In hindsight, it seems crazy it took this long to get a Lonely Island movie, but Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping was well worth the wait. After making their mark on SNL, helping to usher the show into the digital age, Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer entered the feature film world in various combinations with movies like Hot Rod, MacGruber, and The Watch. But it wasn’t until Popstar that the three were granted the opportunity to create a feature film from the ground up, together, and make it whatever they wanted. Producer Judd Apatow helped shepherd the film through production, but Popstar is 100% The Lonely Island through and through.

The mockumentary story of a successful solo artist (Samberg) whose sophomore album bombs spectacularly, right at the beginning of a new tour, is chock-full of the trademark ridiculousness and absurdity that makes The Lonely Island’s stuff so much fun, but the film also has a surprisingly effective emotional center—three childhood friends who were changed and broken up by the quest for fame and notoriety. And of course the soundtrack is phenomenal, with Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone putting a tremendous amount of work into crafting songs that are hilarious but also genuinely catchy.

Alas, when Popstar hit theaters in 2016, audiences didn’t show up. The film was beaten opening weekend by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequel, with Captain America: Civil War still lighting up the box office. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the intended audience for Popstar didn’t find the movie immediately, but over time the film has grown both in stature and in its fandom.

Given my personal borderline-obsessive love for the film, I recently got the chance to speak with Samberg, Schaffer, and Taccone for an exclusive, extended interview about all things Popstar. We discussed the film’s inception, how they went about writing the songs and script at the same time, and how the post-production process proved incredibly intensive with an enormous amount of footage to sift through. We also discussed the film’s release, with the trio remaining diplomatic about how the movie was handled while also pointing to a couple of things here and there that indicated Popstar may not be a giant hit. It’s a wide-ranging, candid, and unsurprisingly funny interview that I do feel any fan of the film, or the work of these three guys, will enjoy.

I know that you guys and Judd both kind of had the idea to do something with this music documentary format. But I was curious, was it always a pop star? How did you kind of hit upon the idea of Conner4Real and The Style Boyz as the central part of this movie?

ANDY SAMBERG: Kiv feel free to correct this, but my recollection is in the beginning we had talked about doing more like a fictionalized version of ourselves and in a mockumentary style, and Akiva had a general meeting with Judd and Judd said that he thought we should do like a mockumentary, more in the vein of a pop star, but also about us, and we said that's basically the idea we were already interested in doing. But I think Judd was geared more towards like a singular pop star, and we kind of took that and tried to turn it into like an amalgam of everything that was happening in pop music at the time.

AKIVA SCHAFFER: I'll clarify that a little bit just because I was in L.A. and in the meeting or whatever. Judd was not that specific. He was just basically like, "You three, music mockumentary, go." So he would have been fine with it being a boy band, but boy bands barely exist these days beyond like One Direction. And so we were kind of like, the modern thing out there now is Drake, Justin Bieber, Kanye, just people, just singular superstars. But he wanted it to be a movie about the three of us, so we were like, "All right, we'll figure that out." So that's why it’s the Style Boyz and him.

JORMA TACCONE: And I did feel like we kind of walked back into that too. Because even when we did our first table read, I think that the response that the three of us were surprised by was that people actually wanted more of the story of the three of us, which I think was a little hard for us. It was certainly hard for me a little bit just because it felt like, "Oh who’s going to care about this?" And it's not us obviously, but it's just diverting from that singular pop star kind of thing. It's obviously a story that we enjoy telling but we were—I was a little nervous about it honestly, and the response we were getting was kind of pushing us more in that direction. That's how it felt to me at least, I don't know how these guys feel.

SCHAFFER: Yeah I would say it continually pushed to the three of us, and we had more stuff that was less about the three of us and that even just as we would show cuts to people and audiences and test audiences and everything, it just kept pushing more and more to be about the three of us.

RELATED: Exclusive: The Lonely Island Reflect on 'Popstar' and Why the Bieber-Centric Marketing Wasn't Their Favorite

TACCONE: And some of the reason that we really leaned into the singular pop star thing too, was just that we had watched so many of those documentaries, that there were a lot of funny bits that were either based on things we had seen. Like the Katy Perry documentary or this or that thing, like how the quick change thing came about or like, there was just a lot of those that just felt inspiring because there were so many of those documentaries, rather than like you know, there aren't that many about NSYNC or anything.

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Image via Universal Pictures

SCHAFFER: Plus everybody just saw my performance as like a capital A actor and were just like, more of that.

