I may have been covering the film festival side of South by Southwest, but I still couldn’t help discovering some new music. Big in Japan is a comedy about the real life band Tennis Pro, who go to Japan when American gigs aren’t panning out. The film is improvised comedy with the real band members Phil Peterson (bass/vocals), David Drury (guitar/vocals) and Sean Lowry (drums). I met Tennis Pro and director John Jeffcoat the day after their SXSW premiere and concert party, where we were interrupted by new fans who had also discovered Tennis Pro the night before.
CraveOnline: How long has Tennis Pro been a band before they were movie stars?
David Drury: 11 years.
Were you actually big in Japan?
Phil Peterson: Well, that’s what the movie is about. The movie is about our desire to go to Japan to make it big.
Sean Lowry: We sort of hope it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That’s called The Secret. This movie is your vision board.
Phil Peterson: It’s kind of The Secret. Also the definition of “big in Japan” changed with us throughout the process of making this movie, and also for the viewer of the movie as well.
John Jeffcoat: What does it mean to be big? What is success? I think the success they initially went to Japan for was maybe somewhat different than the success they found, but it was the question of what is success and how do you quantify it?
Were the Japanese characters in the film actors you found over there?
John Jeffcoat: There are no actors in the movie. They’re all bands. They’re musicians.
So the woman who won’t leave your apartment?
Phil Peterson: She’s a model.
John Jeffcoat: She was a model that we found so she wasn’t in a band and I guess the two women at the soap bar were not in a band. They were actually the biggest marquee names we have in the film, in the adult film industry.
Japanese adult film industry?
John Jeffcoat: Japanese adult film industry. We didn’t know that until we were into the shooting.
Sean Lowry: That’s the model where you start out in the adult film industry and then you transfer into legitimate acting.
David Drury: We’re their doorway to legitimate success.
This is their Girlfriend Experience.
[All laugh.]
Phil Peterson: Right.
Tennis Pro isn’t comedy music like Tenacious D or something. Were you intent on performing your legitimate music or was there any talk of maybe doing funny songs for the movie?
John Jeffcoat: I’ll say coming onto the project, one thing that was exciting for me was that the band had four albums deep of material. Two big questions for me taking on the project was can I get along with the guys? Are the guys easy to get along with? Is it going to be okay traveling? And then do I like the music. So when I got the albums and then scrolled through all the stuff, I found that it was a lot of great stuff that I could compile to make a really compelling set list. We started with that and then from our trips, the guys started writing songs for the movie. There was never any intention to make it like a Flight of the Conchords kind of thing.
Phil Peterson: Or Spinal Tap.
John Jeffcoat: It’s party music. It’s not jokey music but it’s the kind of music you want to put on at your party and enjoy. So I feel like the movie had to reflect Tennis Pro’s music.
Where can we find your albums?
Phil Peterson: iTunes is good. CDBaby is a really good spot to find us.
Sean Lowry: We’re everywhere. Spotify, Rhapsody.
Phil Peterson: Pretty widespread digital distribution.
Have you been making a full time living as a band for all 11 years?
Phil Peterson: No.
David Drury: Wouldn’t that have been nice? No. I think that’s part of what the movie is. We’re not pulling our weight. It’s not cutting it so we’re trying to get out of town and find an audience that will work for us.
Sean Lowry: It’s getting squeezed out by our obligations at home.
Are the significant others in the film your actual significant others?
Phil Peterson: Yes.
John Jeffcoat: Sean’s girlfriend in the movie is actually his wife. The idea is I wanted to have the married guy, the guy with the domineering girlfriend and then the single guy. David’s not single. He does have a wife back at home.
John played the agent in the film. Have you ever had agents ask you to make compromises to sign you in real life?
David Drury: No, because we’ve done everything ourselves. We’ve self-managed, self-recorded, self-promoted.
Sean Lowry: That concept is based on Phil was in another band.
Phil Peterson: It was even worse than in the movie.
John Jeffcoat: He’s happy because the band didn’t make it.
Phil Peterson: I want them to see it and know that it’s them. I was in this group that was kind of a supergroup that this label had put together. I was doing arranging and producing and I was in the band. There was this one show that we played that this A&R guy from a major label was there and he was all messed up, drugged out, super, super drunk. You could smell him a mile away. He hung out with the lead singer after our show and just trash talked me the whole time, which is fine, whatever. He can have his opinion but what was offensive to me is that my bandmate actually took this guy’s advice.
John Jeffcoat: You didn’t do what Sean did. It went the other direction.
Phil Peterson: I quit actually.
David Drury: What was the term they used?
Phil Peterson: They were like, “Dude, you’ve got to get rid of the gay clown.” I don’t really care about that part of it. Being called names is fine, but the fact that this guy who was the lead singer of the band was actually considering, “Well, maybe I should.”
