So what was the genesis of Due Date

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What do you love about your job? What is it that drives you?
Pesci? Hey, that’s not fair to Zach.
For me, partly it’s that a lot of times, comedies get dismissed, because when they’re done right, they seem really easy to make. When a comedy is good, it tends to be very breezy, and I think that gets interpreted as, “Oh, that was an easy thing to do.” But the truth is, the best thing you can hear as the director of a comedy—besides, of course, the movie doing well and all that stuff—is “that movie just put me in a really good mood.” I think there is a real place for comedies in culture. And yes, I understand the difference between The Hangover and The Social Network, but that doesn’t mean there is less of a place for The Hangover. I think it has a real effect on people, and I love doing that.
I know [laughs]. I was taking a dig at him.

There have already been a lot more sneak peeks out there than I would have liked! [Laughs] It’s not that we feel like we’re holding state secrets—it’s just, the thing about comedy is that it works well when there’s surprise involved. I’m not trying to be cagey, but we like to keep a little bit left for a surprise, that’s all. I will say we are in the in the middle of making an epic follow-up to The Hangover, and I think people will think it’s a worthy follow-up. We are really trying to make something great here.

Obviously we worked on it. I mean, even after my own pass at the script, Zach’s character wasn’t an actor yet. I called Zach one day, maybe a month and a half before we started shooting, and I said, “Maybe he should be going out to L.A. because he wants to be an actor, and maybe he’s inspired by something on a TV show.” And we started riffing on that. We gave him a dog three weeks before we started shooting. Things just kind of layer and layer. It’s always developing.
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I‘m about to turn 40. Here’s what I was saying to Zach last night, when we were having dinner: “I’m going to spend my 40th birthday in Bangkok shooting the sequel to the highest-grossing R-rated comedy ever.” When you’re younger and you say to yourself, “God, where will I be at 40?,” that’s a pretty good one.

Well, you and Zach are like the Scorsese and De Niro of R-rated comedy now.
So what was the genesis of Due Date?
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I have a Ferrari and a mansion, yes. No, I’m kidding. That’s not my style. I feel so privileged to be able to direct movies. It’s the only thing I ever wanted to do, and the fact that I get to do it and get paid to do it and get to show up every day and try to make Zach laugh and make Robert Downey crack up in the middle of a take—that’s just a dream.

No, he still drives around in that.

The film has some great cameos. Did having Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis on board make it easier to assemble everyone around them?

Zach’s character is just unbelievable. Was that character on the page, or did you and Zach—
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When you made the first Hangover, it was for about $35 million—at least that’s what was reported. When you do the sequel to something that was so monumentally successful, grossing almost $500 million worldwide, do you feel like you need to up the budget? Do you feel pressure to make it bigger?
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[Laughs] It happened pretty quick. He happened to have an opening in his schedule, and we were ready to go, so it really worked out.

Anti-chemistry, I love that. So Todd, you are now the holder of the record for the highest-grossing R-rated comedy in the history of whatever—the world.
Can you give us any sneak peeks into The Hangover 2?
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They really did, considering just how different their approach is to everything. It’s one of those happy accidents. Downey is a master at taking things very seriously. It was a really interesting duo, we knew that early on. At first Zach just went over to Downey’s house and had dinner with him, and you could tell there was a good kind of anti-chemistry.
What did it take in order to get Downey?
No, I don’t think it’s bigger at all. We recognize what was special about the first movie, and we always try to keep that in mind. So it’s not necessarily like, “Oh, it’s Transformers 2, it’s going to have more robots and more things exploding.” We do have to keep the surprises there and we do have to live up to the first movie. When you make a movie and it does as well as that, it’s not really your movie anymore. You kind of share the ownership with everybody who’s seen it. We take that pretty seriously, in terms of having the follow-up live up to the original. And as far as the pressure of it goes, to me it’s the opposite. There’s so much pressure when you’re shooting in an alley in Las Vegas at 3 a.m., and you’re thinking, Boy, this is really funny, but I wonder if anybody is going to see this movie with Zach and Bradley [Cooper] and Ed [Helms]—whom they barely knew. So shooting Hangover 2, you feel liberated, because you know people are expecting it and are going to turn up for it. That’s a really good feeling.

Yeah,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], we just got done with a photo shoot with Guinness. (Just kidding.)

But that’s never the way it happens in Hollywood!
I just want to know if Zach got rid of his Subaru yet. That’s my biggest question.

We tried to add a little more emotion, to make the movie about something. In other words, it’s not just a road movie with two guys bickering. It had to have another level for him to play. Downey is kind of the straight man in this movie, and he’s never the straight man in any movie. Even in Iron Man he’s not the straight man—he just doesn’t do that. But he had seen The Hangover, he liked Zach, and when we got him the script he just responded to it.
I basically hired the first two guys [Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland] to write it for me when I was shooting The Hangover. Then when I was done with The Hangover and I knew I wanted to work with Zach again, I started looking through scripts that we were developing. Due Date was one of them, and I thought, Oh, this could be great with me and Zach if I could get somebody really big in it, like a Downey, who could really elevate the movie. And that’s when we started rewriting it, and Adam Sztykiel started rewriting it to kind of get Downey.

When I interviewed Zach for the Vanities opener, he talked about how he and Downey worked together and how opposites attract.
How does it feel to be that guy? I remember when I met you at Sundance way back when. Now you’re making these hilarious blockbusters, and they’ve struck such a chord with audiences in America and worldwide. And you’re just about to turn 40, right?
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So now that you’re a big-time director, have you bought a mansion in Malibu yet, or a Ferrari? What are you doing with all that money, stuffing your mattresses?
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You know, ultimately these guys are all actors, and they like to play—meaning Jamie Foxx or [Ed: spoiler alert?] Danny McBride or Juliette Lewis. They are willing to do it because of Robert and Zach, and they get to come down to set and fuck around and make it really cool.

I love that. Or maybe Scorsese and Pesci.