The script ended up benefiting from that because we kept working on it over the course of that time.īTL: I always forget that you didn’t write Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but you did continue to collaborate with Jason Segel as a writer on a few other movies. And then we delayed production when the pandemic happened. This would have been the same except I had to call the studio up and be like, ‘I think we have to delay this production,’ which goes against every instinct that a director has. Most of my movies have, like, a two-year development process, maybe a year-and-a-half. But we originally were going to shoot in Buffalo, and I was scouting, and we pulled up to a hospital - there was a scene in a hospital at the time - and I was like, ‘I don’t think we should go in there.’ And then I was like, ‘I don’t think we should make this movie,’ which is one of the craziest phone calls as a director because you fight forever to get, and I’ve been pretty lucky. We originally were going to shoot in Buffalo we ended up shooting it in New Jersey and New York City. We were about to shoot, and then the pandemic happened, and then, five years later, the movie exists.īTL: Movies like this can be in development for a long time, and then you’re ready to start filming in March or April of 2020 and a pandemic happens, so how do you shift? Did you already have locations? We approached together, and he was really into it, and then we worked on it. Obviously, Judd is really helpful creatively, but also, it would be very easy for everyone to understand what it is. I mean, I collaborate with Judd a lot, and I knew that with Judd, the studio would totally understand what it was. Stoller: Billy and I figured out a story over the course of about a year, maybe, and I approached Judd maybe six months to a year. I’m straight - that wasn’t my story to tell - but when I saw that he was like a proper movie star, I was like, ‘Oh, this is the right guy.’ I emailed him, and it was like, ‘Hey, would you ever want to tell this kind of story?’ He was intrigued, and so we started talking about it.īTL: How soon after that did Judd Apatow get involved as a producer? I’d been intrigued by the idea of doing a rom-com about two gay men falling in love. We cast him in that, and he turned out to be an incredible actor, which I did not know, and then we screened the first episode, the pilot, in a movie theater, and he destroyed every time he was onscreen. I knew him from Billy on the Street, and then we cast him in Friends from College, which is a show my wife and I created. What happened was I cast him in Neighbors 2. Stoller directed from a script he co-wrote with Eichner, who plays podcaster and LGBTQ+ activist Bobby Leiber, who has been (mostly) content being single… until he meets Luke Macfarlane ’s Aaron, a rugged and good-looking jock-type who seems even less commitment-prone than Bobby.Įichner and Stoller managed to put together a pretty incredible cast for Bros, including a number of hilarious cameos and guest appearances, and it’s very likely to be the highest-grossing movie starring an LGBTQ+ cast in its very first weekend in theaters.īelow the Line recently spoke to Stoller in person at the film’s NYC junket, and he had plenty to say about the film, how different Eichner is from his character, casting Macfarlane, and the body part they wound up cutting from the film.īelow the Line: I know Billy appeared on your show Friends from College, but at what point did he come to you with this project? Did he have some kind of script already written? The show often had him yelling at unassuming passersby, offering a dollar for them to answer his questions, and he would even get celebrities involved.įor Bros, Eichner teamed with filmmaker Nicholas Stoller, no stranger to romantic comedies between Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five-Year Engagement, both of them starring Jason Segel. That man is Billy Eichner, who roughly 11 years ago was running around the streets of New York City putting a new spin on the classic man-on-the-street interview format with Billy on the Street. Universal Studios’ new comedy Bros is going to be an interesting movie to follow as it’s released in theaters this Friday, being that it’s the first major studio rom-com written by and starring an openly gay leading man. Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane in Bros/Universal Pictures
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