Directed by seasoned comedian, producer, and writer Dax Shepard, the adaptation of beloved TV comedy CHIPS is now in theaters. Before the film opened widely, I sat down with Shepard for a wide-ranging interview about how he came to the project, his career thus far, and what he has coming up. He talked about what hooked him on the project, how he got Michael Pena to be in the film, what filming in California brought to the production, what he learned in test screenings, how hard was it to keep a straight face while filming some of the underwear scenes, future projects like Scooby-Doo, and how often people want to talk to him about Mike Judge’s comedy classic Idiocracy.

If you’re not familiar with the source material for CHIPS, it was a television comedy that ran for six seasons between 1977 and 1983 about a pair of California Highway Patrol officers. Shepard wrote, directed, and stars in the action comedy as Jon Baker, who was played by Larry Wilcox in the TV series. He’s joined onscreen by Michael Peña as Frank Llewelyn “Ponch” Poncherello, played by Erik Estrada in the TV show, and the story finds the pair patrolling their West Coast city for any and all criminal behavior. Baker is a beaten-up professional motorbiker who’s looking to put his life back together, while Ponch is an undercover Federal agent investigating a heist that may or may not be an inside job. The film also stars Adam BrodyJessica McNameeRyan Hansen, and Vincent D’Onofrio.

COLLIDER: Jumping backwards, did you grow up with CHiPs?

chips-movie-image-dax-shepard
Image via Warner Bros.

DAX SHEPARD: I did. I was 2 years old when it debuted, and then I was 8 when it went off the air. I’m from Detroit where it’s gray and cold 8 months of the year and you turn o this show for like an hour and it was California, beaches, bikinis, motorcycles, and then this weird, odd couple of this lanky white dude and a latino, and I dug it. I didn’t follow any of the storylines, I just liked the motorcycles and the California.

I remember watching CHiPs in reruns where I grew up.

SHEPARD: How old are you?

Old enough [Laughs]. I remember watching it on channel 25 or something.

SHEPARD: What city?

In the suburbs of Boston.

SHEPARD: Oh, so yeah, weather sucked there too.

It was horrible. Maybe CHiPs is the reason I wanted to move to L.A.

SHEPARD: Oh, 100%.

Because every episode is just bright and sunny with huge pollution. It was great.

SHEPARD: No clouds in the sky.

But a lot of pollution.

SHEPARD: Yeah. Back then it was much dirtier.

It was crazy. How did this project land on your lap? Was this something that you’d been like thinking about?

chips-movie-image-dax-shepard
Image via Warner Bros.

SHEPARD: It didn’t land on my lap, I went and begged them to let me do it. They had developed different versions of this movie in the past, Warner Brothers. I think all the previous attempts went in a parody direction, like Starsky & Hutch kind of. I was writing another script and I made a Poncherello joke in that script, but I didn’t know how to spell Poncherello so I googled Poncherello, and then this image popped up of Jon and Ponch but they looked really tough, it wasn’t the traditional image of the like family friendly TV, they looked kind of like they were in Lethal Weapon or Bad Boys. And I was like, “Hold on a second. That show could handle that treatment. It’s guys on motorcycles at the end of the day, so it could hold that kind of Bad Boys tone” and that’s really all I pitched them. With Michael Peña as Ponch.

So you had Michael prior to the pitch.

SHEPARD: No, I sold it with him starring but I never met him or talked to him about it.

[Laughs] That’s great. And you got him!

SHEPARD: And I got him, by hook and crook. My TV sister Erika Christensen is really good friends with him and I knew that so I was like, “You gotta…” she looked at me and I was like, “I just sold a fucking movie with Peña starring in it. You gotta text him and tell him I’m a good dude.” And then we went ad had like a blind date breakfast and it went well and then he was on board.

So obviously you shoot in California and you get the California tax credit, but more than that it opens the door to getting people who live in L.A. to be the side supporting characters.

chips-movie-image-dax-shepard
Image via Warner Bros.

SHEPARD: Absolutely. Yeah, you’re not gonna get Maya Rudolph to fly to Louisiana for one scene in CHIPS. Never gonna happen. Or even Ed Begley’s not gonna do it, Josh Duhamel is not gonna do it, Mae Whitman’s not gonna do it. There’s so many advantages to shooting here in L.A. because, as you say, everyone lives here. And then just for my own mental health, we were shooting n the winter in L.A. which means there was only 10 hours of daylight to shoot, and the whole movie is exterior, so I was home every day at 5 o’ clock to eat dinner with my kids and put them to bed, and just being able to have that be part of my day really helps keep me happy and healthy and working at my best.

So you finish the movie, you then start to do friends and family screenings/test screenings. What do you learn from those screenings that maybe impacts the finished film?

SHEPARD: You learn everything in the tests. The tests are the most important part of the process, and not even necessarily reading those cards afterwards, because when it gets to that part of the testing process where you’re asking people to articulate their opinion, it can kind of break down a little bit. But just sitting in a theater with strangers who have no expectations of the movie, there’s such a visceral, palpable flow to the movie and you immediately know which scenes are long, which ones are slow, which ones are working, and which ones need help. For me, if you’re a comedian and you write a screenplay, you’re writing down everything you think is funny, right? And you film everything you think is funny, and then you find out in the testing process what percentage of your sense of humor is broadly appealing. And it became very apparent that 20% of my sense of humor was way too perverted, so the scenes you’ll see as deleted scenes in the DVD are mostly sexual in nature.

