve done middle America-themed satire before. Did you see this as a logical extension of that, thematically, or as new territory?

PB: The difference with Hamlet 2 was, it didn’t start out intended as satire, it really was about this character of Dana; it started from character, and not necessarily about him poking fun at society. It turned out that way, with the ACLU, but that was developed later on, wasn’t it, Andy?

AF: Our intention was to do something funny and along the way a political stance appeared. I think it just came out of…us.

PB: Yeah, it wasn’t really designed that way.

Q: Pam, given that South Park and Team America were so un-P.C. but they did not involve actual people, did you feel that you had to dial down the outrageousness a bit, or did you really feel liberated?

PB: I don’t think we dialed it down at all. I think the only difference from before was that actors have to have lunch breaks.

Stylistically, what turned out different is that this movie is very emotional, because of the way that Andy directed it and because the cast is so good, like Steve Coogan and Catherine Keener in their scenes together. You get good actors, and they make your writing look better – that’s the trick. We have all these very broad scenes, too, of course.

Q: You stick with your characters, whatever they’re going through, and encourage the audience to do the same.

AF: It is about being emotionally on board. The death knell of a comedy is, even if it’s funny, if you’re an hour into it and suddenly you realize you have no emotional involvement and it’s just about laughs. We wanted, and we wanted you, to feel for this guy and kind of identify with him. He is trying his best, in the middle of pathetic circumstances. The more you like him, the more you feel for him, so the funnier it is.

The big lesson that Pam and I learned on this was, we didn’t filter ourselves and we didn’t come up with strategies; we followed our interests with the scripting and didn’t pre-meditate anything. We found ourselves where we ended up, because we didn’t have to articulate the intention to executives and we didn’t have to sell it to anybody. We did what we wanted, and it was more fun, too.

PB: Yeah.

Q: Was there any point in the writing process where one of you said to the other, “Oh, that is just beyond the pale?”

AF: That did happen!

PB: When did it happen?

AF: Well…the three-way –

PB: Oh, I forgot about that, that’s right! In an early draft, Dana got inspired to save his drama department after a very vigorous lovemaking session with his roommate [David Arquette’s character] and his wife. That confused people as to his sexuality, and was distracting.

AF: We realized we had to pull back.

Q: And you’d covered that already in your earlier film Threesome.

AF: Exactly. I’d have been sequelizing myself.

Q: With the Dana character, was a guiding concept “those who can’t do, teach?”

AF: I think the guiding concept was, “Drama teachers are always nuts.” There’s always this one teacher in your high school who is crazy and wildly unconventional and sort of a sorry spectacle. But they end up affecting you more than the teachers who are totally together and know their stuff, because they teach you something about the sadness of human endeavor –

PB: The fact that there’s a lot of disappointment coming your way when you reach middle age; how to process disappointment, that’s what those teachers teach students. That’s invaluable.

AF: They kind of serve as a cautionary example; “don’t end up like that teacher and you’ll be all right.”

Q: Did you see Dana as a leading man in his own comedy of mortification, like Albert Brooks in his movies of the ’70s and ‘80s?

AF: Early on, we articulated that we didn’t want to parody inspirational-teacher movies but that we wanted to make a movie about a guy who thinks he’s living an inspirational-teacher movie.

PB: Dana has to come to grips with the fact that he’s not onstage and that nothing’s going the way he hopes it will.


AF: I think everybody does that to some degree; they think that they’re this character, and their life is a certain kind of story. We tried to reflect that with the movie’s act structure and the voiceover. It’s as if this is the way Dana would want his story told, with Merchant Ivory hauteur.

Q: So his story came first, not the show-within-the-movie. When you were coming up with that, was it like we see him doing in the movie? What was that process like for you?

AF: Piecemeal. At first the show was much more topical, with Monica Lewinsky in it…and a series of random images. Everybody kept saying, “Well, what’s the show going to be like?” and we kept avoiding the question. The idea of there being musical numbers came quite late.

PB: Eventually, every time we would talk about it, it kept coming down to what the content of the show was. We realized that Dana’s problem was the specter of this mean, abusive dairy farmer father who never believed him, and that’s what he had to overcome. Suddenly it came together, with the symmetry of forgiving someone.

AF: We wanted it to involve Christ, because –

PB: -- we’re really behind him; we think he was one of the more spiritual people who ever lived.

AF: The idea of there being a time machine and turning Hamlet’s tragedy around had already gotten into the script, but as a throwaway. About a month before we started shooting, we watched Mel Gibson’s Hamlet 1990, directed by Franco Zeffirelli to remind ourselves of the storyline –

PB: -- yes, who the characters were –

AF: -- because, basically, not since high school had I read it –

PB: I think it was a sign that I had never read it.