Sean Lowry: That guy burned a lot of bridges.
Phil Peterson: Yeah, he did. He’s nowhere.
Sean Lowry: He had a real band for a while and he ended up kicking out his real drummer and getting a studio drummer. You lose that cohesiveness.
Phil Peterson: And loyalty. After a while people are just like, “Oh, it’s a revolving door band.”
You called it a supergroup so were the other artists more established?
Phil Peterson: No, but I’m a professional cellist so I do music full time for a living, and I’m pretty well connected. It doesn’t really translate to hooking up Tennis Pro. I play on major records all the time. That’s my day job, but that doesn’t really mean that those people are looking for a band like Tennis Pro.
What were the other day jobs you worked?
Sean Lowry: I’m a hair stylist.
David Drury: I’m a professional card counter, or at least I was when we were filming the movie. I had been part of a documentary about the team that I was on.
Were you part of the team that 21 was based on?
David Drury: No, that was the MIT team. I was a team that was based on that model and we were called The Church Team because we all knew each other through church.
Phil Peterson: Holy Rollers is his movie.
What are your musical inspirations for the sound of Tennis Pro?
Phil Peterson: I want to make people dance. I want to make people have fun. I think that so much of today’s, what you might call in quotes “rock music” has gotten so serious. These people are trying to make this really important art, which has its place but I think that the bases are more than covered in that arena. I feel like there’s still a huge need for fun, happy music that cheers people up and makes them want to dance, makes cute girls want to do irresponsible things, makes people get less inhibited.
What annoys me about modern music is I like melody and harmony. Music has sort of become all rhythm and monotone. Even singers who have great voices like Beyonce sing songs where they’re not singing.
Phil Peterson: Yeah, it’s not real writing.
David Drury: Everybody wants to write important music and I think a lot of what we like to do is be tongue in cheek and laugh a little bit at ourselves and play an untrustworthy narrator in our song lyrics, have a fun time, play with melody and harmony.
Phil Peterson: Melody and harmony take time to craft. It’s easy to push play on a drum machine and crank something out that’s rhythm. Rhythm is very important as well but it’s a balance. It’s a trifecta really. You have to have good melodies, good lyrics and good rhythm.
Not to say that people who lay down beats aren’t creative because they are. Rappers are talented. I just don’t want that to be the only music there is, where even singers are basically becoming rappers.
Phil Peterson: Right, that’s a good observation.
Normally, when famous singers try to do movies, they take a lot of criticism. Are you worried that Tennis Pro will get harassed like Madonna was?
Phil Peterson: No, any love is good love at this point. Even bad press is good press.
John Jeffcoat: You’re also coming in from an unknown band. I think if they were Coldplay and all of a sudden Coldplay is going to act in a movie, you can pretty much bet that it’s going to bomb. When you’re coming from an unknown entity, you’re essentially creating it all. It’s all fresh and new so there’s no baggage that you’re carrying. It’s a great opportunity to relaunch the band.
Phil Peterson: There was actually a lady at our screening yesterday that I talked to as I was coming out. She said, “I watched the entire movie and loved it and my husband and I didn’t realize that you were actually a band until you got up on stage and explained that.” They thought it was actors playing the role of a band. She said her husband was like, “Man, they’re playing this material really well for actors.”
Would you be interested in doing a movie with dialogue you had to memorize and rehearse?
Sean Lowry: I would.
Phil Peterson: I would now.
John Jeffcoat: That’s what they were doing towards the end. We did several acting workshops. I think they did really well once we started doing that.
Sean Lowry: I did a lot of play acting in high school. I’ve killed a lot of brain cells since then but I was Ebenezer Scrooge in the Dickens version of A Christmas Carol.
David Drury: I played a robot in a church play. I played Judas Iscariot in a church play. I was part of an improv group at some point. It was good for learning to get creative in front of an audience and let yourself be vulnerable on stage and things like that.
Sean Lowry: I’m a hair stylist so I act like I care everyday.
Phil Peterson: And also, being on stage, I’ve done a lot of stage performing. That’s very similar to acting. Playing live for people.
John Jeffcoat: My feeling about working with the band and working with non actors is a lot of movies I like, like the Nick Roeg movies and things with David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Art Garfunkel, who all have that charisma of a musician. When you see it on stage, they may not be the perfect actor but they bring that clout to the screen because they’re a performer. That’s why I wasn’t too worried about working with a band who was performing on stage, and they could bring that character, that personality from stage.
Are the costumes in the movie your real Tennis Pro wardrobe?
Sean Lowry: I would say that they’re a form of… The tennis whites aside, how we dress throughout the movie is in some fashion how we dress in general. The tennis whites, we did wear those in the early stages.
