Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote a really funny movie called Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. In it was weed, nudity, poop jokes, Neil Patrick Harris (that’s Doogie Howser) and social commentary. It also had the honor of starring a Korean-American: John Cho and an Indian-American: Kal Penn, who didn’t have funny accents or know martial arts, and believe it or not, this was an American first and a very big risk to take with studio executives and audience.

Hardened by experience, Jon and Hayden fought to keep the substance in their writing and Harold and Kumar go to White Castle didn’t become Mike and Dan go to McDonalds. The audience (that’s us) proved that we could take it. Harold and Kumar may not have been a box-office smash but it soared high in DVD and rental sales.

America laughed a lot. Harold and Kumar became household names. So Jon and Hayden are back, this time as writers and directors for Harold and Kumar 2 (as yet untitled). Now that they are fully in charge of the movie’s artistic vision, they plan to “correct the mistakes” of the first movie. Giving us a full-force comedy that will push buttons we didn’t even know we had. Expect to have soda flying out your nose.

Rumors and Secrets and Lies

The Vulture: Where are you guys right now?

Jon Hurwitz: We are in Shreveport, Louisiana. We just started our second week of pre-production on Harold and Kumar 2.

V: What does pre-production mean? What are you doing?

JH: This is a whole new experience for us. Basically we’re working with each of our different department heads shaping every specific detail of the movie. We’ve got an incredible team. Our Cinematographer, Daryn Okada, knows absolutely everything there is to know about photography. He’s a genius. And we’ve got an amazing production designer named Tony Fanning, who has a lot of experience with really seasoned directors. He’s worked with Steven Spielberg, The Coen Brothers, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Zemeckis… and now he’s slumming it with us. So we are really honored to have him.

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve been going location scouting like crazy and have found most of where we’ll be shooting our scenes. Each time we go on a scout, there’s a larger group of people with us. Hayden and I, we’re first-time directors on this so each experience is really fascinating. But what’s been the most fun is that with every decision we make, we’re finding new opportunities for comedy or new ways to help make the movie truly great. Anyways that’s our hope. We’ll see how it turns out.

V: So you’re filming in Shreveport, Louisiana? I thought it was supposed to be in Amsterdam?

JH: It takes off where the last movie ends. Harold and Kumar try to go to Amsterdam… but, uh… an incident occurs which gets them in trouble and they end up… basically through the bulk of the movie as fugitives trying to secure their freedom.

V: Oh. I heard a rumor that the incident happens on a plane?

JH: Yes. I would say there’s a bit of an incident.

V: Oh. Well I also heard a rumor that Harold and Kumar would be a trilogy… Is that true?

Hayden Schlossberg: The truth is that Jon and I love writing for these characters and we see Harold and Kumar movies, not as a trilogy, but as something we want to continue writing until we get sick of it and we’re not sick of it yet.

So as many movies as we can think up that are really funny and original, we want to work on.

V: You’ve written movies before but this is your first time directing one. How is it different?

JH: Hayden and I over the years have written upwards of ten to fifteen screenplays. Writing a screenplay is a completely different experience because it’s just the two of us sitting in a room, writing and hanging out. We’re not really working with a whole lot of other people. As writers, we’ll develop the projects with producers or actors and take meetings with studio executives, but for the most part, it’s just the two of us.

As directors it’s a lot more fun because you get to work with a lot of people and be a major part of the entire creative process. I mean, Hayden and I were never fans of screenplays growing up. We were fans of movies. It’s fun to have the opportunity to bring our entire vision onto the big screen. Or, at least as much as the budget can afford.

HS: Writing is a really personal experience and directing is very collaborative. I can imagine certain writers not wanting to direct because they don’t want to deal with people. But Jon and I are very enthusiastic about this movie and the people we’re working with. For us it’s fun and a chance to actually socialize. As opposed to just sitting in a room and brainstorming.

Odd-Couple Dynamics

V: But you guys collaborate all the time. You work as a team.

JH: Yeah. We have a constant collaboration but we’ve been friends since high school. We’re like brothers. It’s a simple collaboration between us and by now we pretty much share the same brain.

When you collaborate as directors you get to work with all sorts of experts who know about all the things we don’t know about in terms of filmmaking.

HS: I think the fact that there are two of us has helped our ability to collaborate with others. We’re used to having to work out ideas and problem solve with another person.

I think a lot of screenwriters don’t become directors because they sometimes have a little more trouble working with other people.

V: In the first Harold and Kumar there were all these groups of two: Harold and Kumar, the white guys down the hall, those two English girls who had ED…

JH: I think that in comedy a lot of times odd couple dynamics are really fun. If you have one person with a strong point, then it’s fun to have the person who’s the counterpoint. It allows you to explore both sides of an issue in a comedic way.

But I think it can also be attributed to the fact we are a writing team. One of us will say something and then the other will immediately know how the other character would respond.