AF: -- and we realized that there was some interesting material we should make use of…

Making the movie was like putting on our own crazy high school production. We didn’t have a lot of resources; we were throwing things together. Very few of the kids playing students had any kind of musical theater experience. A lot of the students in the on-screen class were kids from the high school we were shooting at in Albuquerque. None of us had ever written songs before, and I’d never worked with a choreographer or filmed a dance number before, so there

was a real sense of “let’s put on a show.” We didn’t have to imagine that naïveté, it was real for us.

Q: Was the movie ever close to filming, or simply being developed? You ended up making it independently…

AF: People would read the script and say, “This is really funny. How the hell are you going to pull this off?”

PB: Nothing really happened for five years, and then all of a sudden…We got Steve Coogan, then we got the financing. From the time that our producers read the script to the time that the movie got made was really fast.

AF: Then, from the beginning of prep to showing it at Sundance was…not even eight months.

Q: You’ve both worked on movies within the studio system, including your most recent projects before this. Did you feel you were taking a chance in going with independent financing with Hamlet 2?

AF: I’ve done it before; Threesome was financed independently, and Dick was made essentially outside of the studio system with the production company of Mike Medavoy. We didn’t have a distributor when we started shooting that movie.

This was definitely going a little bit further out on a limb. But it was this thing where, we would get distracted and then four months would go by and we’d pick up the script and say, “We have to make this movie, we have to do this, we can’t not do this.” Pam and I couldn’t forget about it.

PB: It haunted our dreams.

Q: Andrew, you were able to convene key collaborators who have been with you for pretty much your whole feature career…

AF: Cinematographer Alexander Gruszynski and I have been working together for 20 years. He’s somewhat idiosyncratic, so he lends an air of intellectual mystery – but he’s also very funny. I have a shorthand with him, and it’s fun, because each time we try to clean the slate and say “Let’s do this one in a different style.”

Q: So what were the guidelines for shooting Hamlet 2?

AF: Our inspirations came from visits to Tucson, where the movie is set, and to a certain degree Albuquerque, where we filmed it. Pam and I had gone to Tucson, at the beginning of the scriptwriting process, and found it had a surreal flatness with a sense of things having faded. It was an interesting metaphor for what

Dana’s life is like. So Alexander and I kept looking for flatness, and bleached-out and depressing areas, which we thought would make things funnier.

Q: Were your methods with production designer Tony Fanning comparable – as in, not bright and colorful but instead dreary?

AF: Yes, the idea was that Dana’s world lacks color and is flat but that he keeps invigorating his environment, or trying to. His house expresses that, and the desire to work towards staging the show goes further. The show itself explodes in color, movement, and sound – kind of the antidote to the rest of the movie.

Q: Let’s talk about Steve Coogan. How and when did he come aboard?

PB: Probably in the year leading up to when the movie got green-lit –

AF: I think it was at least a year-and-a-half. He read the script and said, “I’ll show up anywhere, I’ll do it, I’m on board.” No qualifiers, no equivocations. We liked that.

PB: Yeah!

Q: From his ongoing work in the U.K., it’s clear that he is willing to look bad or discomfited as his characters. He goes deep into them, so you probably knew that there was nothing he wouldn’t do…

AF: That was the main thing. We didn’t send the script to many people, because we weren’t trying to find the most popular famous actor in the world; we wanted it to be somebody who just really got it.

I will confess that there was one conversation that I had with an actor who shall remain nameless. His concern was that he would look like an a--, that he would humiliate himself in some way. Steve had no such qualms.

PB: He loves it!

AF: Steve loves to look like an a--.

PB: What’s key to Dana is that there’s so much pain. I think that’s why when people see the movie they are responding, because you feel so sorry for him and so bad for him. You believe that he exists, and that everything is going wrong for him. Steve will go there and never wink at the audience. It is true British fearlessness.

AF: But he’s also a fine actor. There’s this one monologue that he has which is very funny, but he’s weeping in the middle of it. Steve understood what and

where the jokes were but also acted realistically through it. It’s a double-pronged approach that very few people can do.

PB: He’s so brilliant that I just can’t believe more people don’t know about him. They will, and if it’s not this then it’ll be something else.

AF: He’s inevitable.

Q: Speaking of actors and limits, how did Elisabeth Shue’s characterization come to be? In the past decade, since Being John Malkovich, we’ve seen several meta self-parodies; this one seemed oddly affectionate…

AF: Originally, the idea was for somebody more obscure, whose zenith was a TV show in the early ‘90s. Pam and I resorted to calling the character “Famous Actress” in the script, even though we had a few examples in mind. Elisabeth, like Steve Coogan, got it and was totally up for humiliation. She embraced it, and ran headlong into it, and I adore her for that.