Phil Peterson: As a gimmick.
Sean Lowry: As time went on, I realized that we were becoming a novelty band. So we stopped doing it at a certain point.
David Drury: The clothes that we wear in Tokyo on the lost luggage line, those outfits we worked with somebody to create an outfit that worked in a three piece, that looked good on screen all together.
Phil Peterson: A lot of it was our own stuff.
David Drury: It was our own stuff, our own input. All the other costumes were a lot of our own work.
Has Tennis Pro ever played SXSW Music?
Phil Peterson: No.
John Jeffcoat: First time for all those things.
Phil Peterson: But we played three sets last night under a SXSW banner because it was a SXSW tent, but it wasn’t an official thing.
John, was your first movie, Outsourced, improv also?
John Jeffcoat: No, that was scripted to a tee. I wrote it with George Wing who wrote 50 First Dates. It was a really solid, really tight script. We had a 30 day shooting schedule. We shot 35mm film, a crew of 100 people in India. So it was a big production. One of my frustrations shooting it was I wanted to go on some of the real locations, but we had such a big crew, these big cameras, we’d attract so many people, we had to build entire streets on sets to do stuff. I thought, next time I want to be able to go on the street. I want to go to these locations and make it authentic. That was one of the exciting things about Big in Japan. Literally, when we didn’t know where to shoot a scene, we’re like, “Let’s just take it to the street.” The streets in Tokyo were so colorful and so well lit.
Phil Peterson: And also with your 5D, people just thought you were a tourist taking photos. They didn’t realize that this was a frickin’ movie being shot.
John Jeffcoat: My crew, Ryan [McMackin] and I, were literally rigging cameras with suction cups in elevators without getting permission from the hotel because we didn’t really care. The elevator doors would open, there’s Ryan and I suction cupping a camera on top. It was really fun. We did that kind of stuff all the time in Big in Japan.
What was the “Outsourced” sitcom supposed to be in the beginning?
John Jeffcoat: For me, we had so little time to explore the call center culture of the people worked there. That was a bit of a draining process. It was actually that process that was just ongoing and dealing with all the network execs that took me away from actual production. After that, I needed to do something fun. I wanted to do a fun, rock n’ roll movie comedy. I wanted to get a camera and make it small. Working on the television thing, I was really only in the beginning part of it and then it was its own thing.
When the show came on and got so much criticism, did you have an “I told you so” moment?
John Jeffcoat: It was such a long process, it was a double edged sword because it was very lucrative. Once it came out, I was done with that process and I moved to South Africa with my family. I needed to take a break. It prevented me from doing another movie and also it took a long time for Outsourced. Now, so many people have seen Outsourced with Netflix, at the time it was taking a long time for people to see it.
The TV show, the thing is it was doing pretty well. Even with all the criticism, the viewership was really good. It was strong and it was getting better. The problem was the executives at NBC kept getting shuffled. Then it was put in a later time slot. Finally a new executive came on and decided to green light three more shows which lasted three episodes. We went a whole season.
I really wanted to be a little more culturally accurate, a little more gentle I guess than it became. I was just kind of shocked the way they went really broad, really risque. It wasn’t my vision although it was a great cast. Ken Kwapis who directed the pilot was fantastic. Parvesh [Cheena], who played Gupta, he’s funny. He’s a sweet guy and I just thought he was really funny. There were some really nice moments, but the other thing is I really did not want to rehash the movie. As much as I tried to avoid that, the episodes they wanted to do all ended up being, “Here’s this scene from the movie, here’s this scene from the movie” but redone in a bigger way. So that was frustrating.
What are your favorite movies about musicians or bands?
David Drury: Spinal Tap is one of my favorites.
John Jeffcoat: I think The Commitments is one of my favorites for sure. On the quirky spectrum, Leningrad Cowboys Go America was a fun one that I always liked.
Sean Lowry: I love That Thing You Do. That’s one of my favorites and I feel this twinge of pain, like Anvil, like that’s my future.
John Jeffcoat: Anvil was a really great film but I did not want to go out and buy their album afterwards. I’m hoping people who watch this want to go buy the album.
Sean Lowry: I think that’s what I liked about our movie though too. I think we all want people to like our music, but I think that even if you’re a metal head, you can relate to the story. You can relate to that moment in your life where you’re like, “I gotta get a job. This isn’t working.”
John Jeffcoat: There’s a musician here named Ian Moore and even Dave Matthews who saw the movie, the musicians’ reactions to watching the movie definitely are another level. It’s a visceral reaction almost. I think anyone who’s been on tour in a band, they connect in a much bigger way than I would have anticipated.
Phil Peterson: To many aspects of it.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
