The cast boasts a four-headed hydra of American adolescent trouble in front of the camera (Mechlowicz, Jacob Pitts, Travis Wester and Michelle Trachtenberg), and a three-headed one behind it (writing-producing-directing team Jeff Schaffer, Alec Berg, and David Mandel), allowing for a spectacular cross-section of creative comedic voices. The cast and crew sat down not two days ago to discuss their upcoming project.
Mechlowicz, Pitts, and Wester were the first to face the journalistic firing squad. Baring their souls in much the same way they did their asses in the movie, they admitted that the film came out racier than they expected when they first signed on to the project. "When I read the script," confessed Wester (Teddy Bear's Picnic), who plays the male half of a virtuous pair of twins, "I didn't remember there being quite that much nudity." Mechlowicz concurred. "Even after we shot the film I didn't realize how much nudity was in it, until we saw the first screening. There's a substantial amount of it."
True to his character Cooper's randy, sex-obsessed personality, Pitts (K-19: The Widowmaker) leapt at the opportunity to shuck his drawers in the name of good old fashioned comedy – aping the willingness of one of his heroes to do so. "Ewan McGregor is a big inspiration – I see any movie he does, and not so much for his acting, though that's alright too."
Joking (we think), he continued: "He's got a lot to brag about, and you don't want to be the last to join that gravy train."
Despite the film's varied locations (among them Paris, Rome, London, and Ohio), principal shooting all took place in Prague, which provided a suitable European backdrop against which the performers could inflict their equal-opportunity offenses on the multiple countries the characters were supposed to visit. Alec Berg, who received a producer credit on the film despite co-directing it with his two longtime partners Schaffer and Mandel, said that Prague's versatility made it an ideal central location for filming. "We did find this amazing suburban backyard with a pool in it, and a lawn, but if you moved one house over you'd see like a field with a goat in it, and the other house on the other side is like Stalin's penitentiary."
The actors indicated that their involvement was limited to some CGI work, at least when the film's more exotic locales became sites for the characters' hijinks. "Everything was green-screened for any other country we were supposed to be in," explained Mechlowicz. The rhythm of the actors' responses suggested they'd had plenty of time to become familiar with one another, as they interrupted and finished one another's sentences throughout the interviews. Recalling the quick pacing of any actual shooting in specific places rather than a studio or in and around Prague, Pitts explained, "I don't think we were in any one location for more than two days ..." His pause was just long enough for Mechlowicz to finish his thought. "... Which was nice. It kept it different for us, and the energy of the whole thing up."
Despite the easy exchange of ideas and the flow of the production from one scene to the next, many of the sequences had to be trimmed, edited or removed outright to maximize the film's comic potential. As Mechlowicz indicated, however, none of them were unwarranted; hopefully, they improved the version now reaching its way into theatres. "Scenes were pieced together differently, and there were scenes I know I liked tremendously that got cut, but I'm sure through all the test screenings they did, it was done in the best interests of the film. The writers and director have such great comedic timing – they worked on Seinfeld for so long and they spent so much time in the editing room – that that's one of their really strong fortes, editing in terms of comedic timing."
Part of the reason for some of those edits and omissions, Mechlowicz begrudgedly confessed, was due to the sheer enjoyment he felt while in some of the scenes. "In one of the scenes when we were shooting, I just couldn't stop laughing, I mean, to the point of unprofessionality. It was ridiculous." Those gaffes notwithstanding, the other two admitted that a few of their favorite moments were eventually cut, but again, it was all in the service of a streamlined, entertaining final product. "A lot of stuff did get cut that I liked," explained Wester, "which was kind of disappointing, but I guess you've got to sacrifice some stuff for story."
Story was the singular appeal of Eurotrip's script for actress Michelle Trachtenberg, who cut her teeth on Nickelodeon shows as a pre-teen and recently ended an illustrious run on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "The great thing about Eurotrip, Trachtenberg gushed, "is it has an actual plotline. It's not just raunchy, gross-out comedy. There is a story where [Scotty's] looking for love in Europe. It is from the makers of Old School and Road Trip, so it has elements of those movies in it. I would compare it to American Pie, but I can say we have a little bit more of a story going on while making you laugh.