Q: Was she an active participant in brainstorming specifics of how to tailor it to her?

AF: Yes; it had been written more generically, but she told us stories. We incorporated them into the script, and they’re in the movie.

PB: It was her idea to have the kids not know who she was and say, “Who are you?” She really wanted to –

AF: Well, that wasn’t –

PB: I think, we may have had it an earlier draft but we took it out when people were getting nervous –

AF: Yeah, we took it out. But she thought of it after we’d already taken it out. She said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if they didn’t know who I was?”

Q: In the scenes with Steve as Dana, like where he’s riffing on her name, was there improvisation? Was she able to keep up with Steve?

AF: That’s the one scene in particular where they both really embellished, when Dana first meets her. He was always mindful of doing what was on the page, and then would throw in extras on top. Since Steve is a brilliant writer, it was usually pretty good stuff. Elisabeth was totally up for tossing the tennis ball with Steve. She can think on her feet.

PB: She’s pretty smart.

Q: Now, the young actors…you had several to cast for this. A couple of them did have musical theater experience, like Skylar Astin and Phoebe Strole of Broadway’s Spring Awakening.

AF: I was in New York and saw that show, which reminded me of the kind of show that Dana would put on – in that it’s unconventional. The language and the content are a little scandalous, pushing the boundaries of what you can do onstage. I remember seeing Phoebe and thinking, “That’s Epiphany, that’s her!” They both read for us, and they just nailed it. They were right on in terms of their choices, no question.

PB: They’re both really inventive; the scene where Skylar, as Rand, does his animal onstage and jumps up and claps his hand to go back to his chair. That was all him.

Q: One scene is shot outside the Broadway theater where Rent ran for over a decade. Given that the show’s arguable creative and audience heir, Spring Awakening, has this cast presence in your movie, was this an intentional tip of the hat?

AF: No, they were the only ones that would let us do it!

Q: Among the transfer students, you have Melonie Diaz as Ivonne. Counting Hamlet 2, she had four movies at Sundance this year…

AF: Well, Melonie I’d seen in Raising Victor Vargas, and we just pursued her. Ivonne was not a very big part for someone who’s done so many films already; basically, I begged her to be in the movie. Kind of stalked her, for a little while…

PB: But didn’t you also make the case to her that this was the one time where it’s not “the white teacher coming into the city and saving the kids;” this guy is lost, and it’s the kids that save him.

AF: Yeah, and she was very keenly aware of the idea of playing a Latina teenager who would defy the usual expectations. It’s the opposite of what you’ve seen on bad TV and in other movies, and she was down with that.

Q: Surely you also bonded over both having gone to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts…

AF: It was kind of a Tisch reunion, an NYU mob, because Skylar and Phoebe went there as well.


Joseph Julian Soria came in to read for the part of Chuy, and I asked him to look at the scenes for Octavio. Michael Esparza was the opposite; he came in for the part of Octavio, and I asked him to read for Chuy. We cast them both that way.

It was fun to use local Albuquerque teenagers, too. There was this one guy; we called him Chuckles and kept putting him in scenes because he was so funny. Finally, I had to give him a line, so we Taft-Hartley’ed him i.e., made him eligible for SAG membership.

The [movie’s drama] critic was also from the local performing arts school. He’d never worked at all, except for the school productions.

Q: How very apropos! Once you were in production, did you find yourself bumping up against budget constraints? That’s one reason you shot in Albuquerque instead of Tucson.

AF: It was a lean budget, but I think that from doing pilots and doing Threesome for $1 million, you learn where to spend your resources and where not to…

PB: When I was on the set, I had a couple of fits, but then Andy took me aside and said, “You have to realize, this is an independent movie.”

AF: We did get Pam a chair, but not a trailer.

Q: Did you feel that you had a lot of support from Albuquerque, in addition to financial and the local talent?

AF: Albuquerque is a magical place; it really is the Paris of the Southwest.

Q: How so?

AF: In the way that Paris, Texas is the Paris of Texas. No, Albuquerque was a perfect stand-in for Tucson.

PB: They have wonderful balloon festivals – and fine Italian restaurants, because there are so many relocated mobsters there.

AF: That’s the word. We never saw them.

PB: I don’t even believe the mob exists, actually.

Q: It doesn’t; remember, this is being recorded. So, you finished six weeks of shooting at the end of October?

AF: Appropriately, on Halloween. In New York City.

