Tagline: We know it’s big. We measured.
Epic Movie is an ensemble comedy about four young adults going on an awesome adventure. In the spirit of “Scary Movie” and “Date Movie, a parody that spoofs recent mega-blockbusters. The comedy centers itself around four orphans who visit a chocolate factory and are transported to the wonderful land of Gnarnia, after stumbling upon an enchanted wardrobe. There they battle pirates, encounter earnest wizards and attempt to defeat Gnarnia’s dastardly White Bitch.
The twisted minds of two of the six writers of “Scary Movie” tackle the biggest mega-blockbusters of all time in “Epic Movie.” The story centers on four not-so-young orphans: one raised by a curator at the Louvre (where an albino assassin lurks), another a refugee from Mexican “libre” wrestling, the third a recent victim of snakes on her plane, and the fourth a “normal” resident of a mutant “X”-community.
The hapless quartet visits a chocolate factory, where they stumble into an enchanted wardrobe that transports them to the land of Gnarnia (with a “G”). There they meet a flamboyant pirate captain and earnest students of wizardry – and join forces with, among others, a wise-but-horny lion to defeat the evil White Bitch of Gnarnia.
For the last thirty years, from “Airplane” to “Hot Shots” to “Scary Movie,” parodic comedies have focused on specific movie genres. With the studios’ ongoing deluge of summer and holiday blockbusters becoming the norm, writers/directors Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer felt the time was ripe to expand the scope of genre parodies to include recent action films, comic book films, and children’s fantasy films.
The idea for the film came to Friedberg and Seltzer while they were making “Date Movie” with producer Paul Schiff. “We had so much fun making that movie we didn’t want to stop, so we came up with another one,” says Schiff. “We were just brainstorming and talking about targets of opportunities ripe for parodies.”
Friedberg and Seltzer decided to build the framework for the film around the general plot of “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” Thus was born the characters of Edward, Peter, Susan and Lucy – four unrelated orphans in search of their homes, who are magically transported into the fantasy world of Gnarnia (“with a G, like Gnarly”), where they meet The White Bitch (Jennifer Coolidge), and her team of assistants and assassins. Along the way they meet numerous incarnations of characters from recent tentpole films.
“We just like these movies and thought they’d be great movies to ridicule,” says Aaron Seltzer. “Like `The Da Vinci Code’ and `Superman’ and `X-Men’ and `Nacho Libre.’ It just seemed like fun to parody them all, using `Narnia’ as the broad outline, and then it just stemmed from there.”
EPIC MOVIE reunites four of the stars from “Date Movie” – Adam Campbell, Jennifer Coolidge, Tony Cox and Fred Willard – and introduces many actors new to the directors’ repertory company. The filmmakers note that they fell in love with a lot of great, funny actors on “Date Movie,” and felt lucky to be able to bring some of them back. “Overall,” notes Jason Friedberg, “we wanted a really strong ensemble cast and lots of different personalities.”
A quartet of talented comedic actors plays the orphans who, strangely, look nothing alike. Kal Penn plays Edward, who falls under the White Bitch’s spell; Adam Campbell is Peter, who tries to be a true leader even though his natural inclinations are to cut and run; Faune Chambers is Susan, the practical and stoic one; and Jayma Mays is Lucy…the idiot.
“Edward is loosely based on the Edmund character from `Narnia,'” Kal Penn relates. “He’s jealous of his older brother, Peter, and doesn’t really think that he’s part of the family. He’s the traitorous character. He’s led to believe that the witch is going to make him king of this land, whereas my siblings are on a separate mission. He doesn’t feel like he really belongs, but through the course of the story they all come together as a family to fight off the witch.”
In a spoof of Penn’s own body of work, the directors added a reference to “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.” “It was definitely important to me to ridicule something that I’ve done as just part of the good-natured aspect of EPIC MOVIE,” Penn says. “I think the great thing about all the movies we’re ridiculing is that they’re such a form of pop culture reference, that to even have the White Castle reference was kind of an honor.”
Adam Campbell, who starred as the foppish, charming, bumbling British lad Grant Funkyerdoder in Seltzer & Friedberg’s romantic comedy spoof “Date Movie,” portrays the foppish British lad, Peter, who sprouts chicken wings. But instead of flying majestically through the air, Peter clucks and runs. “My character is a rather anxious, nervous, frightened mutant boy who eventually gains his courage and becomes something bigger than he’s ever dreamt,” says Campbell.
