ComingSoon.net: From the synopsis I've read, this seems like a very ambitious movie even compared to "Loch Ness" if that's possible. Did you write that synopsis yourself? It was very funny.
Zak Penn: I don't know 'cause I don't know what you're reading. I've written a synopsis. Maybe I did, what's the first line or two?

CS: Let's see… "an all-star cast featuring many of today's top actors".. no, that's definitely a publicist writing that. "Zak Penn uses the camera to film events, then 'edits' those events together with music and voices that he has recorded, to create an impressionistic tone poem…"
Penn: (laughs) Yeah, yeah, you mean the one that says nothing? Yeah, that was me. Trying to mix it up for you guys, so it's not always the same.

CS: I got about halfway into the paragraph and I was like "Wha??"
Penn: I can't believe they used that, that's awesome. I always try to write stuff like that, you know like totally random. The thing I wrote for Tribeca, they asked me to write a thing about my vision about the film, and it's this incredibly long thing that's so pointless and has nothing to do with the movie. I'm hoping people will be amused.

CS: Yeah, that seems to be in the production notes, the one about your "job as a director being to solve the problems of the world." That was very funny.
Penn: I should actually just read that before the movie.

CS: Do you feel that "The Grand" is more ambitious than "Loch Ness" in terms of the size of the cast and what you were trying to do?
Penn: Yeah, well here's the thing: every movie has it's own ambition. With "Loch Ness," obviously what made that movie difficult was that we shot it like a documentary so we had very little crew. It was really shot hand-to-mouth basically. This one obviously, with all these actors, we needed more of a real infrastructure. It's more ambitious in terms of the scope and everything, but whenever you're doing a thing that's improv, there's always a certain sense of ambition to it, but I have to tell you, having professional actors and people who really came completely prepared for their parts, in some ways makes it a little bit easier, because it's more ambitious on more of a global scale, but for me personally, it's a little bit easier because I've got all these amazing comedians to fall back on to help me make the movie.

CS: Did you do this in a similar way as Christopher Guest where you just created the characters, picked an actor, gave them a general plot and then let them improvise the rest?
Penn: With "Loch Ness," I did a similar thing. I wrote an outline that basically what happened in each scene. Now in "Loch Ness," everyone was playing themselves, so I said just be yourself and bring anything that's real to the part. On this one, I basically created the characters with a writer, Matt Bierman, a friend of mine I play poker with, kind of came up with the idea, and as I cast people, I'd say, "Okay, you're playing Lainie's husband, Ray Romano, so tell me what you want to do." And he came back to me with all these different ideas, and I kind of wove them into the movie, same with Chris Parnell. A lot of these actors really came up with a lot of stuff. I just told them, "Here's where you fit into the movie." It is a lot like the Christopher Guest movies, and a little bit like Larry David does "Curb Your Enthusiasm." I think Christopher Guest workshops his films. He'll get his actors together, and I think he works on it more with the actors before they start than I do. I just let them do their own thing and when they come to set, I mesh it.

CS: After talking with everyone, did you wind up with some sort of set script?
Penn: By the time we started this movie, it was a 35-page outline. On "Loch Ness," It was like 25 pages, this time it was a bit longer. It basically details pretty much what they need to know about the story, where their character is going and who they are. It doesn't have any real dialogue, except there'll be a line or two that I want to get in and that's it.

CS: Does any of that change once you get on set and start doing stuff?
Penn: Some of it does change a lot, it depends on a lot of things. One of the key things in this movie that's pretty crazy is we had this idea to play the final poker tournament for real. Basically, one of the original concepts, and it's even in the treatment, is it says that I don't know who's going to win, because the six people who make it to the final table will play for real in character and whoever wins will win in the movie. So we shot two endings with each of those six characters.

CS: Gotcha, so you had interviews with each person to get their reaction after winning or losing. So is this done in a documentary format?
Penn: Well, no, there are some interviews, but with most of them, I had to shoot two different scenes, because I tried to get away a little bit from the documentary format, so we'd basically shoot a scene and then shoot it the opposite way. I had a scene for each character where I'd say, "Okay, now you won. Play the scene like you won. Now you've lost, play the scene like you lost." Often, they were two entirely different scenes because of the implications.

CS: And this was before you actually played the tournament.
Penn: Before we played it. We shot an extra scene or two after to fill in the blanks on some characters, because the person we thought was going to win didn't win the tournament. I won't ruin it, but it was quite a surprise. It was actually a great day of shooting. One of the most interesting things I've been involved with in a movie is actually filming a live tournament where people are in character, because the actors really wanted to win and there was a tremendous amount of stress in the room like there would be from a regular tournament, but it was fictional, so it was just a very weird experience.

CS: Where did you shoot the movie?
Penn: The Golden Nugget kind of made the movie possible by letting us get free reign of the hotel. They gave us all these incentives to shoot there, and we could never have shot it on this budget, with this complicated a cast and everything else, if they hadn't stepped in and helped us make the movie. Most of the movie was shot on location at the Golden Nugget.

CS: And there's basically one major tournament over the entire movie?
Penn: Yeah, the movie basically is the story of this one fictional World Series type tournament, and most of the poker in the movie takes place at the final table of that tournament, but there are a number of other tournaments that are featured where we see other people playing during the movie. The structure is definitely taken a bit from "Best in Show" and even moreso from "Spellbound," the spelling bee documentary.

