With Sisters opening in theaters this weekend, Collider recently chatted with stars Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph and Ike Barinholtz, director Jason Moore, and writer Paula Pell who are responsible for bringing the hilarious comedy to life. When the Ellis siblings (Fey, Poehler) realize their parents (James Brolin, Dianne Wiest) have sold the family home, it comes as a big blow. With one weekend left to clean out their childhood bedroom before the new owners take possession, they suddenly decide to throw one final cathartic rager at the old homefront for all their aging high school friends.

The filmmakers spoke about their recent collaboration, how they set out to make a fresh and funny film with lots of familiar comedic faces including many SNL alums, the genuine bond of sisterhood between Tina and Amy, Paula’s amazing script, her alt joke process of slipping Post-it Notes to Jason on set, Jason’s directing style with a genius cast of talented comedians, and why audiences should give Sisters a chance because it’s opening the same weekend as the new Star Wars. To learn more about what it took to put this movie together, here’s a list of 20 things to know about Sisters. Check it all out in the interview below.

1. Tina and Amy have worked together so long they feel like they’re real sisters.

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Image via Universal Pictures

TINA FEY: I feel like we are.

AMY POEHLER: I feel like we’re chosen sisters. I was saying today that our relationship is as old as Lourdes Ciccone.

MAYA RUDOLPH: And as beautiful.

FEY: And as talented.

POEHLER: And as good at dancing. I’m realizing none of us here have sisters.

IKE BARINHOLTZ: All brothers.

POEHLER: I think as a woman you get lucky if you get to choose your family and sisters and people who knew you when. But, you’re not related to them, so it’s easier.

RUDOLPH: It’s way easier.

POEHLER: We were both talking about how interesting it was to see Sisters together, because all sisters like to tell you is how different they are from their sister. I didn’t hear a lot of people saying, “Me and my sister are so close and we’re so alike.”

FEY: We’re exactly the same.

RUDOLPH: We almost killed each other 30 times. There was a lot of blood. And now, we’re best friends.

FEY: We were the only two women on our first improv team together in Chicago. I think that’s where it started to work.

POEHLER: We learned pretty quickly that we liked the same things. We liked speaking the same way. So much of comedy in the beginning is finding your tribe, because no one’s very experienced. No one feels funny, but you end up searching out people who like the same things as you or that get you. That was pretty quick, good, first dating period, and now, today, we’re getting married.

2. Tina and Amy swapped roles in the movie because Tina felt Amy could play the back half of crazy better.

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Image via Universal Pictures

FEY: Initially, when Paula Pell started writing the screenplay, I think she may have even pictured us in the opposite roles. I tried to put my producer hat on, which is a beautiful hat. The front of it is like a baseball hat, but the back of it is all feathers. But I put my producer hat on, and I thought when you have a part for someone where they’re supposed to be tightly wound in the beginning and then go crazy, you cast the person who is better at going crazy. I just knew that Amy would play the back half of that better. I tried to play it like it’s a movie about, “I was once the greatest ice skater in the world, but now I’m in this wheelchair. I used to be the hottest girl. I used to party really hard, but you will never see me doing any of it in the film.”

3. Jason’s litmus test while directing this comedy was getting Paula to laugh. When the laughter became too loud, he had to set up his own video village.

JASON MOORE: Paula has a great laugh. She’s my litmus test because she has an amazing laugh and my monitor is far from her. I feel if we make her laugh, then we’re good.

PAULA PELL: We started the movie with one video village area. Then, very quickly, it was announced that Jason was moving to his own video village because we were tending to be a little obnoxious cracking each other up and just goofing around.

MOORE: We have all these hilarious people in the movie in that house all the time, so there was a whole comedy club going on. I wasn’t able to concentrate because it was too funny, so I went and sat by myself, but I could still hear her.

PELL: It was a parade of hams. He had work to do that he was actually being paid for, as we were, but we were just going to make sure that it was about fun. There was a lot of cackling.

4. Jason asked Tina and Amy for input into the design of their bedroom and the posters that went up on the walls for the film.

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Image via Universal Pictures

FEY: Jason emailed us and said, “What do you want in the bedroom?” Amy contributed more. For me, for my youth, we were both Maura.

POEHLER: It was easier for us to understand Maura’s bedroom than it was for us to understand Kate’s. I would say though, because we all have very different childhoods, that growing up, I was more of a hair band Massachusetts girl, so I had White Snake, Bon Jovi, Pat Benatar and stuff like that. Ike, what did you have?

BARINHOLTZ: Mostly Klezmer music which is Jewish folk music with a lot of clarinets.

