John Michael Higgins on Bad Teacher and the State of Female-Centric Comedies

You're obviously known for improvisation, was there a lot on the Bad Teacher set?

Bad Teacher had quite a lot of improvisation. Jake is really into that. My entire part in Walk Hard was improvised, I think. It was almost like doing a Christopher Guest film, where I said whatever I wanted.

Do you like working that way?

No, I tell you. I end up doing that all the time -- I get hired for that a lot. I get on the set, and often the first thing they say is, "Michael, say whatever you want." It sounds great, but then I think, "Oh, just give me a script!" It puts a bit of a burden on me. I walk in and they're like, "We can't wait to see what you do!" Which is fine, except it puts these odd pressures on me. That's why every time I'm hired for a drama, I come home to my wife and go, "Honey, I'm doing a drama!" I'm thrilled, because I don't have to panic all day that I'm not gonna get it up. We improvised a lot on Bad Teacher, but to answer your question, I personally think improvisation is dangerous and overused. It is a great, useful tool to find things in the scene, unless what you're doing is specifically -- the spirit and structure of it is improvisational. Like Christopher Guest, where there really is no script and we're not, quote "improving" on anything. That's sort of what I resent sometimes about improvisation. The way Jake does it, is not that way. We really shoot the scene and then he uses improv to say, "Was there anything else in here that we missed? Could we have gone another direction in this bit of dialogue?" But we have a really good structure underneath it. And often the case -- and I think Christopher Guest is to blame for this, because he's been so badly imitated so many times -- people just abuse it.

I'm not so much into improvisation for itself. I don't think it's really -- I think it's a parlor trick or a theater workshop. It's for acting class. As a product, I'm not mad about it. It's not really story oriented. It's more of a competition. Or a cabaret trick. It's not about character and story and need and want. It's a laugh clock -- "Where's my next laugh? Where's my next laugh?"

It certainly feels like modern comedies are based on improvisation, though.

I do it all the time. Almost every single job I do. Except I'm doing a four-camera comedy now, and there's just no time for it. Every word is numbered and it's a 20-minute thing, so you really can't mess around too much. We might improvise in rehearsal, but that's where it belongs.

Is that part of the reason why you wanted to do Happily Divorced?

I'm really not running away from improv in a big way, but I'm often hired to do that. And the thing about the four-camera comedy, it's a little bit more like my real roots and really what I am. I'm a stage actor. That's what I was for 20 years before I did any film or television. It's really what I'm made of -- it's what I'm built for. And four-camera has great elements of that. There's an audience, we play it in real time -- each scene is in real time. I walk to the front door, put my keys down, "Honey, I'm home!" This goes on and on and on until the scene ends. Which means I, as a performer, can control time and space. It's almost like stage, where I tell the audience how long the conversation will last, how quickly I'll cross from the couch to the chair, and they generally don't edit that much. They're trying to capture something. That's the difference. I really like that. I haven't done a huge amount, mostly because I've been making films, but this opportunity came up -- and I happened to really love Fran Drescher -- and I thought this could really be fun for me. I just thought I hadn't really had a real series go as a four-camera. I hope this one does. It has a very good chance to go, I think -- famous last words, but it's not reinventing the comedy, which is a problem with four-cameras in the last ten years.

I would imagine the lead-in from Hot in Cleveland will help with whether or not Divorced catches on as well.

It's a really good lead-in, and I think part of the reason why Hot in Cleveland works is because it's a traditional, multi-camera show. And so is Happily Divorced. It trusts that the multi-camera format as invented by Desi Arnaz is a fully functioning format that doesn't need a lot of tinkering. It's an invention that seems to be invented complete. It's like the first car that they ever made was a Lexus. It's very weird that way, I think. But that's generally true of comedy, in a funny way. I bet if we were on the streets of Verona in 1511 and we watched some comedians to a couple of sketches, we'd laugh our asses off. I'm sure of it! It's funny. You don't need to improve upon it. Human nature is human nature.

You mentioned how you like doing dramas, and you've got a role in We Bought a Zoo -- does that qualify for you?

It's hard to even identify Cameron's work at all. I remember the year I went to the Golden Globes and the Best Comedy category. I was there for Best in Show, and we lost Best Comedy to Almost Famous. And I remember sitting at the table thinking, "Is Almost Famous a comedy?" We were up against Chicken Run and Almost Famous, so you tell me! I couldn't figure it out! We were obviously a dead-ahead comedy. Which is just to say that Cameron has a genre of his own -- whatever he does is its own thing. I really like that about him. In film, I like blurring those lines. Recently I saw Dog Day Afternoon again. My wife and I were looking at and were like, "This is a comedy!" It's a funny, funny movie. The types of problems that he faces are just comedic. This woman won't talk now, and now she's hot. Cameron makes movies like that. You feel real life pulsing in them. You feel like this real pull of emotion -- that's very apparent in We Bought a Zoo, particularly between Matt Damon and the boy [Colin Ford], which are very good and rich dramatic scenes.

And what's your part in this one?

Once again, I'm holding up the comedic end of it. I'm the heavy, but I'm the heavy in a light way. It was really fun to shoot. They actually built a zoo. I always call the movie "We Built a Zoo." Every day you go to the set and you're surrounding by animals -- odd animals, like giraffes. It was a great experience. Matt's a great guy, and Scarlett's very smart and interesting. It was a really fun movie to do.

It's the first Cameron Crowe fiction film since Elizabethtown in 2005. Do you think it'll have some big Oscar buzz this winter?

I would hope. It deserves to. It's a very unusual and interesting movie. It's very small scale for a movie with such big stars; it's a simple thing: a guy buys a zoo. Never seen that before. It's really good, and Cameron really covers the bases. It goes all over the place, thematically. I think it's going to be good, but for me -- it's a general -- if I think it's great when I'm on the set, it's going to be terrible. Maybe I should just say We Bought a Zoo is going to be terrible, because I'm pretty sure it's going to be great.

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