And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.
Nicholas StollerWe have tons of live performances that we're putting on there. We have music videos. There's a music video for the song called I Am Jesus what is one of the funniest music videos, like we just could not find a place for it in the movie, but it's like crazy funny. And we have the whole video.
Nicholas StollerYeah, it's an origin story. But you very quickly get into the origin and then it's off to the races. It is an origin story, certainly, but it's not like the movie ends and somebody stretches. It happens pretty quickly and I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say about it, but I think when people see that first hint, they'll be pretty excited about it.
Nicholas StollerI remember like that scene with Pharrell where they're at the music video shoot, we have this on camera actually, Pharrell's confused because we weren't doing the script. We were doing all this improv and then Diddy says to him... Pharrell's like I don't understand what's going on and Diddy goes, "We do a lot of improv". (laughter) I remember being we just made him into a comedy nerd. We somehow turned Sean Combs into a comedy nerd, so.
Nicholas StollerAll movies are inherently collaborative, and animation even more so. There are hundreds and hundreds of people involved with an animated movie.
Nicholas StollerI mean we certainly always shoot a lot of extra material, but our goal was to make kind of like a big kind of rock-and-roll road trip comedy that has heart and that has hopefully you feel bad for Russell and you feel bad for Aldeus and also I wanted to surprise people with some of the turns in the movie and I think when I watched it with audiences they certainly...the reactions made me think that we did and so all that I'm just very excited about it.
Nicholas Stoller