POEHLER: Pictures of sexy clarinets?

BARINHOLTZ: Just pictures of rabbis and clarinets mostly.

FEY: Stock photos of cabbage rolls.

POEHLER: Maya, what about you?

RUDOLPH: I had the bunk bed that Arnold and Willis had in the show. I bought it from Arnold. My bunk bed looked up, and I had the poster of Flash Dance there, which I looked at a lot. I studied it a lot.

POEHLER: You got a lot of Jennifer Beals in you, girl.

RUDOLPH: Then, later on, I had a very large poster of Prince peeling off a tank top. My grandmother was always like, “He’s very feminine. I don’t understand the attraction.” I do.

BARINHOLTZ: Maybe your grandmother just needs to purify her body in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.

5. With so many talented comedians, there was a lot of improv on set. To keep it fresh and funny, Jason started with Paula’s amazing script and found innovative ways to roll with the actors’ spontaneity and creativity. Paula’s clever process for alt jokes complemented Jason’s directing style.

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Image via Universal

MOORE: It starts with Paula’s amazing script. It is her voice that is the key to all the humor. We would always do a pass that was the script as written. Paula has a process for alt jokes that she’s done on other movies.

PELL: I started using it on Bridesmaids, and I’ve done it with a number of movies, where when I’m on a set, they’ll have an extra writer come in to just punch up jokes on the set. I started putting them on Post-it Notes because I was afraid to be too intrusive with the director in terms of the real estate of time and coming in and being in a space when he’s trying to talk to the actors. I would write down little alternative lines or alternative ideas and slip them to him like these little pieces of candy. Then, he could decide if he wanted to use them. There wasn’t a big pressure to it. That worked so well that I started doing that on other movies. When I did it with Jason, we had a whole Post-it Note thing set up.

MOORE: She would give me these incredible jokes, but try and pick out which ones to do, and then give them quietly, secretly to each actor so the other actors didn’t know what was going to happen. Oftentimes, the director might call out the joke and then everyone’s already heard it. You want them to be fresh. It was the Post-it Note alt process, and because they’re all improv comedians, then also we would have certain runs, and these were the ones where you could hit the ball anywhere you wanted it to go.

PELL: You’re just winding them up and watching them go because those ladies are a master class in improv.

MOORE: Exactly. Sometimes I would hand them three Post-it Notes and then they could have improvs of their own. It was always about keeping it fresh and keeping the ball in the air which was really fun. In the script or on the Post-its, there are things that were really funny on the page and we felt like this is probably going to work. Then, I would also look at the next two or three that maybe didn’t feel as strong on the page. It’s knowing that when you have these actors and you give them something that’s strong, that it’s their little twist or their little afterthought or word that they changed that does bring it to life. It’s trusting what’s on the page, and then also knowing that you have such heavy hitters in terms of delivering the moment and not ever trying to restrict the possibility, because so much of what’s funny ends up happening in the moment inspired by what’s on the page.

PELL: The great thing about that later, when Jason was editing, was he was able to try many different options with different jokes, because it’s all about combinations, and some joke that is a certain flavor might not mix with another one. He was like this amazing culinary genius of putting it all together in the right combination. It helps if you have people that trust each other, too. We trusted each other so much that sometimes he would push me and I would push him into directions where we didn’t quite feel comfortable, like “I don’t know. I don’t know about this part.” Then, we’d look at each other and nod and go, “Okay. I get that. I got it.” We did that with each other I think in beautiful ways.

6. Much of the comedic sense is drawn from SNL and a lot of that went into the movie, which gave the filmmakers the luxury of seeing it play out compared to a snapshot in a sketch.

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Image via Universal

PELL: There’s the whole idea of the way SNL pushes the envelope of funny, but tries to also have these characters that people care about. I always wrote characters on the show that were recurring, that I always used to say were like joyful losers that you really want to get behind because they’re as fucked up as you are. That part of it was definitely part of the writing, but the luxury of having a full script as opposed to a sketch is you can really see how it plays out, as opposed to just a snapshot in a sketch. You can do a quickie, what happens in this moment in a sketch, but with a movie, you can really play it out. I love when people respond to a joke that I’ve written in a script, and it’s also always a double joy if it was something that did crack me up if I wrote it. Jason was always very, very incredible and generous about laughing at my stuff, and never full of it, never doing it to placate me. Definitely I had to work for it, and then, when I got it, it was really satisfying. Much like Lorne Michaels who has a high standard of what he thinks is funny. That’s why he brings such funny people on that show. Jason was a person that I prided myself if I did really make him laugh. He wasn’t impossible to make laugh because he’s a very joyful person, but when he did laugh really hard at something, it was a home run in my head for my own self esteem.