TACCONE: In fact, there were two standing ovations during the table read right? They were like “Lawrence! Lawrence! Lawrence!”

SCHAFFER: Yeah, yeah I interrupted the whole thing, well if that happens in all the theaters nobody is even going to be able to hear the rest of the movie.

SAMBERG: Right, that would add that to the run time, because we’d hold for applause. Kind of the way the Marx Brothers used to do it, where they would time their performances and so we would have to be like, "Okay there is going to be like a five minute pause break here.”

SCHAFFER: Yeah so I guess that finally explains that five minute gap in the middle of the movie.

I will say the frog jizz outtake is the hardest I have laughed in a really long time.

SAMBERG: (Laughs) One of the most rad cuts we made. I love that.

TACCONE: I don't think we really got through it very many times on set because we all thought it was funny.

It's clear you guys shot a lot of footage for this, and the deleted scenes show a bunch of different directions the film could have gone, but how did the script develop and evolve before shooting began? Were there kind of different routes you guys were considering?

SCHAFFER: We put a ton of work into it but it was always kind of along the same path, right? Am I forgetting something guys? I feel like it was always kinda towards the same goal, just trying to write just tons of different stuff. And Judd would always just try to be that good third party keeping his eye on what it's supposed to be, and just able to give us like gentle nudges to keep us on track essentially.

TACCONE: Yeah, yeah there was no huge plot shift. It was definitely a harder movie in the edit because it was just more malleable than other movies, like you could add a snapchat thing of him talking directly to camera. It kind of changed the tone of like the next 10 minutes of the movie. So there was a lot of us playing around in the edit of continuing to kind of write the story.

SAMBERG: We also had a lot of characters and songs that we liked and that was ultimately the hardest decisions to make because we didn't want to cut anything, but we had way too much. And we also had way too much of Conner's downfall, for some reason those scenes just came very effortlessly (laughs).

It gets dark in the deleted scenes.

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Image via Universal

SAMBERG: There’s a good hour of his downward spiral. But in the end the audience had the stomach for about 10 minutes of it.

SCHAFFER: And I mean to your question, yeah it wasn't so much in the script phase as it was in the editing because it piggybacked on both of what they just said. Because you can just keep writing all the way to the last day of editing. You can always add another voiceover line or re-structure a whole section. Basically if you want to see all the ways it could go, it’s on the deleted scenes, as opposed to most movies where it's just a page. You can actually just go watch all the different ways it could go, and every big musical number where we shot the whole thing but then couldn't figure out a place in the movie to let it play the whole song. Like “Mona Lisa” is one of our favorites that we ever did yet we only show it in the movie for a second. The other opening of the movie where it actually showed all of “Mona Lisa” over like credits and stuff, I know we included the video, I'm not sure we included it in the context of that big jumbotron thing where we are throwing the hammer at the beginning of one of Conner’s concerts. That was always our intended beginning of the movie.

TACCONE: There was actually a moment where our editors were—we were just going and going and going and at one point our editors were like, "This is the most versions of a first act I've ever done on any movie." At that point, and we were not done yet, we had 105 versions of the first act, and I remember there was a moment that we showed the movie to our buddies, Phil Lord and Chris Miller and a bunch of other very smart other people. And Phil pitched us like three different versions of the first act, and we could be like, "Yeah we tried every single one of those." So it was like, it was nice to know, "Okay this is the best it's ever going to be." All you need to do is do it like 120 times (laughs).

The songs are incredible. I mean it seems obvious but you not only made a movie, but you also basically made a brand new Lonely Island album at the same time. How did the writing of the songs inform the story and the characters and vice versa?

SAMBERG: Well, thank you. It was the intention to have a new album along with it, and that's just also why it took so long. We started making songs before we even started really writing script.

SCHAFFER: Yeah we knew the character's name, because wasn’t “I'm a Weirdo” the very first thing we recorded?

SAMBERG: Yeah.

SCHAFFER: And that has Conner4Real all over it, like we definitely knew his name and knew his attitude, and we basically knew everything about him, which is enough to start writing his song, so we didn't know where they'd fit in the movie yet.

SAMBERG: Yes. And then so yeah, as we would write we'd be like, "Ooh, we could maybe put that song here and like, oh that actually informs what's happening to his character here, that would work." And then as the writing of the script sort of started taking more shape, we then started writing songs towards the script and towards the scenes we had written, and towards the characters we had added. So like once we knew we were going to need the character of Hunter the Hungry, Jorm sort of took it as like an assignment and was like, "I'm going to go make some Hunter the Hungry songs." And then made those and sent them to us and we were like, "Ooh yeah this feels a lot like how Hunter the Hungry would sound."

