By Brent Canle  |  Send to Friend

Broken Lizard (Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske) started simply as a sketch comedy group formed in the early '90s while they were students at Colgate. Over the ensuing years, the group churned out live performances and short films before shooting their first feature, Super Troopers. Further feature comedies Club Dread, and Beerfest shortly followed, earning them a significant following. Their newest film, The Slammin’ Salmon, co-starring Michael Clarke Duncan, opens December 11. 


Let's go ahead and start with the new movie, shall we? What's it all about?

Kevin Heffernan: We play waiters in this high-end restaurant owned by this crazy former heavy weight champion of the world, like a Mike Tyson type of guy.

Paul Soter: … played by Michael Clark Dunkin …

KH: He kind of terrorizes us. We find out over the course of one night that he owes a bunch of money to the mob and so he starts this contest to spark these guys to sell the most food and raise money for him. The contest is that the top selling waiter gets $10,000 and the lowest selling waiter he’s going to kick the shit out of him.

How was it decided that Kevin was going to direct this movie?

KH: Jay [Chandrasekhar] usually directs but when we got the movie together it all happened very quickly, and he was obligated to something else at the time and so I stepped in. I don’t know how we all feel about that just yet.

PS: He’s alright.

Steve Lemme: Did you find it challenging? I think this project was most complicated in terms of choreography. There are so many moving parts. Even if you aren’t in a scene, you might be walking through some door in the back. How did you find it as your first directing attempt?

KH: Fuckin’ easy, man. Piece of cake.

Jay, Erik, and Steve worked as waiters in New York. Did any of the experiences or stories from there influence the film?

SL: Every waiter wants to tell their waiter stories somewhere. When we started writing this movie, what we did was sat down and told every single waiter story that we had in our arsenal. Which were many.

Jay Chandrasekhar: Like the time you got a television deal. Go on …

SL: Oh, thanks, Jay. My [character's] plot line was something that happened to me. We sold our first movie, Puddle Cruiser, to a major television network. We got our advance, split it up five ways, and after taxes and commission, it was like $4700. So I quit my job at City Crab Restaurant in a blaze of glory, threw down my apron, and told everyone to shove it up their ass.

Erik Stolhanske: Coleslaw down the pants.

SL: That’s in the movie. So then, after a year there was a loophole in the contract and the network did not pay us the rest of the money, and so after one year I came back to the restaurant, $2600 in credit card debt, with my tail between my legs, and I got the slow clap from the staff.

As a group, do you feel that your creative process revolves more heavily around the plot of a film, or the individual jokes woven throughout? Which would you say takes more time and energy?

KH: I think it is different from project to project. Some projects were built around jokes more than plot, but some are built around plot. Like Super Troopers was a movie where we started with ideas for funny scenes and then we ended up stringing it together with a plot. Beerfest was more that we had the idea what we wanted the plot to be, and then we filled in the rest.

PS: With The Slammin’ Salmon, did we start writing it before he had the hook?

KH: We had funny ideas for situations before we had the plot.

SL: We had atmosphere. We wanted to do a waiting tables movie. We wrote Beerfest at the same time when we wrote The Slammin’ Salmon, and the idea was to do different budget levels. Beerfest was a middle-range budget, The Slammin’ Salmon was something we could do for under $5 million. So with that in mind we wanted a contained location, which was a restaurant, so that is what we started with. We started writing, told all the waiting tales, and after the whole gamut we had to decide who would be the crazy boss.

You mentioned that the film was shot at all one location. Was it easier, or did you feel confined?

ES: I thought it was great. It was like doing a play. You just show up in the morning, turn the lights on, throw your costume on and go to work. It wasn’t as exotic as shooting on location, or as fun, but it was certainly more convenient.

KH: The trick was to just not make anyone feel claustrophobic. Since we were in one place for that long, you try to move it around and use everything that is available. It wasn’t that bad. We had multiple sets. The office was one. The different bathrooms. So when I got bored being in the big room, we could just move over to somewhere else.

Broken Lizard started as a sketch comedy group in college and now you're major film makers, do you see anything else other than comedy in the future?

PS: Like drama?

ES: Sci-Fi?

KH: Tears?

JC: Lemme has done some Off Broadway acting.

SL: I did a four-hundred-year-old play Off Broadway. August Strindberg's Queen Christina.

KH: He was Queen Christina.

SL: No. I seduced Queen Christina.

JC: It was had to tell.

SL: They had me in so much pancake make-up. I got the part two days before the opening because they had fired the lead actor. Luckily no one showed up for the first performance so I got another dress rehearsal under my belt. And then these guys show up for the second show, when the director had a brainstorm to do it all in whiteface. I had pale-white make-up on, I looked like a geisha girl. Red lipstick and all.

KH: Could you imagine our gasps when we walked on stage?

PS: Us four guys walk into this theater so stoned.

JC: We were so stoned.

PS: Quietly sweltering for four hours long.

SL: The problem was we were all five feet away from each other.

KH: We were sitting on beanbags or something.

ES: It was above a deli. We were right on top of each other.

SL: The only people who ever showed up were my friends except one time, it was a Swedish play, two Swedish people showed up. And that was it, for the whole audience.

JC: They left at the intermission.

SL: In Swedish they were like, “dis fookin’ sucks,” and they were gone at halftime.

I’m glad to see you weren’t deterred from the business.

SL: I was depressed after that performance when these guys showed up.

KH: What are you talking about, we had pizza afterwards!

SL: My dad took us out to a pizza party. But it was so thinly veiled, everyone was saying the play was good but no one could look my in the eyes. My dad capped us at two slices. He wanted to get the fuck out of there.

JC: So maybe not so much drama from us.