7. The “Forever 21, Suddenly 42” shopping joke between Tina and Amy’s characters was one of Paula’s Post-it Notes that she gave Jason on set.

MOORE: That was Paula. Paula wrote it.

PELL: That was a little Post-it Note. That was part of a reshot scene that we did a little later on, which a lot of times you do as connective tissue when you look at the edit of a movie and you’re like, “I think we need a little bit more padding here. We need to set up this better.” We were lucky enough to have a couple days to do that. Those scenes ended up being very funny scenes.

MOORE: That was one of my top ten favorite lines when I saw it. Sometimes you just know.

8. There was a shared vocabulary and a sense of camaraderie on set that made it feel like a well-run emergency room.

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Image via Universal

POEHLER: There’s a bit of a shared vocabulary. I would even go farther than just SNL and say that in the improv community, it’s like a well-run emergency room. If you see a well-run emergency room, there’s not a lot of freaking out, because you just don’t have the time. You don’t take up a lot of time talking about how something is not going to work or you can’t do it. You just do the best you can in the moment, and you wish for the best, and you’re around people who are hopefully most skilled and better than you at what they do. I think that is just a tonal thing that we’re all used to. Also, we like working and feeding off of each other. There’s not a lot of ball hugs on our team. That was really fun. We all took great pleasure in other people’s jokes and there wasn’t a lot of feeling like we were competing. We were feeding each other ideas and thoughts. That always makes for certainly a better experience, but often times a funnier film.

9. Maya plays Brinda, the megabitch from senior year. She says her character is a “dickhead” who’s nothing like the way she was in high school.

RUDOLPH: I feel Brinda is a delightful dickhead and the best. She’s one of those people that held onto this idea of feeling left out, and made that her identity, and has carried that through life. She’s got this chip on her shoulder now about trying to prove herself. But I really think it’s just to be let into the party, you know, the party of life. That’s all she wants. She wants to be let into the party of life. She keeps having to sneak in and dance outside the window. I was not a Brinda by any means. I was a theater rat, and sometimes I would wear fancy hats to school. Some would call that a nerd. Perhaps a Captain’s hat or maybe a fedora depending on my mood or my hairstyle. I was friendly, and I might have smoked a little pot.

10. Ike found the role of James a welcome change from playing Morgan in The Mindy Project, but he was shocked to discover he’d been replaced by The Force Awakens droid, BB-8, in the sequel.

BARINHOLTZ: It was nice to not play an indigent, perverted loser, but to play a nice man that you would be proud to bring home to your family.

POEHLER: I will say that Ike and I had fun acting together. We’ve done a lot of comedy together, not like comedy isn’t acting, but we’ve done a lot of big, boisterous improvisational stuff together. We had a lot of fun working with Jason to create an arc in this film where you cared about whether or not Maura and James got together, and that was really fun to work on together.

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Image via Universal

BARINHOLTZ: Jason would occasionally remind us, “Hey, remember you two just met.”

POEHLER: Oh yeah, that’s right.

BARINHOLTZ: It was a real change for me. It’s something that I would like to do more.

FEY: We just can’t find the role.

BARINHOLTZ: There’s nothing else. I’m waiting for Sisters 2. When is Sisters 2 happening?

POEHLER: It’s already in the can.

FEY: We shot it already. I’m so sorry.

BARINHOLTZ: You shot it already?! Who’s playing James?!

FEY: Ki Hong Lee from The Maze Runner.

RUDOLPH: That bleak lert guy from the new Star Wars.

BARINHOLTZ: Alright, fine.

POEHLER: Bleak lert dog toy in Star Wars.

FEY: That little round thing.

RUDOLPH: What’s his name? Bebop? (BB-8)

BARINHOLTZ: Bebop. I get it. He’s good.

FEY: It’s DJ Roomba for you Parks and Recreation fans.

11. Jason cast Dianne Wiest and James Brolin as the parents before they got a role on Life in Pieces. We have him to thank for making them the elder couple of the year.

MOORE: It was in fact before. It was long before. They loved working together. I’ve heard the story that they talked about wanting to work together again. Somehow that word got out and they’re great on that show.

PELL: There was so much chemistry going on there.

MOORE: They loved each other. Yeah, we did it first.

12. A stuntwoman did the keg stand for Tina, but Tina did the big jump from the top of the sink hole.

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Image via Universal

MOORE: We did have a stunt person for Tina on the keg stand because Tina was too busy. She actually did the jump from the top of the sinkhole down. She did it on a wire. She did it herself. It was a 30-foot jump which is considerable.

