Remember in Jackass Number Two when Johnny Knoxville wore old age makeup and gave his “grandson” alcohol and cigarettes in front of aghast onlookers? That character, Irving Zisman, has his own movie now. Bad Grandpa is a feature film comprised of Irving Zisman pranks and stunts starring Johnny Knoxville, but it also forms a coherent story about Zisman bonding with his grandson Billy (Jackson Nicoll) on a road trip. We got to to interview director Jeff Tremaine by phone, and he opened things up in a lively fashion.
This interview discusses many of the specific stunts in Bad Grandpa, so we should issue a spoiler warning in case you really want to know nothing about the pranks they pulled in Bad Grandpa. There’s still no substitute for seeing Knoxville in Zisman makeup provoking people. We’ve been as vague as possible about the mechanics of each stunt, in order to still discuss the achievements Tremaine and his crew pulled off. I even learned something. I thought Spike Jonze played Zisman’s dead wife, for whom they have a funeral early in the movie and continue to play tricks with the body. Jonze in fact played an entirely different character.
Jeff Tremaine: Fred, what the fuck, man?
Crave Online: That is the best intro I’ve ever had to an interview.
I’m sorry, I’m a little hungover.
It’s great, I love it. So did you talk a lot about whether to do another Jackass movie or try something a little different?
This was never done as a substitution. This was an idea we had started talking about in 2006 after the second Jackass movie which actually has a bit called “Bad Grandpa” in it. We were loosely discussing the idea of breaking Irving out into his own movie and then Paramount asked us about two years ago if we were still considering that. We thought it just seemed a little impossible but we started writing the ideas and writing funny scenarios and then it kind of took a life of its own. We actually started committing to it about two years ago. It really took off once we started coming up with funny ideas for Irving.
Were there ever any other characters or skits you thought about turning into a whole movie?
Irving was the only one that I can think of. We didn’t really come up with that many original characters that had a backstory. Most of the time it’s just the guys playing themselves. So no, Irving was the only one that we thought of for this idea but who knows?
How much does it change the construction of a stunt, or the editing of it, when you can’t show people’s reactions in the aftermath because the story is still going on?
The Jackass model is us just flipping the cameras on everyone around watching what’s happening and laughing. This is playing it through and hoping that we’re getting the reactions we need. It’s also always a game of pushing everything as far as we can push it with people. Really we kind of go until we get busted. That’s kind of the theme, just to push it as ridiculous as it can go. It’s just a different movie. We film until we get the right reactions, and then we have to go in and make it nice with people.
The department store stunt looked pretty elaborate, where he goes through the window. Did you have a chance to test that before doing it?
We tested the rocket, not through the window. We tested the little toy rocket in a warehouse and we made Knoxville ride it. He didn’t want to do it at all, but we made him because he had to know how to stay low. We wanted the rocket to be as explosive as it possibly could. We wanted it to go as high as it could, but for it to go as high as it could, he had very little headroom. We tested it. It was about six inches of headroom. If he pops up at all, he takes his head off, so we made him test it.
He tried it once and that was good enough for him. We were able to test it, not through the glass, but in a warehouse. That stunt was very complicated because doing a dangerous stunt in front of real people is complicated, especially when it’s a two-sided stunt. It started on the sidewalk but it ends inside the store. We were shooting it on both ends. We had to just make sure people were close enough to see it but not close enough to get hurt by it. It was tricky.
Did you pay for all of the groceries after the grocery store bit?
[Laughs] We probably paid for those and a bit more. We made nice everywhere we went the best we could. There is a person at the end of everything going through and running quite a bit of damage control.
Whose job is that?
The whole team. It depends which aspect. We have a team of releasers that go in and talk to the people. Just based on who it is, we send the right kind of person to go deal with it. Like if it’s an angry man, a lot of times we soften him with a young lady to go up to him. It’s sort of a strategic thing but ultimately I guess Derek Freda our producer, he has to do a lot of the damage control.
Did you just find an unsuspecting wedding to set up?
No, that fell into our lap. The wedding was actually one of our field producer’s wedding. Early in the movie, he was like, “Hey, if you need a wedding, you can shoot my wedding.” We kind of blew it off, we didn’t have any idea for it, but that was in September. He got married in, I want to say, April. Then around March we started thinking, “Wait, when are we going to get an opportunity to have a wedding and fuck with a wedding?”
So basically we knew that a lot of his friends knew what he was up to, but there was an older side of the family so we kind of cordoned off a back room and made it this photo room. So they’re setting up a photo in there and that’s where we have a cake. We kind of filtered the right group of people that wouldn’t recognize Knoxville from the wedding into that room.
Did his wife sign off on that too?
She did, but they got a little nervous the night before so it got a little hairy.
Did they have two wedding cakes then?
Yeah, that was not their wedding cake. That was a fake wedding cake, but all the guests thought that was the real wedding cake.