CS: What were some of the challenges of shooting the poker scenes on a lower budget and getting the coverage you need? I talked to Martin Campbell about how he did "Casino Royale" and it sounded pretty complicated.
Penn: It's interesting you mention that. I know Martin, 'cause I worked with him on "Zorro" many years ago and he's a great guy, although those aren't the most realistic poker scenes I've ever seen. The thing is what we realized what was interesting is that it would've been more complicated for us to shoot the poker tournament staged than it would to do it real. To actually get all the angles you needed and to shoot all the hands you needed would involve too many set-ups. What we did is that we actually had a consultant on set who had run a poker show and we talked to some people and we just shot it like a real poker game. We had ten cameras rolling and whatever we got, we got, and that's the way it went. We did some pick-ups the next day, but in general, we shot it like you would shoot a live event and then we edited it together. It's shot very much in the way poker shows shoot it. It's really more about the editing than the shooting frankly. You set up a bunch of cameras and you let them roll, then it's how you cut them together. I haven't seen "Lucky You" but I imagine they've done some fancy things during the poker game. We didn't do a hell of a lot of that.

CS: Poker tournaments on TV can be events of two hours or more, so how do you condense that so it doesn't take up the entire movie?
Penn: You'll have to be judge of that when you see it. That's a good question for my editor, how difficult it is to condense what is essentially… I never had any intention of showing an hour and a half of poker. Frankly, you're really trying to make a movie is only incidentally for poker fans, so the real key is figuring out exactly what moments you need to show in order to quickly tell the story and still give it some sort of drama.

CS: Did you know everyone in the cast beforehand like you knew Werner or was it just a matter of finding people you wanted to work with and who were willing?
Penn: Obviously Werner Herzog, Michael Karnow, those guys since they were in my last film, I wrote parts for them up front. Michael Karnow, the guy who played the crypto-zoologist in my last film, kind of came up with an idea for his part. Werner has a big part in the movie, both of which I conceived beforehand, then there are a couple parts where I kind of knew what I wanted, but I had a list of actors and I ended up picking the person that ended up playing the part. Then, there's a couple parts where the person who I cast made me change what the role was to fit them and what they do. Like any casting process, it kind of evolved as it went on.

CS: I know that a lot of your cast already played poker, but was that true with everyone involved?
Penn: No, a lot of the people didn't. I mean Werner has never played poker before in his life, and Chris Parnell had never played poker before. It doesn't really matter though. It's pretty easy to teach someone. Only the people at the final table need to know how to play poker and even then, sometimes the person who doesn't know how to play as well has a huge advantage over people who are really good in a very short game. It's one thing if you're playing over the course of weeks, but there are times where Chris' lack of knowledge of the game, made it harder for the opponents to read him. We did give him a crash course, and we had a lot of people on set to teach them poker. Werner picked it up very quickly, but it wasn't essential, in fact I kept saying to agents, "It doesn't matter to me if they know how to play poker." That's not so important.

CS: Did Werner Herzog make a documentary about his experience playing poker like he does about everything else?
Penn: No, you know where Werner went after making the movie? It seemed like a joke, but we needed him for ADR at one point, and we called him, and his wife was like, "Oh, no. He's in Antarctica making a movie." I was like, "Ha ha" and she sent me a picture and there's Werner in Antarctica making a movie.

CS: Have you worked on that Werner Herzog superhero movie we talked about last time?
Penn: (laughs) No, I haven't, but I still am working on this graphic novel about Werner I want to do.

CS: We've seen a lot of the cast do this sort of thing, but can you talk about getting Gabe "Mr. Kotter" Kaplan to be in your movie?
Penn: Someone involved in the movie, one of the producers, knew Gabe Kaplan. He's very famous in poker circles, because he's been a poker player for the last thirty years or longer. I'd grown up on "Welcome Back Kotter" and I was always a big fan of "Fast Break" and I was like, "Where is Gabe Kaplan? Why hasn't he done anything? Why isn't he acting anymore?" There's a part in the movie that he was just perfect for. David Cross and Cheryl Hynes play brother and sister poker players, the Schwartzmans. David's like the McEnroe of Poker and they're both uber-competitive and they were raised by this father who made them play all the time and was way too tough on them, and that's how they've gotten so good. Someone brought up Gabe Kaplan and I was like, "That's perfect. That's exactly the feel I'm going over." The actors I gravitate sometimes, even people who are non-actors, someone like Werner Herzog, there's like a deadpan quality to Werner that you can't mimic it. He just has it and there's no other way to describe it. Gabe Kaplan has something similar. He's got this incredibly deadpan delivery that's almost better-suited to this type of movie than it was to a sitcom, not that he wasn't great on "Welcome Back Kotter" but I actually think there's a couple scenes of him in this movie, where people will be like, "Oh My God! That's Gabe Kaplan?" I was really psyched about it, 'cause it's always fun to see someone you haven't seen in a long time, particularly someone like Gabe, who's had no interest in acting. He just moved onto other things, so it was really fun to bring him back, and I think it makes the character kind of fun to watch.

If you're in New York on April 27, it might be worth standing in line to get tickets for The Grand when it plays at the Tribeca Film Festival.