TACCONE: Yeah in the very beginning when we were just kicking around the idea, we were separate for the very beginning, for a bunch of the writing and song stuff. And we would send each other stuff, back and forth. And I remember because being on the East Coast, I got the first version of “Mona Lisa” sent to me, and it was like 4:00 in the morning, and my wife was like, "What are you doing?" And I was just giggling in the corner (laughs). Like “Yeah I think I made some awesome shit!" And then when we got together, we obviously started writing in earnest.

The cast here is stacked with insane talent. How did you go about assembling that? Did you have specific actors in mind as you were writing the parts?

SCHAFFER: I know we did for some people, but I'm trying to think who it was. Not necessarily Tim Meadows, but we were very, very psyched to—we are big Ladies Man fans.

SAMBERG: He was always on our short list, we were like “He would be great.” I'm trying to think, I mean Bill, the hippie part was always going to be Hader (laughs).

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Image via Universal

TACCONE: Yeah since it's basically a reprise of his role from Hot Rod.

SAMBERG: No...

TACCONE: Yeah you’re right, it's different, his name is Zippy and not Dave (laughs).

SCHAFFER: I mean the truth is, once we would decide it was somebody like, "Oh Maya said she would do that," then we would always do a re-write so everything essentially is kind of re-written for people. So everything is written for them. But yeah it wasn't like we were just in our office writing this being sure about who anybody was going to be necessarily.

I also wanted to talk about Brandon Trost’s cinematography, which I think is really dynamic and kind of offers a seamless transition between those big music performances to the dialogue scenes. It doesn't really feel like you're getting any visual whiplash, because everything feels as part of a whole, but really looks fantastic which could have gone really wrong with like a mockumentary format. How did he first come to your attention and what was your working relationship like?

TACCONE: He did MacGruber. Brandon at that point had done some like Rob Zombie stuff, I mean he had done a ton of features at that point, but it was not comedy necessarily. And so I met him, we were totally like-minded, awesome. And the dude is obviously incredibly fast and great at what he does, and he also has a great sense of humor so we just hit it off. I actually lived with him while we were shooting MacGruber with Will Forte and John Solomon, and then Kiv got to know him, and we've all just been friends basically ever since.

SCHAFFER: But that was his first comedy right?

TACCONE: Yeah that was his first comedy and then he's been like Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s dude forever after that.

SCHAFFER: But you can say on the record that Seth and Evan kind of stole him.

TACCONE: Yeah, yeah, they fuckin stole him, I mean totally. And then we've stolen him back occasionally, which is always a nice feeling when they’re like, "What are you doing? We need him for re-shoots." And we’re like, "Fuck you guys."

SAMBGERG: (Laughs) And he did That’s My Boy.

SCHAFFER: Yeah he shot That’s My Boy, and he shot your wife's movie that you produced, he shot both of hers.

TACCONE: Yeah he shot The Diary of a Teenage Girl, which is my wife's movie, which is not a comedy and then he just shot—my wife did a movie with Melissa McCarthy in New York, that he just shot as well. And I believe on both occasions, he was needed for reshoots on Seth and Evan movies (laughs).

SAMBERG: All of this information is available on IMDB.com (laughs)

This is a ridiculous movie in which Conner defeats a giant bee off screen, but it also has a lot of heart as a story about friendship, which I think really, really works. Was keeping that emotional center important to you guys from the get go?

SCHAFFER: Yeah and it was what we were relying on Judd Apatow to steer us towards too. We were like "We want to do it but you gotta let us know when we're close.” We would write scenes and basically give it to him and he'd be like ,"Oh" and he'd have very insightful things that you would assume Judd Apatow, based on his work, would obviously know how to do and it turns out he does. So he would be like—the scene with the dick in the window is a reshoot, well not a reshoot, we're constantly reshooting while we're editing but that was one where he like steered it in a new direction and was kind of like "I need this argument to happen, some sort of argument between you guys" and we added, surprisingly, the dick in the window. But yeah, I mean that really is the Judd influence that we were hoping for basically.

I wanted to talk about the ending, and I was curious how you guys hit upon the ending and writing “Incredible Thoughts” specifically as a kind of finale-type song.

TACCONE: That really wasn't there and Kiv kind of forced it into being, right Kiv? I mean the song was written but it wasn't originally a Style Boyz song. Not to like ruin the movie for you or anything but it was a Conner song that we turned into a Style Boyz song.