"The way the jokes are set up is not just about gross-out, it's things that normally happen in regular life that are ridiculously funny, but we just glorify them on screen."
Bouncing off a popular television series, and coming into her own as an adult actress, Eurotrip seemed like the perfect prescription to rid her of that dubious label of "teen star" that often plagues performers who achieve success during adolescence. Despite the abundance of bawdy humor, Trachtenberg said, "I was actually really excited. I was looking for a project when Buffy wrapped because I wanted something very different from Buffy, to show people that I am eighteen years old, I am growing up, not only as an actress but also as a young woman, and the script landed in my lap." As her appetite for more mature material developed, she described how she was reticent to accept an empty endorsement of the potential project before she'd investigated it thoroughly. "I was told it was really funny but I never believe what anybody else tells me until I read it myself, and every single page I was turning I was laughing hysterically."
Still, she did have one hang-up about accepting the role; her character Jenny did originally participate in the wall-to-wall nudity, and that was a bridge the fledgling actress was not yet willing to cross. "Originally my character Jenny has a topless scene, where she shows her boobs, but I sat down with my boys, the directors, and said, I love this movie I love the script, it's really cool, but I am not comfortable showing my chest." Though her individual reservations were satisfied long before shooting began, the issue of just how exploitative the film would be towards men, women, animals, or any other would-be participants still lingered over the production as time for release drew near.
One sequence in particular that skates the line – perhaps even crossing it – involves Cooper's seduction of a young woman who can't seem to find the stain that he insists lurks somewhere on her chest. Berg admitted it pushes far past what a lot of people might consider "acceptable." "That scene answers the question, 'What is beyond gratuitous?'" Schaffer agreed, though he insisted that their offenses were not limited to only women; rather, the film's jokey tone was a sort of catch-all for any party within the range of their incisive humor. "I've gotta say we are equal-opportunity offenders. Yes, that is degrading to women, but we are also degrading to men. We're degrading to America, we're degrading to the French, we're degrading to the Germans. At some point, everyone needs to have a little bit of a sense of humor because everyone's getting fired at."
Mandel offered a challenge – based upon an fairly unique inclusion in Eurotrip – to any journalists still posing questions about their ability to take aim on any target in sight. "I would defy you to name another American teen comedy that dares to show fifty naked penises."
As the film wrapped and final credits began to be awarded, one last clarification had to be made for the filmmaking triumvirate: no first-time directing team has ever been awarded with split credit. Berg attempted to explain why the guild night not be willing to do so. "The director's guild is insanely possessive of the director credit, partially because I think they're afraid it will become this kind of amorphous thing like a producer credit, and they're definitely afraid that someone like Bruce Willis will agree to do a movie, but he wants to co-direct it with so-and-so, and then it becomes directed by two people, but who really did the work? I guess that's understandable, but in our case, we went in and plead our case, saying 'Look, we've been together for thirteen years..."
Mandel re-enacted their argument, as the rapid-fire pitch of their words overlapped one another even more quickly than did their screen stars: "We are a team, we've always been a team, and they chose..." Berg leapt in, acting as both the DGA panel and himself, and responded. "The guild said, 'We know you're a team, we know you've always been a team, we know you're going to direct it together, but you can't have the credit.' They did the same thing with the Weitz brothers, and they did the same thing with the Farrelly brothers. This is the way they are. They do not give director credit [that way]."
Mandel, who always had the last word (or perhaps punch line), rejoined: "Our other plan was to direct under the name Steven R. Spielberg, but they wouldn't let us do that either."
Eurotrip opens nationwide on February 20, coming just after the flatulent humor of Along Came Polly and with just enough distance from the final act in the American Pie trilogy, which was successfully released last summer. Travis Wester hopes that their film inspires a whole new generation of films that follow the same vein as his new feature, bypassing the history of bodily fluids that have been ingested in past years, and aiming for the funny – and in the multitudes of teen boys, another equally important bone. "I'd like to see them return to the sex comedy, because I think for a number of years, there was this sort of surge of teen gross-out comedies, like the American Pie [movies] and stuff, which are okay, but let's take it back to the sex comedy." Wester couldn't have articulated our collective distaste for scatological humor better or more succinctly: "More sex, less poo."
