It’s almost surreal to interview Jay Chandrasekhar, director and co-writer of Super Troopers 2 in his titular super trooper garb – it's not unlike speaking to a Marvel personality while they’re still in their impressive super suits. But Chandrasekhar is shockingly relaxed despite having switched between on-screen gag machine and commanding director all day on set. He's hard at work crafting a sequel that's been nearly two decades in the making, the follow-up to the scruffy stoner flick that captured the Generation Y zeitgeist at seemingly the perfect cultural moment.
Finally, after a decade of formulating and a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign, Chandrasekhar and the rest of Broken Lizard are finally making Super Troopers 2 a reality. During of his scant minutes of downtime, Collider had a chance to sit down with the writer/director to get the download on the long-awaited sequel. During our chat, Chandrasekhar revealed what it was like getting back in the Super Troopers driver’s seat, how he approached the film differently from the film he made two decades prior, how he dealt with the pressure of living up to the expectations, and the future he envisions for his team of uniformed weirdos.
Check out the full interview below. Super Troopers 2 is now in theaters.
How’s it going? I know we’re shooting a bit of a bawdy scene tonight.
JAYCHANDRASEKHAR: It is a bawdy scene. I mean, yeah it is. I mean, there’s a plot point to it. You know, the Canadians are just a little more open-minded than we are.
Has this been like riding a bike?
CHANDRASEKHAR: It is like riding a bike a little bit. Because, usually on a film the first three or four days, you try things out to try to figure out what you’re going to do. By the third day, you figure it out, and then you’re like, “Damn, I wish I could go back and reshoot those things.” We don’t have that. We just do it. And over the years, we have put these uniforms on a fair bit at events. We’ve worn the uniforms here and there, at parties and whatever. So we’re kind of used to them. But it’s nice, because the audience already knows us as this.
What’s been the biggest challenge, approaching this sequel so many years later?
CHANDRASEKHAR: The big deal of this movie is that you don’t know, we’re making what I think is a really great movie. We’ve written thirty-seven drafts, we’ve hired top-flight guys like Rob Lowe, Hayes MacArthur, Will Sasso, and they’re all delivering big-time. So many fans of this movie have an emotional connection the film because they saw it with their friends, a lot of them saw it high, a lot of them saw it multiple times. A lot of them have little jokes that are related to the film because they saw it so much. A lot of them feel like we’re sort of like their friend group and they have their own dynamics that are similar, there are all of these things that are why, for whatever reason, that movie took off. The question is whether they’ll accept the new one. I don’t know. It may be like seeing your high school girlfriend ten years later. Maybe you’re like, “Oh I don’t feel the same.” That’s the danger. Regardless, I told everybody I wouldn’t make the movie unless we were all the same weight we were when we made the first one. So we’re going to do everything we can to ease the audience’s concern. Oh, do they look too old? I mean, we’re older. But hopefully they’ll just settle in.
How did you approach this in comparison to the way you approached the first one? Did you try to emulate that same magic?
CHANDRASEKHAR: We only ever write jokes that amuse us. And it’s not – I don’t want to say this the wrong way, but we don’t make movies in anticipation like, “Oh boy, they’ll love this.” We literally go out at night and drink and smoke and have fun, and create little small jokes and then we find places to put them in the movie because what’s funny to us. We met each other at age eighteen when we were like heavy, heavy drinkers and smokers. That comedy that comes out of the late night is sort of what this group really started as. We were all sort of like heavy into the late night and we put the jokes into the movies and we put the jokes into the stage show and so you kind of just have to – we’re doing that again. It’s not that all these jokes were written late at night, I don’t mean that. We’re making a movie that we think is funny period. And if the audience likes it, well that’s good news. That’s how we’re approaching it.
How many callbacks are you consciously threading into this one, Easter eggs for fans and things like that?
CHANDRASEKHAR: There are a couple of things that, where they were, we were able to seamlessly integrate them we did. There’s no doubt that people that have seen the movie, they’ll go, “Ah, I know about that.” And if you haven’t seen the movie, you won’t know what that joke is but it’ll hopefully still be worth watching for a few seconds. [Laughs]
Would you say this is a bigger, better sequel?
CHANDRASEKHAR: We’re not trying to go bigger, but when I made that first movie, I didn’t really know how to make movies. I just had a hunch and the hunch in that case, happened to be right. Since then, I’ve made I think five or six more movies, and I’ve directed about 105, 110 episodes of television. And so I understand filmmaking on an entirely different level. So in terms of making it bigger, it’s just bigger. Because in television you go big, and in movies you do go big. So when we’re doing gags or crashes or stunts, there’s a place to put the camera and if you put it there, it’s going to look perfect. And if you hire this guy to do stunts, it’s going to look like a real movie and it’s going to look like a big movie. And it’s not that we’re spending a ton of money, we’re not. We just know how to do it now. And that doesn’t necessarily translate to people loving the movie. They’re going to go, “Well, this is a more professionally made movie.” That is obvious, when you watch it. The costumes are better. The sets are like, twenty times better. The stunts are going to be twenty times better. None of that ultimately matters. What matters is, is it funny, and do they accept us now? Or are they so whetted to that first movie that they can’t just get into it.
I was going to ask about the pressure, but it seems like you’re dealing with it incredibly well.
CHANDRASEKHAR: What is the purpose of pressure? Like there’s pressure, okay, yeah. And at the end of the day, the Internet is both incredibly nice and incredibly mean. And there will be horrifyingly mean things said about the movie and us and amazing things said about us and that’s the way it is. It doesn’t change anything. All I can do is keep my nose down and shoot the scene, shoot the scene, make it funny, make it funny, make it funny. And then that’s it, what are you going to do? Yes, pressure. Immense pressure. And you know, people really want it to be good.
Absolutely. There’s no ill will, only anticipation.
CHANDRASEKHAR: There’s no one who’s like, “Aw, fuck these guys.” But who knows? We’ll see. So far, my gut feeling is that it’s – I almost think if we just make a good film, people can relax and go, “Okay, it’s not the first one, but it’s good. We’re happy to have those people again.” That’s a win for me.
Obviously now you’re so experienced with television, could you ever see Super Troopers the Series becoming a reality?
CHANDRASEKHAR: The thing about our movies is, we write thirty drafts. That’s a very detailed script. Which means that if you try to crank it out week to week in television, it’s impossible. Maybe it’s hard to really focus and make it as great as it needs to be. I don’t know that we’d ever do this as a television show. I think we’d do something else as a television show, maybe. But I think we’re already starting to discuss the idea of making Super Troopers 3: Winter Soldiers and put it in the dead of winter, with snow. Up here, there’s heavy, heavy snow up here.
So the juices are flowing!
CHANDRASEKHAR: I sent an email about 3am last night about how an opening scene could look like and I sent it to everybody. We have some ideas. But again, though if this movie doesn’t perform, that’s irrelevant. [Laughs]