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Image via Universal Pictures

SCHAFFER: Kind of getting back to your other question of was it songs first and then story or story first and then songs, or even the actor question because it's all happening at once, as we would be like "Oh whoa, you know what this song could maybe go here" then we'd usually have to do a rewrite of the song to make it fit a little—not that the songs are about what's happening in the story, but just so they don't take you in the wrong direction completely, which was something in editing we learned a lot. We would take like "Legalize It", which was also one of our favorite songs that is not really in the movie, it's in the end credits now, and that was one of our favorites and we kept putting it in different places in the movie but it would kind of derail the story just because its energy was so different. And we moved “Ibitha” around a lot, and there was a lot of just surprising things when we would be editing, of where songs could fit. So we initially wrote “Incredible Thoughts” and it was just a Conner song about how brilliant he is and how he has amazing thoughts, and then as we were trying to figure out what our finale song was, basically we kind of repurposed it and then rerecorded it and changed it a little and made it work.

You talked a little bit about the editing process earlier, but it sounds like a lot of the stuff kind of changed in post-production. What was that experience like for you guys? Was this kind of a more post-production intensive movie than like The Watch or MacGruber, other comedies you guys have made?

TACCONE: Yes definitely.

SCHAFFER: We shot so many talking head interviews that we would shoot for about 45 minutes each time and then once you've done that, I can’t remember how many hours of interviews we did but…

TACCONE: Total it's like 400 hours plus of just stuff. Everything included. But that is like the amount of footage you would have for a normal documentary, where you’d shoot for a year.

SCHAFFER: Yeah normal documentaries take like a year to edit and when we got into editing, like in the first week we're like "Oh this is like editing a real documentary at this point." Just the amount of people we were trying to hire just to transcribe interviews so that it was searchable so you could be like "Oh did anybody ever talk about what it felt like to have your second album come out?" And you're like well I can't go watch 100 hours of interviews again to try to figure that out, so we were trying to have basically like assistants transcribe interviews so we could search it in a word document and that's exactly what real documentaries do, but we were on a normal comedy movie post-production schedule. That made it difficult I guess.

TACCONE: And just to put it in the context of a normal movie that shoots on the longer side, I think it's more like around 120 hours or something. So we had, I mean it was far more than 400 hours that we had.

Wow.

TACCONE: Yeah.

SCHAFFER: Not to complain. The best part about us shooting it was we could just keep shooting. We would write a version of a scene, but because it's a doc we could have three cameras going, almost more like how shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine or something shoot, where you can have multiple cameras and then the moment you're done with that scene you can go "Oh let's do it a hundred different ways," which you can kind of do on a big comedy but not as much because they need to like really light. Brandon [Trost] was so good about making it look awesome but not having it be in the way at all, and then we could honestly go "Well, we have an extra half hour, let's grab skateboards and go sit outside where we are right now," because also any location we were at was the correct location, because it takes place in the real world, in modern times. So you could honestly walk outside into a parking lot and go "Alright we have a half hour is there something you wrote that we wanted to try here?" And so we were able to shoot constantly.

TACCONE: We had an alt script of just things that we wanted to fit in that was like 300 pages that we just had with us, and whenever we were, as Kiv said, ready to do something, we would do it off to the side. But for us as directors I would say it made scouting really embarrassing because we would have, especially with the tech scout where we would be like "Yeah this room's fine, and the hallway's fine and that room's fine and it's all fine.” It made it seem like you didn't care but you were like "No, no, it's all fine, like we're going to try to do these five scenes today too," and usually we'd actually be able to do it too, we squeezed a shit load in.

SCHAFFER: Yeah you're supposed to be backstage at a concert and then you're at The Forum and then you're like every inch of this place looks like you're backstage at a concert, so…

TACCONE: Yeah, we are backstage, so it's perfect (laughs).

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Image via Universal Pictures

It all looks cinematic too, it doesn't look just like plain beige whatever. I think a lot of that comes through in how you guys set up the shots and the cinematography and stuff.

SCHAFFER: Credit to Jon Billington who did our production design too, because the task we were giving him is we basically said like, “Alright let's pretend this is at 12 different cities across the world,” so we'd go, “Okay, this is Boston,” even though it's arbitrary because backstage stuff's the same everywhere but they always look different, every place has its own personality. So we just got a lot of images of different backstages from around the world and then basically tasked him with the thing, which was constantly changing. We'd be like "Alright we're in the new place" and so he had to come up with different aesthetics for each one so that in the movie it's not like you know where you are, but it feels like you're in different places and that's because he's having to redress or dress all different kinds of rooms in different ways that just make each one feel like, conceivably, you're in different arenas all around the world.

