The premise of Hulu’s new comedy “Pizza Movie” reads like a riff on beloved stoner comedies such as Cheech and Chong‘s “Up in Smoke” or the cult classic “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle“: two college friends (Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone) get high and have to go on an epic journey to make it downstairs from their dorm room to pick up a pizza. Yet if the concept is familiar, the execution couldn’t be more distinctive — in first-time feature directors Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher‘s hands, “Pizza Movie” is one of the most visually and structurally inventive comedies in years.
“It was important to us to not just shoot this like a basic comedy,” Kocher told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, noting that the intention was to make a movie like “Harold and Kumar” or “Dude, Where’s My Car?” but with the high style of a director like Edgar Wright or the Daniels. “From the outside, the stakes for these characters look small — they’re going downstairs for a pizza. But to them, this is life and death. Their emotions are at 11 — this is their ‘Lord of the Rings.’”
McElhaney and Kocher, best known to comedy fans as the sketch comedy duo BriTANicK, found inspiration not just in stoner comedies and Peter Jackson fantasy epics but classic Looney Tunes cartoons, the Coen Brothers, and dozens of other influences. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of “Pizza Movie” is the exuberant and infectious passion for cinema that permeates every comic set piece; this is a movie by filmmakers pouring everything they’ve ever loved and thought about into their first film, and it makes the 92 minutes of “Pizza Movie” feel packed with ideas.
What’s really impressive is how the film doesn’t feel at all derivative — it doesn’t exploit or lean on its influences but absorbs and synthesizes them into something completely new and unpredictable. “I’ve often been frustrated by how comedies don’t utilize the filmmaking toolbox visually,” McElhaney said. “Hopefully our style is more slick and polished.” It’s a style the filmmakers have honed over years of creating sketches and short films, often paying tribute to a specific genre.
“Our sketch stylings throughout the years on YouTube are very genre-heavy,” McElhaney said. “We’ll pick a style to parody, and sometimes we spend half a year editing a two-minute sketch because we want it to feel grander.” That kind of meticulousness is another hallmark of BriTANicK’s filmmaking that gets at why “Pizza Movie” is so special — the content is incredibly silly and lowbrow, but McElaheny and Kocher treat it with the utmost care. The movie, as Mel Brooks would say, “rises below vulgarity.”
“It’s smart, but it’s idiotic at the same time,” McElhaney said. “When something really dumb is shot with a lot of skill and thought, something happens to your brain where you go, ‘Wait, what am I feeling right now? Is this the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, or is my brain being ignited in an intellectual way?’” Adding to that, Kocher said that one of the duo’s primary goals is to generate opposing emotional responses right on top of each other to keep the audience engaged.
“Something we shoot for is to make people get goosebumps from something and then laugh at the fact that they just felt an emotion over something so stupid,” Kocher said. That “Pizza Movie” is so genuinely emotional at times comes largely from the casting. In Matarazzo and Giambrone, the filmmakers found two actors whose onscreen chemistry is up there with the great comic duos of coming-of-age classics like “Superbad” and “License to Drive.” Kocher said that came out of an extensive audition process during which the filmmakers looked at as many people in as many combinations as possible — and made them all read, regardless of star status.
That said, in the end, the casting was a roll of the dice. “The truth is, we got very, very lucky,” Kocher said, with McElhaney adding, “You don’t really know until you get to set. The chemistry read we saw was pretty great, but then we were moving so quickly, and you show up on set and are like, ‘I hope this works.’” Although the directors encouraged the actors to contribute as much as possible, the airtight nature of the script — in which the characters have to accept a number of outrageous, complexly linked challenges to survive their high — meant that most of what ended up in the movie was carefully planned months before shooting.
“We’re structure nuts, and we really put a lot of work into that,” Kocher said. “We didn’t move too much around in the edit, because it was a house of cards. We couldn’t move stuff around after we wrote it, which I think is what you want. You want every scene to not be cuttable, because if it is cuttable, you should probably cut it. We like to write and watch really intricately plotted stories where you set something up that feels innocuous and then it comes back in a big way in act three — this movie has 17 different threads that all come back in hopefully very satisfying ways.”
It’s a busy time for Kocher and McElhaney; just a few weeks after “Pizza Movie” premieres on Hulu, “Over Your Dead Body,” which Kocher and McElhaney wrote for director Jorma Taccone, opens in theaters. “We have said yes to everything for the last five years,” McElhaney said by way of explaining their current prolificness (as well as the multiple drafts they owe to various employers before they can get moving on something new). “Now, do we keep doing that or do we focus on our next big personal project? Who knows? I feel like in six months we’ll have a very different answer.”
“Pizza Movie” begins streaming on Hulu April 3. To hear the entire conversation with Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