Jayma Mays, who co-starred opposite Rachel McAdams in “Red Eye,” plays dimwitted Lucy, a parody of the youngest of “Narnia’s” Pevensie children. Lucy discovers early on that the only person in her life is killed, but they’ve left her a trail of clues. Along with the others, Lucy goes on a quest where she eventually discovers that she actually has had a family all along.
For the role of Susan, the most responsible and practical of the orphaned adventurers, the filmmakers selected Faune Chambers, whose credits include “White Chicks” and “Bring It On Again.” In casting the role they were looking for someone to provide a good counterbalance to Jayma Mays’ Lucy.
“Susan has been an orphan all of her life,” explains Chambers, “so she feels that she’s never been a part of anything worthwhile. So when she finds this golden ticket that says, `an epic adventure,’ she’s just so excited. And once she gets there, of course, it turns into something they’re not expecting, but what she’s discovered is a nice little family unit that she’s never had and never been a part of.”
Jennifer Coolidge plays The White Bitch, a reference to Jadis, the White Witch, the principal villain from “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Coolidge, who co-starred for Seltzer & Friedberg in “Date Movie,” is best known for her work in a host of Christopher Guest comedies, including the recent “For Your Consideration,” as well as the “Legally Blonde” films.
Coolidge says that playing the bad girl is more interesting to play than a more virtuous character. “I guess I just get offered the bad girl a lot,” she says. “I seem kind of typecast, I guess, but yeah, it’s just more fun.”
In a first for a parodic film – or any film in history – two separate actors portray roles originated by Johnny Depp in other films. “Saturday Night Live” veteran Darrell Hammond, best known for his brilliant takes on everyone from Bill Clinton to Sean Connery, plays the roguish Captain Jack, referencing Johnny Depp’s memorable performances as Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films.
In preparing for the role, Hammond says “I spent almost every hour of every day watching `Pirates of the Caribbean,’ trying to get every single little thing I could get my hands on, because the thing about the character is that it has so many layers to it, so I had to take a look and find as many aspects to parody as I could.” Crispin Glover (“Back to the Future”) injects his trademark eccentricities into the character of Willy, channeling Johnny Depp’s performance from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Gene Wilder’s original Willy Wonka – and even a bit of Michael Jackson.
“We were searching high and low for an actor to have the courage and sense of abandon to ridicule Willy Wonka as played by Johnny Depp,” recalls Paul Schiff. “Crispin twisted the character and played with it.”
Fred Willard plays Aslo, in a tongue in cheek reference to the computer-generated lion, Aslan, from “The Chronicles of Narnia.” “Aslo is kind of a randy lion, who has an eye for the ladies,” says the comedy veteran.
Willard undertook some unorthodox research to get into the mind of a lion. “I went to several zoos,” he says. “I ate with the lions. I slept with the lions. Made love to the lions. Made love to the zookeepers. And finally they said, `That’s enough. Out you go.’ And I said, `But I’m preparing for a movie.'”
In creating Aslo’s makeup effects, every expense was spared. “My days consisted of them slicking down my hair, putting on a skullcap, putting on the wig, struggling with the pants and shoes, and shaving my chest so they could glue the fake chest hair on,” Willard says.
Diminutive character actor Tony Cox, best known as Billy Bob Thornton’s sidekick in “Bad Santa” as well as his spoof of Hitch in “Date Movie,” plays Bink, an assistant (and chauffeur) to the White Bitch. “Bink is a real bad-ass mo-fo sidekick to the White Bitch,” says Cox, whose character sports a Fu Manchu beard.
Kevin Hart, a veteran of the “Scary Movie” series, plays Silas, the Albino Monk, a parody of the self-flagellating assassin portrayed by Paul Bettany in “The Da Vinci Code.” In EPIC MOVIE, Silas works for the White Bitch as one of her many assassins. Hart underwent three hours of makeup and sported special contact lenses to play the character.
Even the blockbuster “X-Men” series doesn’t escape ridicule. When we first meet Peter, he’s a classmate of Mystique, Rogue, Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, and Magneto at the “Mutant Academy of Arts and Sciences.”
Carmen Electra, who appeared in a “King Kong” parody in “Date Movie,” portrays a character modeled after Mystique, shape-shifting mutant in the “X-Men” films. “I worked with directors on `Date Movie’ and on the first `Scary Movie,'” explains Electra. “So we’ve built this relationship, and when they called me up last-minute and asked me to be in this movie I thought it would be fun to dress up as Mystique and get to work with the guys again.”
Had EPIC MOVIE faithfully followed the films it ridicules, it would have been a globe-spanning adventure for the cast and crew alike, taking them from the lush forests and fields of New Zealand to the waters of Costa Rica; and from the museums of Paris to a tiny backwater village in Kazakhstan. However, with the help of movie magic, the filmmakers were able to create magisterial sets in the suburbs and stages of Southern California.
