Danny McBride on 30 Minutes or Less, Getting Over Your Highness, and How to Act During a Lap Dance

Were you disappointed by the reception for Your Highness?

You know, when you're making a movie, you're making what you think is original, and what you want to see. And obviously you hope that the rest of the world will also see what you're trying to do. But honestly, at the end of the day, when you're working in a studio and doing this, there are so many things that are out of your hand. When the movie comes out is out of your hand. How they market it is out of your hand. And it's out of your hand if the audience is going to show up on the day that it goes. Obviously David and I hoped more people would get into that film. But I think we made what we wanted to make, and I feel like that movie will be around. People can find it on their own. It'll just be up to ourselves to dig ourselves out of the hole. [Laughs] Getting people to trust us to make something else.

How do you regroup from something like that?

Luckily, 30 Minutes or Less is here, and then we have things like Eastbound, which is back in production. But yeah, it's a humongous learning experience for sure. It's crazy. The craziest thing about that movie was when it's out, and then you still have to be on the road for another two weeks selling the movie overseas when you know it just farted and fell on its face in America. It's just this thing of keeping a smile on -- keep moving, keep doing it.

But the other thing that was really helpful in dealing with that film was that I was going through it with David Green, who's one of my oldest friends. You're there to give each other pep talks on the days when it fucking stings a little bit and pull each other out. I mean, for us, I remember my first year of film school; we're shooting videos on these Super-VHS cameras, and there's just these two dudes who wanted to make these crazy movies. So there is a level of feeling like we accomplished something even if financially we didn't accomplish what everybody was anticipating or hoping. At the end of the day, we're just two dudes from the South who convinced a studio to make a really fucked-up, dirty, filthy and insane movie, and we got away with it.

Is this what you guys wanted? The studio movies, the mainstream stuff? Or is this kind of what you do to have opportunities for more freedom on smaller stuff?

You know, I never really imagined that we would have mainstream success. Even being considered for things that are out there for mainstream audiences to consume, it's navigating new waters that we never really had a plan for. I was second-unit director on George Washington, and creatively, it was so satisfying doing films like that and All the Real Girls and The Foot-Fist Way that we thought, "If we can keep doing thing like this the rest of our lives, we'll be completely happy." Then, as you start finding success and you get offered bigger opportunities and stuff, none of us knew how to navigate that. You're just kind of coming in and doing what you think is going to work.

But I think the lesson I've really learned from it is that if you want to take the chances and make the risky movies and things that you're not worried about a big audience responding to or not, you just make things with a budget that is responsible for that kind of thing. David and I, with Your Highness, never set out to make something that a mass audience would embrace. For us, when you make the choice to make things that are vulgar and that push the levels of decency, you're definitely going to isolate a large portion of people who are out there. So if you want to make those sorts of comedies, you're going to have to be responsible with the budget you're biting off for that.

Do you ever think about where your older characters are these days? Say, Bust-Ass, speaking of All the Real Girls?

Bust-Ass? You mean Tracy? [Laughs]

Of course! So sorry.

I haven't thought about Bust-Ass for a long time, but there was a retrospective of David's career at the Egyptian about a year ago, and I went to see that. It was the first time I'd went to see All the Real Girls in a long time, and it really kind of fucked me up for a few days, because... I don't know. Everything was so cool and new and simple to us then, you know? We were operating outside of any expectations, and we really felt like we were breaking new ground for ourselves personally. I love that film. I love what David has done with it. That was my first time doing anything in front of a camera and getting to know what that feeling is even like. It's just nuts after all these years, I can watch that and I'll see scenes and remember what was happening on the set that day -- memories that I haven't thought about since then. When I watched, it made me feel like, "Yeah, maybe I should visit some of these old movies every now and then" -- to kind of get back in that mindset of when there were no expectations on things, and you were doing it because you wanted to do it.

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