If being crass were a science, then the Virginia-bred movie star Danny McBride would have a PhD.
If being crass were a science, then the Virginia-bred movie star Danny McBride would have a PhD. McBride returned to his home state over the weekend to a sell-out crowd for the 2016 Virginia Film Festival’s special presentation of his and frequent collaborator Jody Hill’s new HBO comedy, “Vice Principals.”
On this particular Friday night, McBride, not short on laughs and insight, was joined by Hill for a quick Q&A after the presentation.
The night began with showing an early collaboration of McBride and Hill with their short film Learning to Skateboard. Featuring some Fredericksburg scenery, the short follows McBride as he calls in sick to work and learns to shred on his board, disrespect authority, and not “be a slave.”
It is typical McBride and company, who do a lot with very little.
The two men met in film school in North Carolina and immediately connected through their dark sense of humor and Southern sensibility.
“We were next-door neighbors our freshman year and Jody’s roommate was a vampire, I believe,” reminisced McBride.
McBride and Hill’s often filter-less sense of humor has been a hot commodity since their 2006 debut.
The film, financed by McBride and Hill with credit cards, showcased McBride’s comedic chops with a strange story and interesting characters littered throughout. It also garnered the attention of SNL alum Will Ferrell and comedy producer Adam McKay who would help parlay that momentum into the series Eastbound & Down. The four season HBO hit featured McBride as the infamous Kenny Powers in a redemption tale unlike any other.
Instead of returning for another chapter of Eastbound, Hill and McBride pitched Vice Principals which feels like a comedic cousin to their earlier efforts.
McBride offered a sincere apology to those who didn’t have a chance to watch the show as the spoiler-inducing last two episodes of the first season were shown.
The show offers a glimpse into the lives of two competing vice principals (McBride and Walton Goggins) that join forces to take down a newly hired principal (Kimberly Herbert Gregory). It is just as dark as it is hilarious. McBride plays the series’ central character, the authoritative but emotionally stunted Vice Principal Neal Gamby, as Hill serves as the show’s primary director while both write and produce.
McBride recalled how the show came to fruition creatively after “The Foot Fist Way,” had finished its festival run, “We were like, ‘What should we do? What should we do now?’ and Jody actually came to Virginia, where I was living at the time, and we locked up for a week and wrote a feature version of this TV show.”
The two put the project aside for years and would eventually return to it after Eastbound wrapped. “When we were finishing up Eastbound, we looked at it one more time and were like “this would be awesome if it were not an hour and a half and actually nine hours”.
The two initially sold the series to HBO as a limited-series between fall term and spring term, with each season being nine episodes. “HBO bid on it and they were okay with that and they liked the idea of that, so in 2014 we wrote the whole entire series in 18-episodes before we started shooting.”
McBride remarked on how the audience is at least sophisticated enough to understand where their brand of entertainment comes from.
“Jody and I are both humongous fans of both film and television, we’ve grown up on it, and we’re the first generation that grew up with video stores and VCRs,” he said. “We’ve seen hundreds of movies a year; the average film viewer has as well.”
So how did they get the great Bill Murray to show up in the first episode of “Vice Principals”?
(From left, moderator Coy Barefoot, McBride and writing and producing partner Jody Hill)
“I did two movies that were universally liked, Rock the Kasbah and Aloha,” McBride said sarcastically about the two critically panned flicks. “But the takeaway from that I do become friends with Bill Murray, which is worth it.”
The collaboration with HBO seems to be a perfect fit, as McBride noted: “They are really hands-off with this. We respect them so if they have any issues with anything we listen to it, but most of the time they’re telling us to push it further. They want more nudity”
Taking questions from the audience, both men are asked why their humor has such deep characters; “To us this is a very like broad comedy concept, you know? So we embrace that and just trick the audience into thinking it’s going to be something silly” states McBride. “We don’t even approach these movies like comedies; we just approach them like they’re dramas with dick jokes.”
“It’s either the Odyssey or some dumb 80s movie” Hill chimes in on where their influences lurk inside of their twisted stories.
“I think that empathy is one of the greatest virtues that people can kind of have,” said McBride about his his history and connection with incredibly abrasive characters. “The idea of trying to present a character who is such a shithead, and has such terrible qualities and trying to figure out how is a person is just relatable is something that is interesting to us.”
To give the evening a more homecoming feeling, McBride even invited and introduced the audience to his former English/Drama teacher from Spotsylvania-County, who told the audience he was an “excellent” student back in the 90s.
David Gordon-Green, a frequent collaborator and former classmate, has directed the next season set to premiere likely next summer, again on HBO.
“They haven’t given us an official release, but I imagine it would probably be next summer I would assume,” McBride said. “But yeah we finished it, delivered it all to HBO, the second season, before the first season even aired. So it was cool completely make something in a bubble, and I think that was what Jody and I were trying to do.”
McBride and Hill are currently busy currently working on The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter featuring McBride and Josh Brolin with Hill directing. The film is due out late next year and is being shot in Asheville, North Carolina. The story follow two hunters taking their sons on a hunting trip who aren’t exactly into it…