Producer Paul Schiff notes that making a parodic movie like EPIC MOVIE is deceptively complicated. “Because we’re taking on some pretty big and spectacular movies to ridicule, in order for the joke to work the scene has to be grounded in enough reality of that movie so that you can twist it and turn it and ridicule it.”
Executive producer Rodney Liber agrees that there is a level of difficulty inherent in parody films that aren’t found in more mainstream movies. “Unlike other movies where you’re actually concentrating on one storyline, with this one you have maybe twenty to thirty storylines you could be concentrating on, because you’re commenting on so many different movies,” he says.
Los Angeles’ Museum of Natural History stands in for the Louvre Museum in Paris, where we are introduced to the character of Lucy (Jayma Mays), who is sent on her adventure after discovering an intriguing code from an elderly, breakdancing museum curator played by veteran actor David Carradine of “Kung Fu” and “Kill Bill” fame.
“The Chronicles of Narnia” was filmed in New Zealand, but EPIC MOVIE found its lush, rolling hills in Newhall, California, about 30 miles north of Los Angeles.
A ranch in Placerita Canyon in Newhall was the setting for the exterior battlefields of Gnarnia, along with Aslo’s camp. A veritable Renaissance Fair of vintage-garbed background performers – woodsmen, archers, and soldiers – usually 100-200 in total, were brought in daily to the location for two weeks of filming, mostly in sweltering heat approaching 110 degrees.
Costume designer Frank Helmer had one of his proudest moments with the work he did with Jennifer Coolidge’s The White Bitch. “The first time the White Bitch was shot in her full glory was part of the battle scene in which she is reviewing her troops,” he recalls. “It was the first time we had her complete look together: her amazing dreadlock wig, the jackalope headdress I designed, the brown battle dress and her leather arm gauntlets. When I saw her finally in place with the 200 Gnarnia warriors and Bink by her side she looked exactly as I had envisioned, and it was a glorious moment.”
In an age where the visual effects budgets of major Hollywood blockbusters alone is more than the entire budget of most films, visual effects producer Greg Baxter and visual effects supervisor Ariel Shaw, were charged with the task of creating – and at some times recreating – lavish visual effects sequences from the vast array of films parodied by EPIC MOVIE.
The most complicated sequence for the duo and their team of CGI animators and technicians was a sequence featuring a certain pirate captain atop an out-of-control mill wheel.
A talking beaver character and a White Bitch/Davy Jones octopus tentacle character were designed and operated by master puppeteer Mark Rappaport and his team of on-set puppeteers from his special effects company Creature Effects Inc. Five animatronic puppeteers articulated the body and facial features of Mr. Beaver, with the voice provided by Katt Williams.
Supervising the vast army of stunt soldiers and other stunt performers throughout the film was stunt coordinator Keith Adams, best known for his stunt coordinating work on Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” films.
Production designer William Elliott replicated the original films’ looks as much as possible, while avoiding obvious touches. “We try to base all the comedy in reality and let the comedy come from the script and the actors, to give them a good, firm foundation in which to work.”
Not content with mastering the art of parodic movie screenwriting, with EPIC MOVIE, writers/directors Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer have turned to the craft of songwriting. “We’re more songwriters than filmmakers,” jokes Friedberg.
The duo wrote the lyrics for two memorable song and dance numbers: the maniacal “He’s Willy,” performed by Loompa Oompas, and “Lazy Pirate Day,” as executed by Captain Jack and his merry band of pirates.
“We like lots of music in our movies,” says Seltzer. “It keeps things upbeat, fun and different, and some of the movies we’re parodying have music in them, like “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”
The dancing in the film’s two big musical numbers was choreographed by Stacy Walker, who also choreographed sequences for Friedberg and Seltzer on “Date Movie.”
Epic Movie (2007)
Directed by: Aaron Seltzer
Starring: Kal Penn, Adam Campbell, Jennifer Coolidge, Crispin Glover, Héctor Jiménez, Carmen Electra, David Carradine, Jayma Mays, Crista Flanagan, Sara Jean Underwood, Pollyanna Uruena
Screenplay by: Jason Friedberg
Production Design by: William A. Elliott
Cinematography by: Shawn Maurer
Film Editing by: Peck Prior
Costume Design by: Frank Helmer
Set Decoration by: Teresa Visinare
Art Direction by: Daniel A. Lomino
Music by: Ed Shearmur
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, language and some comic violence.
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: January 26, 2007
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