TACCONE: And that would happen within a room too. If it was a large enough room, we'd be like "One corner of it is Boston and the other corner of it is London".

SCHAFFER: Yeah. The big Denver one he made for when Conner's mom comes to visit and stuff. He did a great job considering it was all at The Forum in L.A. basically and like two days at the Long Beach Arena and that's it.

I also wanted to talk a bit about the release. The film got stellar reviews. Did you have any indication leading up to opening weekend how it might fair at the box office?

SAMBERG: A week before we kind of had a feeling.

TACCONE: Yeah that's usually when you start to get the feeling. I would say with some of the other films we've done it's been a little more of like a "It's gonna do great!" Which is actually more of a kick in the gut, whereas this one, that was not the case and so it was a little easier to take, for me at least.

SCHAFFER: It's not our first rodeo and you can just tell…

TACCONE: There wasn't quite as much advertising as I expected to see, if I want to talk a little bit of shit, but, I don't know I was a little surprised…

SCHAFFER: We had a very good experience with both the studio and Judd and everybody, would do it again in a heartbeat, all the way through, and then there were just some things in marketing that we won't get into but when we went "Oh, is that the right call?" And then it became clear.

TACCONE: What is interesting though, I will say, is when you get good reviews, and I talked to several people that said this that they went opening weekend and they were surprised at how many people in their fifties and sixties they saw in the movie theater, because a lot of people— when you get good reviews, that's great, but a lot of the people that read those reviews are not young people.

SCHAFFER: Yeah, we're happy to have them but it would have been nice if some 20-year-olds would have shown up.

SAMBERG: Yeah if they had of just invited their children, or grandchildren.

SCHAFFER: Yeah exactly.

SAMBERG: In terms of how it ended up doing, when we first started talking about making it we we're like, "It's a mockumentary, it's not going to be like that kind of a big movie," and then, as is often the case, as you make it and you get big people involved and it's a studio and all these things start coming in to focus more, you start convincing yourself along the way that maybe you could, and then it comes out and ends up doing about what you thought it was going to do when you first start thinking about it.

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Image via Universal Pictures

TACCONE: That's very true. That is very, very true and I think that because we had so many people we were like, "Oh maybe this will be what bridges the gap or ..." But I think that we all had an inkling in the back of our minds that we probably didn't have as good a shot when they were even recruiting for the screenings, for the free screenings of going to see and they stopped wanting to call it a mockumentary because that was— immediately people were like, "Oh no I don't need to see that.”

SCHAFFER: Yeah I remember my wife like two weeks before it came out, my wife who doesn't pay attention to anything, was like "What would be a good weekend? Like 5 million right? That'd be good for this kind of movie" and I was like…

TACCONE: Like, no! (laughs)

SCHAFFER: Sorta? (Laughs) You're actually right but the expectations have been changed and now dates have been chosen for various reasons. She was correct, but like..

TACCONE: It was a very sobering moment (laughs).

How did you guys feel about the release date? I mean, entertainment-wise it feels like a great summer movie to go see when you're a teen, or out of school and stuff.

SCHAFFER: I think if they had shown up people would have really enjoyed it. We were pushing for whenever Borat and Jackass came out, we felt like those were the movies that we were aspiring to have a release similar too. But it's nobody's fault or whatever.

SAMBERG: We've all three multiple times had our asses kicked in the summer though, it's a minefield. It's really, really hard to get something weird to pop through in the summer. That's just a fact.

TACCONE: Yeah, and you're competing with shit like fucking Captain America, which is not only Marvel but it's also good.

It was weird because you guys were coming out on the heels of The Nice Guys which was another well reviewed comedy from an interesting filmmaker with A-List stars and that also bombed.

SAMBERG: I love that movie.

It's great.

TACCONE: It's really funny.

It's fantastic. It's very strange seeing what —I mean you look at a film like Get Out or Logan and you say "Oh if you make a good movie people will come" but that's not always the case.

TACCONE: No, you need a story to get people in the theaters and you need to eventi-ize, and it's great when it's an actual great product, when it's something like Get Out and you're like, “Shit they were able to event-ize it, make it a thing, but it's also great.” That doesn't always happen, sometimes it's an event and it's not a good movie, and we have not been able to quite crack that event part of it or something.

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Image via Universal Pictures

SAMBERG: We're also like deeply sarcastic and that doesn't always cross over (laughs).

