5 Pro Tips for Making a Great R-Rated Comedy From Horrible Bosses Director Seth Gordon

Despite some chatter to the contrary, comedies are alive and well in Hollywood this summer. Especially R-rated comedies: the combined domestic grosses of The Hangover Part II, Bridesmaids and Bad Teacher are closing in on $500 million. Into this landscape arrives Horrible Bosses (out Friday), the Seth Gordon-directed comedy about three dudes who try to kill their titular terrible employers. How come Bosses works so well when some other summer comedies have not?

Starring Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day, Horrible Bosses is everything you wanted The Hangover Part II to be: a tight, funny and vulgar romp of "boys being boys," with ridiculous stakes and actual consequences. Gordon sat down with Movieline in Manhattan two weeks ago to discuss five tips to crafting a great R-rated comedy.

1. Trust your first reactions

With so many R-rated comedies getting made, what made the script for Horrible Bosses standout to Gordon? The tears. "I wasn't looking for anything, I just read it and cried with laughter, and there was no more to figure out," he told Movieline. "I read so many things that don't move me any way. This one was really compelling. The plot is sophisticated enough, you don't see stuff coming and things catch you off guard."

2. Keep things grounded in some reality

It's what Paul Feig referred to while discussing the success of Bridesmaids, and it's what Gordon hoped to achieve with Bosses: comedy that appears to be of this natural world. "It was really important for me to make the three jobs grounded at the top -- to have it really feel like different and plausible office places, where relatable, office-level oppression, a la Office Space happens," he said. "I tried to have three different flavors of that, so it wasn't the same note again and again. I thought grounding it in a reality -- emphasizing Spacey at the top, because I think his micro managerialism is the most relatable frustration people have with their bosses -- I felt like all of that would hopefully conspire to make it believable that this is in the real world, so that we could depart from there, and go on this journey of wish fulfillment."

Of course, that wouldn't work without an audience surrogate like Jason Bateman. "He's not fully in at the top. Then he's a little more in, but, whoa, didn't expect to be. Just the way he slips into that is a big part of why the journey works, because you think that guy is reasonable. Bateman is the one that's like, 'Wait a minute, let's think about this?'"

Those moments of humanity are key as well. "There's a very smart thing that they did in the first Hangover, which is that you never realize the entire movie that Bradley Cooper has a wife and a kid, and then just before the end, where you resolve the primary story, they drop that in. I think that's so smart. These guys have dabbled in the dark side, but then you reveal, 'Ah, they're good guys' in a way you haven't even asked before."

"The truth is, the success of The Hangover paved the way for films like this. It made R-comedy OK again. It's a lesson that everyone learns, again and again. Making films where people talk the way we talk is going to be appealing forever."

3. Cast the right people, then don't screw it up

"They're incredible," Gordon said about Bateman, Sudeikis and Day. "Hindsight 20/20, perhaps we should have realized that having seasoned writers in the trio -- all of them can write, and all of them are expert performers -- I guess you could say, we should have known, but there's no one way you could know that. It's just kind of amazing chemistry."

"It's trite when people say hire well and get out of the way, but this is certainly a case where they brought so much more than you could expect them to."

4. Don't forget that moviemaking is a business

Despite having the larger name recognition, stars like Jennifer Aniston, Jamie Foxx, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell take a back seat to the three leads in the film -- but they still appear prominently in the marketing campaign. "That was the model," Gordon said about casting big names in supporting roles. "Have the three guys be guys that can't quite yet open a movie just by themselves -- Bateman is definitely a bigger star than I imagined in that role initially, but I was very happy he was interested in doing it -- [and then] let's structure the schedule so that the boss doesn't need to be there for the week. It's very easy to get people to commit just for a week, especially when you're shooting in LA."

5. Hire a great editor, and cut with extreme prejudice

"I needed to have an editor with tremendous bandwidth," Gordon told Movieline, and so he hired Peter Teschner (Borat, Dodgeball, Going the Distance). "There's so much gold that we had to lose, just for the story to flow efficiently. It really did take a tremendously talented editor to stay right on line for the best version of the scene." If that sounds ruthless, that's because Gordon says you have to be. "There's certain scenes that were really good, and they did clarify things or had a few jokes in them, but at the end of the day, just stay on the jugular of what the story absolutely needs. You have to give audiences credit to close those gaps. At the end of the day, we have a 92 minute film that doesn't drag."

Horrible Bosses hits theaters on Friday.

[Photo: Getty Images]