You've got to hand it to Jared and Jerusha Hess, the Utah filmmaker couple (Jerusha writes, Jared writes and directs) who hit comedy paydirt with 2004's Napoleon Dynamite: Regardless of whether or not they're your thing, they could never be accused of pandering to the mainstream. And never has that been more apparent than in Gentlemen Broncos, their third film together, and first featuring Sam Rockwell as an interstellar cowboy whose testicles have been removed for nefarious, if not entirely illuminated, space-research purposes. We spoke recently to the disarmingly polite and normal-seeming duo -- seen posing here in front of one of Broncos' lethal Battle Stags -- about the warped childhoods that inspired their worlds of weird.
MOVIELINE: Some of the strangest sequences I think I've ever seen are in your movie. Some scenes felt like fever dreams almost.
JARED: Our kids have fevers right now, man. But they vocalize their fever dreams.
JERUSHA: We need to start writing down what they say!
How do these ideas percolate between the two of you? Especially the stranger ones.
JARED: A lot of them are childhood ideas.
JERUSHA: And the stranger ones don't necessarily happen in a plot sequence. It's more like we have this funky idea, and then we just pop it in. [To Jared:] Don't you think?
JARED: Yeah, yeah. But the Battle Stags -- those are ideas I had as a kid, or drawings I'd have in my Trapper Keeper in school. The "flesh pocket" idea is an idea that actually came from Jerusha's cousin, that when people go to Heaven, they're going to be naked. But where do you put your hands? Well, you're going to have flesh pockets.
JERUSHA: We just gather, glean from other people.
JARED: We draw from everybody we know. The family characters tend to be autobiographical.
Does any idea occur to you and you're like, "No, that's too gross or weird. We can't go there."
JARED: It's not like we're trying to look for weird ideas for the sake of being weird. It's just the things that entertain us, I guess, that we want to see in a film.
It seems like you get particular satisfaction out of bodily functions and just biological humor in general.
JARED: We like to think of it as "cloning humor." There's a lot of cloning humor in the film.
Is there a lot of that kind of stuff at the dinner table at home?
JERUSHA: Yes. Yes. We both grew up in families with lots of boys. I mean, he has five brothers, I have seven brothers. So it was impossible to be polite.
So none of this is acting out or reacting towards a suppressed childhood?
JARED: I guess I just haven't grown up yet, at the end of the day. Yeah. Probably.
JERUSHA: We have a six-year-old boy. He's pretty gross.
Has he seen the movie?
JARED: I think he's seen early rough-cuts of the film. He likes the Battle Stags a lot.
Any plans for merchandising tie-ins and action figures?
JARED: I'd love to have a little Stag toy or a Brutus doll.
So you mentioned how much of your material comes directly from your childhoods. I wonder if you could share the first thoughts that come to your minds when I bring up the following words: Popcorn balls.
JARED: The mother character in the film is based on my mother and parts of her mom. My mom worked for a modest nightgown company growing up, and she also had a really great popcorn ball recipe. Her company was called Christmas's Country Corn. My mom's name is Christmas. So my brothers and I would often go with her to boutiques to sell her popcorn balls. So that's something very real.
Did she ever make you sell two-to-the-bag?
JARED: She never made me sell two-to-the-bag.
JERUSHA: They would have loved it, though!
OK. Moving on: Geodesic dome houses. Were those typical in Utah?
JARED: It wasn't. It was kind of hard to find. But as a kid, I had always wanted to live in a geodesic dome. I was always really jealous of people I knew that did live in them. Ironically, our editor grew up in a geodesic dome in Massachusetts. The people who want to live in them have to actually have to buy the kit and build them themselves.
JERUSHA: It's like their dream homes. They live and die in the dome homes.
Where did Héctor Jiménez's character of Lonnie come from? And what is he? I couldn't quite make out what sex, age, or planet that guy came from.
JERUSHA: I lived in Kansas for a while, in my freshman and sophomore year of high school. And there was this kid who was always making soap operas and thrillers on the weekends. He once called me and was like, "Jared. It's me. We're making my next thriller, and I'd love you to be the lead. We need you to bring a pair of silk pajamas, there will be a bedroom sequence." And I was like, "Uhhh -- I don't know if I'm allowed, man!" He was quite prolific. The look of Lonnie was directly inspired by him.
And what about that scene on the school bus where Michael Angarano gets a lotiony hand massage from Halley Feiffer, and Lonnie moans and chews potato chips in his ear?
JERUSHA: That happened to Jared.
JARED: That actually happened to me going down to a Shakespeare festival in Cedar City, UT when I was in high school. I had just moved to Idaho and was on this bus and was introduced to all these new kids. And this pair, a guy and a girl were sitting next to me doing this weird ear-blowing thing.
JERUSHA: She would bring not just a travel size thing of lotion to school, but a full-on supersized bottle of lotion every morning and squirt it full-on. The problem was that Jared was then associated with those weirdos.
Were you fans of this kind of pulp sci-fi fiction growing up?
JARED: I was a fan of the cover art. Even if I didn't read the book, I just liked looking at the cover art and having my mind blown. All my favorite films growing up were science fiction.As I got older and had more access to some of the more cult and low-budget films, I loved those just as much.
How do you respond to critics of your films who feel that you're not really making loving fun of your characters so much as laughing at them, and treating at them as oddities?
JARED: It's funny, because when Napoleon came out, a lot of people that didn't like the film didn't like it because they felt we were being condescending. But we have such affection and love for our characters for all their peculiarities. And yes, we are laughing at them throughout the film, but we also have a lot of hope and love for them, and want them to win in the end.
JERUSHA: And we don't want them to change, either. We want them to win on the basis of who they are.
JARED: And however bizarre their dreams are. And it's so autobiographical. Both of us moved around a lot growing up, and had to adapt and make new friends, and really kind of had that outsider point of view.
JERUSHA: We had to shop at thrift stores.
JARED: Our families weren't affluent by any means. So we identify very closely for the characters in our films.
Do the folks back home feel like you're spearheading a new movement of Utah Cinema?
JARED: Yeah. That's funny -- I never really thought of it that way.
JERUSHA: His grandpa says things like, "Well, that was a real interesting home video!"
JARED: When our mom saw Napoleon for the first time, she was like, "Well, that was a lot of embarrassing family material." But at the same time, I think they're kind of flattered that even though it's kind of an abstract reflection of their lives, it's our life too, and we enjoy seeing the goofiness in it all.
So you guys still live there. Any plans to move at all?
JARED: We do. We want to move to the country, and get even more rural than Salt Lake City.
JERUSHA: We want some land! We'll probably end up in Idaho.