PELL: A full stunt boogie on that.

MOORE: We said, “Forget the keg stand. Why don’t you do the big jump?” And she did. She did it twice.

13. The dogs in the movie, Polenta and Mashed Potatoes, are named after foods you’d expect to see on a plate together, just like their owners.

PELL: Who is it that has a bulldog called “Roast Beef”? I’ve known quite a few people in the entertainment business that have animals that are named after foods, which I just love so much. I always wanted to name a pit bull “Noodle,” because I always say my pit bull is made of many kinds of noodles. Her ears are like lasagna noodles. I love that. We had Polenta in an earlier scene, and then once we saw the other doggy looked like mashed potatoes, we thought, “Oh, here’s two people that are meeting each other and falling in love, and their dogs also are two things you’d want to see on a plate together. They’re both starches which I am a fan of as you can tell.

14. Tina and Amy are consummate pros who work together effortlessly and are known for their amazing sense of timing and whip-smart humor. They know how to keep things moving and they have fun doing it.

PELL: They are such hard workers and so professional in terms of they know when they’re supposed to be working and they know when it’s okay not to be working, which I love. Because sometimes you get comedy people in there doing a bit, including me, and you’ll be doing a bit on something and making people laugh, and time is money on a movie set obviously. The last couple days of a movie shoot you’re desperately trying to get every single last page and shot. I learned to appreciate that and understand that you need to shut shit down when you’re using people’s time and money. They’re just such pros. They get there and they find a way to make it seem like they’re completely goofing around and having fun all day, but they get everything done.

MOORE: Sometimes they’re going and being so funny you have to find the right time to get in there and get a word in edgewise, but in the best of ways. Also, they’ve worked on a TV schedule so many times that they know about keeping moving. So, it actually makes it fun and easy.

PELL: It’s like the endless days of single camera shooting that just happens where it’s like we’re going to use every bit of time we can but still have fun.

15. The dialogue and the sisterhood situation are so real and on point because Paula pulled from her own family experiences while writing this.

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Image via Universal

PELL: I was totally pulling from my own family situation and also my nieces, who are a year and a half apart. My sister and I are three years apart. There’s a very specific thing in the script that stayed in there. It was in a stage direction, but they actually do it as I describe them, as preening each other like apes when they see each other at the airport. They just immediately go, “What’s up, bitch? What’s up, girl?” My sister and I do it, too, where we’ll be like, “Oh there’s a hair coming out of your mole there. I need to pull that right now.” There used to be a scene in the movie where she actually pulls it and says, “Either I’m going to put a bead on it or pull it.” My nieces still do it. They’re in their late twenties. They just see each other, and one of them is a hair stylist who immediately checks the roots on the other one like, “Who effed that up? What’s going on with that?” The other one’s going, “Your lips look good. What’s up with that.” And they’re taking bracelets off and putting them on. Tina did that. She takes a bracelet off and puts it on her from Amy. Intimacy I grew up with. We never knocked when you walked in the bathroom. I grew up in that kind of family where it was like, “Yeah, I’m in here. Oh, you have a question? Okay. Yeah, I’m still sitting on the toilet. Yeah, I’ll talk to you.” So, that intimacy of sisters, I think, will be very hopefully relatable. It’s just they’re family times a thousand when you have a sister, because it’s like girls and sisterhood.

16. The first cut of the movie was originally 3-1/2 hours until Jason trimmed it down to just under 2 hours. The outtakes will be on the DVD.

MOORE: There isn’t anything that I regret on the cutting room floor. I feel like because of the way the story works, especially at the party, it really is about you’re trying to sustain a certain kind of comedy. In fact, at the very end, what I did was I would look at the set with the six jokes left in the scene and ask, “What’s the one that’s working the least?”, which means it’s still a good joke, but if you pull it, hopefully all boats rise by doing that. There’s a lot of stuff I love. We cut it all together for the DVD and for some of these other promotional things that I love watching. But in terms of the way the movie turned out, I don’t regret any of it. There’s some really funny stuff that’s not in the movie.

PELL: The challenge is when you write something that has so many different stories going at the same time. In the party, we wanted to create a real cast of characters that were all the people that you remembered from high school – the guy that never quite made anything of himself, the couple that has this stale marriage. All those things that we created in the early phases of it, there were full story arcs of all those people. As it got compressed into a manageable length, you have to trim that down and find the funniest moments in those ancillary characters.