So when you start cutting based on the test screenings and friends and family, is it pretty much sex jokes?

chips-movie-image-kristen-bell
Image via Warner Bros.

SHEPARD: Well, that’s the easiest thing to point out, the more nuanced thing that really most of the screenings kept chiseling away at was the balance. Because it’s an action comedy, it was easy for there to be too much action, not enough comedy, or vice versa, too much comedy, not enough action. You want those two elements to be as equal as possible so that you never go a stretch where there’s 12 minutes of hardcore action and then someone tells a joke and you’re like, “Wait, what movie is this?” You don’t wanna have that feeling of, “what movie is this?” And so that was really where the artistry came in and that’s where Dan Lebental, the editor who also did all of [Jon] Favreau’s movies and did Ant-Man, that’s his particular genius, helping balance that. He and I are partners, we go to these test screenings and we’re like, “It tipped a little bit to…” It’s funny, when you’re editing, you’re never really editing the area that you think is a problem, you’re really always editing four scenes before that. It’s always a set up issue usually, it’s never really the scene, it’s always really the set up.

How long was your first cut versus the finished film?

SHEPARD: I think the current movie I wanna say is like 100-101 minutes, and I think the worst I ever had was like 110. I’m pretty ruthless out of the gates, I’m not precious at all about things I’ve shot, so I think the worst ever was just under 2 hours and then we ended up at an hour and 41 or something. There was no Michael Mann 3-hour cut.

Are you a fan of doing an extended cut for the Blu-ray, or are you one of these people that you feel like the deleted scenes, the deleted section, and here’s my movie?

chips-movie-image-3
Image via Warner Bros.

SHEPARD: I did do a director’s cut. Not because I think it’s better, I don’t think it’s better, I think I put out the best version of the movie. But what I do think is some of these scenes that I liked that were polarizing were polarizing because they came early in the movie before you fell in love with these two guys. So I think if you see the movie and you fall in love with them, then you’ll watch the director’s cut version and you’ll be a lot more tolerant of those scenes that were normally maybe polarizing or off-putting.

So you’re saying that the 20% of stuff that you cut out is now back in the movie.

SHEPARD: Probably 15% of that 20% is back in. Some scenes. I have this awesome scene –it might even be my favorite scene we shot and edited– which is [Vincent] D'Onofrio pulling over this guy at the side of the road in L.A. and he’s just a bad motherfucker, he’s like in Bad Lieutenant mode, and it’s funny and tough and awesome, but it’s dark. That was supposed to be the first scene you saw in the movie, and it was just we couldn’t match that tone, it was just confusing and it just had to go. But it’s like my favorite scene, so it’ll be there on its own but it’s not in the assembly, the director’s cut assembly.

You have some very funny scenes in the movie involving underwear and sex talk...stuff that really made me laugh out loud. Were you able to keep a straight face while filming?

chips-movie-image
Image via Warner Bros.

SHEPARD: The scenes that were hard to keep a straight face on were more like when I was off camera, me and Ryan Hansen, who’s one of my best friends, we just repeatedly hit our dicks together because we were shooting Peña through that. It’s more technical than you think because on the part he’s got to be almost right down the barrel, then he’s got to look to his left. You think it’s just this dumb thing, and it is a dumb thing, but it was so technical that it forced Ryan and I to be doing this for so long that we just could not stop laughing because it’s so fucking goofy-feeling. So there were times like that, but for the most part if I was in a scene, the more sincere we were, the funnier it got. It wasn’t like an [Judd] Apatow movie where you’re just throwing out kind of funny lines and the lines are funny on their own and maybe anyone can say the line and it would still be funny.

All the jokes are coming from the fact that I’m this type of character and Peña is this type of character and now let’s see what their worst fears come true would be. That’s where the comedy’s coming from, just knowing the type of people they are and putting them in situations that they would hate to be in. So when we were like even talking about eating ass it was really important to me that I’m sincerely defending that girl and it’s really important to me that he’s sincerely defending that girl. That’s how you get away with talking about eating ass, it’s like their hearts are both in the right place. And so you’re really thinking about it being funny until after you’re done with it and you watch it and then you can let the absurdity of it hit you.

I know you’re working on the animated Scooby-Doo.

SHEPARD: Yes.

What can you tease people about it?

SHEPARD: Absolutely nothing. Whit Warner Bros., when you’re playing with the crown jewels which that happens to be one of them, it’s a very tight-lipped deal. Their Scooby-Doo IP is as worldwide known as their DC brand.

So when you’re working on the movie do they literally pull you aside and say, “Yeah, no…”

SHEPARD: Well, when people come into our office they have to sign and NDA right when they walk in.

So I guess you can say you’re working on it.

chips-movie-image-michael-pena
Image via Warner Bros.

SHEPARD: Yeah, Yeah. Exactly [Laughs].

My last thing, I love Idiocracy –You’ve been involved in a lot of different things in your career, TV, films, whatever, how often do people come up to you and say they just want to talk about Idiocracy?

SHEPARD: Well it certainly spiked during the election, and [Mike] Judge and I did some screenings around town, but yeah, it seems to be crescendoing this year. I mean, it’s had this kind of slow build, it’s unlike any other experience I’ve had in a movie where it came out and made four dollars and I was like, “Oh that’s a bummer no one’s ever gonna see that because it’s really funny” and then it just built and built and built over the years and it’s really a cool experience and I wouldn’t have thought ten years ago that would be one of the movies I was most proud to be in, but now I am.

chips-movie-poster