Q: Then you had the most hectic post-production period –

AF: In the history of cinema. There was only about 10 weeks between wrap and showing it at Sundance. It was a little nuts. We showed Geoff Gilmore of the Sundance Film Festival an early cut about 2 weeks after we wrapped, and he was interested enough to save us a slot. But we had to show him something a little more finished before he could commit. So we raced and worked furiously, and after another 3 weeks’ work, in early December he committed. It was a little tough having to do all this technical work over the holidays. Honestly, though, doing television, where you have to turn things around in a week or so, was good practice.

Q: Pam, this was during the writers’ strike. Were you monitoring the progress?

PB: I was monitoring and I did not touch a pen, just for the record. Andy asked me to stay away from the editing suite, for reasons that we won’t go into –

AF: No, that’s not true. I basically called Pam every 15 minutes and asked her, “Should I do this, or should I do that?”

PB: He’s being kind.

AF: I didn’t even know about the strike, I was so busy.

PB: Well, at least we won the strike; that’s what people are saying.

AF: Sometimes the good guys do win.

Q: What was the Sundance experience like, from the inside?

AF: It was like being on a game show, on steroids and acid. It was crazy.

PB: It really was. With snow.

AF: We had kept joking, “We’re going to go to Sundance with this movie, and there’s going to be a bidding war!” We were being ironic, blowing ourselves up because we never thought that would happen – and then that was what happened.

Q: And so the movie was shown at Sundance, on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

PB: He would have loved that.

Q: Andy, you had been at Sundance once before, with Threesome.


AF: Yeah, but that had distribution by that point. That was a more sedate experience; this was a nail-biter.

Q: How did you find the response?

AF: That first screening was over-the-top. People were laughing as hard as I could ever have hoped they would. It was one of the better screenings I’ve been to in my life, and I haven’t gotten so many e-mails in one day since…e-mail was invented. If Pam and I had written some fantasy scenario of how it should go at Sundance, it wouldn’t have been that good.

PB: That is true…and there was still a strike, so, no writing was done.

Q: What was the process like for writing the songs in the movie – for the show?

AF: It was a panicked last-minute effort. Chaotic but fun. Of the actual existing songs that are heard in the movie, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” was always in the script. Elton John gave his permission for its use early on in the process, for which we are very grateful.

Q: Pam, how do you think the songs in Hamlet 2 stack up against the ones in the South Park and Team America movies?

PB: Oh, Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Marc Shaiman are very talented, but these are definitely better, I’d have to say.

AF: These come from a more emotionally real place.

Q: Do you hope that this movie will encourage kids to put on a show?

AF: If we can prevent one more production of Godspell, we’ve done something positive.

PB: Society would never be hurt by more musicals, and can only benefit from homemade ones.

AF: When we were scouting and doing general research, we went to a lot of high schools. There were some that clearly had made drama, and arts in general, a priority. But there were some where it had been marginalized. I think it’s an important thing to have in schools, and it’s a way for people to come together and be crazy and creative.

PB: I was surprised how much people seeing the movie got fired up by the idea that the jocks and the gangbangers and the tough guys come to support the drama nerds. The idea that all these different kids are rallying against the forces that are trying to stop them…it’s like a Norma Rae moment when the football guys lift up the guy yelling at Epiphany and drag him out. You see them all feeling connected in a triumphant moment.

Q: Do you hope that this movie will encourage middle-aged men to put on a show?

PB: If they can reach into their artistic core and express themselves, yeah.

AF: We really weren’t trying to be didactic about anything. Honestly, I don’t know what the message of the movie is.

PB: There are secret messages in there, if you play it backwards. We don’t want to give it away; we want to let people discover it.

Q: Do you hope that this movie will encourage people to adapt hit movies into shows?

AF: That’s a huge trend now already, and it’s both good and bad. But movies have always taken storylines from other mediums, so why not.

Q: Do you two now have any ideas of plays to sequelize? Since you actually did end up having to make that effort with Hamlet itself…

PB: We’re going to get into some Bertolt Brecht, like Mother Courage 2. I can’t tell you exactly what our bold approach is going to be, but Blythe Danner is going to be involved. She’ll be wonderful.

AF: Also, Richard II II.

PB: Richard III².

Q: What about Skylar Astin and Phoebe Strole in Romeo and Juliet 2?

AF: It does seem senseless that the young lovers have to die –

PB: It totally does –

AF: -- like, what was he thinking?

Q: What should audience members look forward to when seeing Hamlet 2?

AF: I don’t think anything can prepare you for this film. Prepare for gorgeousity.

PB: “Gorgeousity?”