17. Tanisha Scott choreographed the apple butt dance which the actors nailed after six weeks of rehearsal.

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MOORE: We knew that I wanted to put the apple butt dance in from the beginning, so we had a choreographer start very early. They practiced and practiced, because we wanted it to be that kind of thing where hopefully the dance is fun. But, what is more fun is the look on their faces because they’ve done it so many times, so it was comfortable. They would practice on set pretty much every day. They probably had six weeks of rehearsals.

PELL: It was a testament to those girls. You’d look over, and if they had free time, they’re looking at each other doing their little hip hop moves. They were always moving, and our choreographer, Tanisha, was great. She’s amazing. She does a lot of really famous people and their hip hop videos.

MOORE: They had a great time. It was like for Pitch Perfect, we would rehearse four weeks for those dances. That’s about what they got and they just nailed it. It was fun.

18. The characters in Sisters want to revisit the moments and the memories that defined them when they were younger. The filmmakers found a way thematically to make it funny without making it feel sad.

MOORE: We talked about that, like at what point is it sad that people feel like they need to revisit this. That’s why we tried to earn each reason, which is everybody that comes to the party, something about their current life was defined by what happened to them in high school – the person that they married or the role that they ended up playing in their family. We tried to make it real or believable so that we could hopefully make it feel not sad. I think that we were able to accomplish that. There is a point where maybe you go, “Should they be doing this?”, but hopefully we earned the fact that yes, you want to revisit. Also, sometimes in your forties, you need a good party, like leave the kids at home, have an extra drink, cut loose. You’ve got to get some steam out.

PELL: There’s the thematic thing that your childhood home symbolizes where you were shaped. Then, when you leave it, you’re a completed object. I remember my mom saying one day when she was in her sixties, “The weird thing about age is you don’t ever feel like the age you are. You don’t understand that you’re in your sixties, because in your body, you don’t feel it. You might feel it physically but emotionally it’s like, “Oh I have tons I still want to do, or I want to grow, or I didn’t do this or I didn’t do that.” We tapped into that. In terms of the party thing, I’m not saying I don’t drink, because I will drink and get a little buzz on, but if I ever do like an old school, like with my nieces or something, where I get old school hungover the next day, I will laugh because I hate it. I hate the feeling of being hungover, but I also had so much fun the night before that I’ll be like, “Now I remember why I used to do this all the time.”

19. Just a few years ago, there was so much ridiculous talk about how females couldn’t lead a comedy movie because they weren’t funny. But there’s been a real evolution, and now, that’s all changed.

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FEY: I do think a lot of people who were saying that died, so that may be good.

POEHLER: Yeah. The good news is a lot of people are dying. It’s really exciting always when new voices become commercial because it means that there’s an audience for them. I still think that stories told through a female perspective are really interesting because there just haven’t been as many, so we aren’t treading the same stuff. There’s still a spectrum of stories told through the lens of female characters that are really interesting, because frankly, they’re just newer. We’re excited to tap that aspect of Hollywood cinema.

RUDOLPH: I feel and have always felt very spoiled in that I work with the funniest people I could have ever met in my life. I am so lucky to have been part of this little weird family that we have. It’s also because we’re ladies, and we’re not just ladies, we’re like fucking smart and shit and take care of each other and have decent lives. We have our heads screwed on straight. We were all going through similar things together and looking out for each other. We have this bond that is insanely unbreakable. I always like to say we were all in the shit together, you know, the comedy war together. I feel like that will never end. For me, the end all, be all is being with your family like that. I love other jobs and they’re great, but when you get to do it with people whose voices you know and you have a shorthand, that’s just delicious cake.

POEHLER: It’s interesting, and I’m just making this really obvious connection, but the film is about dealing with people who knew you when and the good and bad of that, because people have an idea of you. Can you change that story about yourself? Or are you just stuck always being this kind of person? We’ve all worked with people that we’ve known for a really long time. So, it was really easy to play old friends obviously because we all are, but it’s cool to watch all of us, and hopefully in the future until the robots kill us, to see the different versions of us as we grow and change.

20. This movie opens the same weekend as Star Wars. Here’s why you should give Sisters a chance, too.

BARINHOLTZ: There’s like seven Star Wars. There’s only one Sisters.

FEY: That’s a good point.

RUDOLPH: That’s a really good point.

FEY: We have a hashtag.

POEHLER: We have a social media campaign. It’s #YouCanSeeThemBoth.

BARINHOLTZ: The three of you love social media. Are you doing a Snapchat takeover?

FEY: A YouPorn takeover.

POEHLER: I’m doing LinkedOut.

FEY: Which just sends anonymous emails to people we knew in high school saying, “Don’t contact me.”

RUDOLPH: But, you can see them both. It’s a holiday weekend.

Sisters opens in theaters December 18th.

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