SCHAFFER: Well you know who else is sarcastic and they crossed over fine was those pesky Ninja Turtles.

SAMBERG: That's true.

TACCONE: Yeah that's true. I guess they're sarcastic. They do like pizza.

SAMBERG: There's also sort of a sexual intrigue to it because like that one turtle was raised by April but then now he wants to fuck her.

TACCONE: Yeah, yeah.

I want to see you guys make that movie.

TACCONE: Yeah but see I read that as sarcasm, that he wanted to fuck her. Right?

SCHAFFER: Oh no.

SAMBERG: No.

I will say that the rewatchability of this movie is insane, and that's true of all the movies that you guys make. Is that an intention on your guys' part when you're making these to kind of reward repeat viewings? Because it's almost like a great album, you just want to put it on because it just makes you feel good.

SCHAFFER: Well you're the nicest guy in the world.

SAMBERG: (Laughs)

TACCONE: That is, I would say not like an intended goal, well it sort of is.

SCHAFFER: Our goal is to make the movies we would have watched over and over when we were younger, not even when we were kids, we would do that well into our twenties, yeah.

TACCONE: Yeah and it's interesting that like what you're talking about being on HBO and people seeing it because that is also something that you want as well, is that when it comes on TV it's a movie that's hard to turn off or that you somehow end up sitting and watching again kind of thing. That's certainly how I felt about my favorite comedies growing up.

I definitely think people will find it on TV. This was just kind of a selfish question on my part but one of my favorite jokes in the movie is a total throwaway line with Bill Hader not only qualifying that Flatliners is a Joel Schumacher film but adding that it was shot by Jan de Bont. Was that in the script? It kills me every time.

TACCONE: (Laughs) Yeah that is the benefit of Bill Hader’s brain. Of knowing that information.

SAMBERG: It was definitely added by Bill.

I also have to know whose idea it was to use the War of the Worlds sound effect for Owen’s helmet.

TACCONE: I really think that was all of us, like collective. The backstory of getting the sound is a little bit more interesting of how we were immediately shot down by many, many Universal lawyers saying that there's no way that we could ever get the sound. At that time we were like "Well, we have to write to Spielberg," and we did and we got his permission, so that's the reason that's in the film.

That’s amazing.

TACCONE: Well he's out of Laser Cats, so he owed us.

SAMBERG: Because we did him that favor.

SCHAFFER: Yeah he got us back for us allowing him out of Laser Cats (laughs).

SAMBERG: I will say every time I've seen Spielberg at anything he goes "Hey it's my director! He directed me as an actor!"

TACCONE: What the fuck? What was I doing man? What was I doing that week?

SAMBERG: Not sure.

TACCONE: No kudos...

The CMZ stuff is insane and delightfully surreal, is there even crazier footage from those guys or did you just let them go to 100 and put it in?

TACCONE: That might have been the hardest I've laughed on set actually was watching Will Arnett go to town on that, when he really goes nuts.

SCHAFFER: I think the deleted scenes have a lot of it too.

TACCONE: Some like really offensive shit (laughs).

SAMBERG: That was another thing that Judd really pushed for, he was like for the TMZ stuff let's just get some killers and sort of cut them loose and pitch weird stuff for them to play with. And that was one of the most fun days of shooting because we just got all those super funny people and sort of pressed record and said go and we were just dying laughing at video village kind of loving it.

SCHAFFER: Oh right, it was only in our script once, because in the script we were keeping it very— like any time it would go to the press saying something, we'd always make it a new press venue. And Judd was the one that was like, “This is the one, why don't we get it,” and then we would tell them, “Okay now this is for the part of the movie where Conner was just naked on stage and this is what he'll look like when he's on stage and okay so go ahead," and then they would discuss, we would be just be able to throw out topics essentially.

SAMBERG: And then it turned into Arnett like jacking it (laughs).

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Image via Universal Pictures

I really love this movie so much. If there's anything else you guys wanted to add about the film or your experience, I mean I know this isn't a traditional kind of press circuit or anything but I feel like a lot more people are going to be seeing it, so.

TACCONE: I mean I just wanted to say though that you know I think a lot of movies are based on fiction and this one's really based on fact, I really love these guys, they're my best friends in the world, I trust both of them implicitly and I just I want to say, for the record that I love both of you guys so much so thank you so much for allowing me to make this movie with you guys.

SAMBERG: Just thank you for talking about the movie so people won’t forget it.

SCHAFFER: I'll just say like ditto to Jorm. Super, "right back at you bud."