Last August, the Broken Lizard comedy troupe released their fourth movie Beerfest, but in the weeks leading up to it, founding member Paul Soter was shooting his debut film as a director, Watching the Detectives. Recently, ComingSoon.net had a chance to talk to Paul about his movie, and he updated us on Broken Lizard’s progress, including the possibilities of a sequel to their 2001 cult hit Super Troopers.
ComingSoon.net spoke to the guys in Broken Lizard a few times last year, on the set and in San Diego, and it looked like the world was their oyster at Warner Bros. where they were finding comedy projects for the studio and had already been talking about their next movie The Greek Road. A lot has changed after Beerfest wasn’t as huge a theatrical hit as the WB suits might have hoped. Paul updated us on that relationship and the status of those projects. “I think because of the year [Warner Bros.] had last year, we’re not able to just say ‘Alright, can you make another Broken Lizard movie like Beerfest?’ I think the movie did reasonably well in theatres and is really kicking ass on DVD so they’re very pleased. It’s put us in a situation where they love us, they want us to keep writing for them, to keep doing stuff, but we can’t just automatically set-up the next Broken Lizard movie with them. We’re having to be really creative like do we need to package us with some bigger star to get a movie made? We’re talking about a project that we star in with Johnny Knoxville, maybe that’s something a studio can feel a little bit better about it. ‘Cause we’re just still not to that point where we are a sure thing in terms of an investment of that kind of money.”
“The relationship is still great,” Paul continued. “We have our deal there, we have our office there and we do a lot of writing for them, and we’re doing producing for them. It’s been a real pleasure, its nice to have a home somewhere. I just finished a script that I want to direct next that’s actually a horror/thriller [called “Beware”] and Broken Lizard is producing, so we’re trying to package that. Other than that, we’re going to talk to Fox in a couple weeks about the ‘Super Troopers’ sequel so I’m curious to see if that’s going to happen.”
It was kind of surprising to hear that the guys were seriously considering doing a sequel to Super Troopers since they have had so many new ideas, but Paul explained the reasoning for this decision. “Honestly, the plan was always that we were not going to do it. In a perfect world, Broken Lizard would make a bunch of big movies and not be Up until fairly recently, we were fighting the perception with if we got recognized, people thought of us as ‘Hey, Super Troopers!’ not if you walk down the street and people point to you and say ‘Broken Lizard.’ It was a point of pride of let’s not go back to that well because we don’t want any further get ourselves locked into being thought of as the Super Troopers guys. It was nice, because I feel like over the last six months, we’ve turned a corner. I don’t know if it’s just that the DVD’s have caught up to us now. We’ve had ‘Puddle Cruiser’ out on DVD and that’s doing well, and ‘Beerfest’ is through the roof, so now there seems to be where people are regarding as ‘Hey, it’s Broken Lizard!’ or ‘Hey, it’s the Beerfest guys!’ Now that we feel like we’re not quite so in danger of being thought of as ‘Super Troopers’ we thought, ‘You know what? It’s such a fun movie, it’s such a fun environment and such great characters ’ We feel confident now about going back and we have enough great ideas where we’re like, ‘Yeah, we should make this movie.'”
Check back next week for ComingSoon.net’s full interview with Paul, talking about his new movie Watching the Detectives, starring Cillian Murphy and Lucy Liu, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival on May 1.
