Dinner for Schmucks Director Jay Roach on Franchise Burnout, French Farce, and Austin Powers 4

After launching two incredibly successful franchises in Austin Powers and Meet the Parents, Jay Roach became Hollywood's first pick to direct any studio comedy, and yet the Steve Carell/Paul Rudd vehicle Dinner for Schmucks (adapted from Francis Veber's French farce The Dinner Game) is his first theatrical endeavor outside those two series in over ten years. Roach chatted with Movieline about the pros and cons of that kind of success, why he loves a girl with an accent, and what he'd like to see from the next Austin Powers sequel.

Now, the casting for the supporting roles in this movie feels like you got to check a lot of boxes off your "comedians I like" list. Is that how it worked, or were you new to some of these people?

That's a great way of putting it. I suppose Lucy Punch is the one I was least familiar with, particularly as a comedienne, but everyone else I knew, in some way. I'm such a freak for Jemaine Clement and Flight of the Conchords and I watch it with my kids all the time, Little Britain I watch too, and David Walliams came out of that. Zach [Galifianakis] is kind of new to me, but only because I didn't really notice him until The Hangover, and I then immersed myself in everything way before I thought I would get to work with him, just because I hadn't seen anybody work like that. In a way, it was like getting all the funniest people I'd seen recently.

The most surprising casting choice for me was Jemaine, because the people we were looking at for that role [as Rudd's romantic rival] were more stereotypical hunky guys, and it just wasn't making me laugh. A similar thing happened with the Owen Wilson character on Meet the Parents: We had a quarterback frat boy character in that, and it just didn't work until we went a little bit off-center with Owen.

It's so sad when incredibly handsome men aren't funny. You just feel so bad for them, having to go through life like that.

Those poor winners who get all the cheerleaders. No, that's what it was, I thought it would be funny putting Ben [Stiller] against that or putting Paul Rudd against that kind of guy, but it's actually so obvious where it's gonna go, whereas if you get someone like Jemaine, he's got a little more off-center quality and you can't quite predict the attitude that person will take.

How did you cast Stephanie Szostak?

See that's another one, because -- and I say this in a self-critical way -- like many American comedies, there was the possibility that the girlfriend character would fade back into the texture of everything. Although she wouldn't have much screentime, it was essential that Paul Rudd would care so much about her that losing her felt like high stakes. We wouldn't have much time to set her up, and I felt that I needed to get someone who hooked you right away with very little material, and that would be better than going with someone who seems familiar. I'm a sucker for accents, and I have a weird theory that you listen more carefully if you meet someone who has a weird accent -- if you meet a girl, that you might actually be more alert to her personality and more attentive in some weird way. Stephanie came in and auditioned a number of times because she was so unknown that everyone was afraid of going with her.

People were like, "Who?"

They really were. My casting director friends were like, "What? You're not going to go with someone people know? Well, who is she, how do we get her in?" It's exciting. That was a side effect that I didn't see coming, that you cast someone like that and then there's that interest.

Obviously, the lead of the original film is a lot more unsympathetic. How concerned were you -- or how concerned was the studio -- with how sympathetic Paul's character would be?

I love the French film, and I've studied Francis Veber. French farce is different, and there's a different type of comedy that the French love that I studied for Meet the Parents, which I felt was like a French farce. I loved [The Dinner Game], but I felt it teased the audience about a dinner that we could deliver, and I think I would have liked it even more if I could connect and relate to whatever that guy was going through even more. I knew our film would be a little longer because Francis kind of turned his two-act play into a two-act movie, and to have the audience care about that guy for so long, we needed some suspense about which way he was gonna go.

Could you have made the movie with Paul and Steve in each other's roles?

That's a funny question. Hmm.

I think Paul doesn't get enough credit as a character actor.

Yeah, the character he did in Anchorman, the surfer in Forgetting Sarah Marshall...

The jerk in Wet Hot American Summer.

He's done some great character parts. He's hilarious, and he's the kind of guy who's the quote-unquote straight man, but that speech he does in the film about "the me you know and the me you don't know" is a great comic run. He always reminds me of Jack Lemmon in that speech, and that's how I think of him. He's completely physical if he wants to be, and unafraid to be broad, yet he's so straight that he can convince you as a leading man, and he's very attractive. He's got a rare combo of all that best things, including being one of the funniest improvisers around. He and Steve are great together. Steve kind of does that Paul Rudd character in The Office, in a way, so maybe I already made them switch.

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