V: In the director’s commentary of Harold and Kumar you said “If you can show boobs, show boobs. If you can show bush, show bush.” That interested me. You made a movie starring a Korean and Indian actor and it wasn’t a martial arts film. A nationally-known fast-food chain let you use their name repeatedly. A main subtext to the movie is smoking weed. It seems like you almost have a check list of “things to get away with if possible”.

HS: I…

JH: I…

HS: Jon you go first.

JH: I was just going to say that comedy is about pushing the envelope.

Hayden and I have been friends since high school and we always connected over comedy. In high school, we’d always talk about the Farrelly Brothers movies, the Zucker Brothers movies, and Howard Stern. Then it was Dave Chappelle’s stand up and South Park. A common thread you find with all of the things we tend to like is that they all push the envelop in some way. The comedy we didn’t like always kept it safe.

V: Like what?

JH: Watered-down teen comedies.

HS: We grew up in a PG-13 era. There were a lot of movies that were just…

JH: Fun.

HS: Yeah more fun then funny. We always liked things that made an audience roar with laughter. Like Jon said, The Farrelly Brothers, with a movie like There’s Something about Mary. It’s a movie that everybody loves but when you watch it it’s actually really far-out, especially in 1998. They were doing things that hadn’t been done before, while still being a romantic comedy and having a heart to it. Those were the types of movies that Jon and I really liked, and it shows in what we do.

Do You Guys Smoke Weed?

V: Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, is it a metaphor for second-generation immigrants discovering the “American Dream” or is it just a stoner teensploitation type film?

JH: We see it as both. I think this goes into what we were talking about before, with the teen comedies that were around when we were growing up. Everything was real “on the surface”, and at times these movies didn’t give any credit to the audience. Not just, no credit to a young audience, but no credit to a general audience.

Working in the business you get to see how a lot of movies get watered-down. There are a lot of movies that were made that people think really suck. Sometimes you find out these movies actually had excellent scripts, it’s just, over the process, people were afraid to do this or afraid to do that.

What we like about the first Harold and Kumar is that we were trying to make a movie that was a youth comedy, and a stoner comedy, and a gross-out comedy. It was all of those things but there was also a lot more going on underneath the surface. There was a lot going on, so if you didn’t enjoy everything, at least there might be something for you. But if you connected with the movie on all levels, you could really have a great time high or not high.

V: Do you guys smoke weed ?

HS: We’ll just say you can watch Harold and Kumar and take a guess.

How a Script Becomes a Movie: One Phone Call.

V: Let’s back up. You sold your first screenplay together while you were in high school?

JH: We actually sold it when we were in college. We decided in high school that we wanted to start writing together but we didn’t think it was realistic.

I mean, we were a couple of guys from New Jersey and we didn’t know anyone who was in the film business. You would constantly hear, whenever you talked about writing movies, that it was this foreign thing that was just impossible to do.

I think that when we got into college and we got closer to our chosen professions, Hayden was going to go to law school and I was going to be an investment banker. We sort of said to ourselves: This is a countdown to horribleness.

It wasn’t what we wanted to do with our lives. There were elements of those jobs that we could do and we’d earn a paycheck. But as we got a little older and continued to see a lot of shitty comedies getting made, we thought: Why not us? We started writing together the summer after our sophomore year of college. Hayden and I lived together in Philadelphia, we had jobs during the day and we wrote at night.

We developed a script over the course of a couple of years. We got a draft together and made the ridiculous and lucky phone calls that got our script out into Hollywood. We sold it right before we graduated College.

V: Wait a second. What ridiculous and lucky phone calls? How does that work?

JH: I think we were naive in a lot of ways, but we also tried to put ourselves in the shoes of the people we were trying to contact. The first script that we wrote was very much like a Harold and Kumar, so we figured that the people most likely to respond to it might be the people who worked on movies with the Farrelly Brothers or the Weitz Brothers, because American Pie had just come out.

We figured the directors and producers on those projects probably wouldn’t want to talk to some college kids. They probably had a lot going on and they would feel like they were wasting their time. We didn’t know what an assistant director was, we had no clue at all. But there was a common assistant director on There’s Something About Mary, Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and American Pie and in articles about those movies there was a lot of praise thrown around about their assistant director J.B. Rogers. Hayden and I said “That’s the guy”.

Maybe he was looking to direct or produce and maybe this would be a good project for him? I called the director’s guild. I got a phone number for him and I left a message. He shockingly called me back and I convinced him to read the script. He read it and called us back immediately. He ended up passing it on to a few people in the business and the next thing we knew we ended up getting a call from a producer named Matt Berenson who was working at a company called Paul Schiff Productions.

Matt called us up and said “I want to produce your movie,” and we were just like: “Our movie’s getting made!” The fact that he wanted to produce it, we thought that our movie was getting made. Then we found out that we would have to develop it awhile with him, then get an agent and/or manager to try to sell it, and then take it from there. So we developed it with Matt. Matt sent it to some agents and some managers.

Hayden and I were in school at the time. I was at Penn and he was at the University of Chicago. I remember being in a legal studies class and checking my cell phone. I had like, six messages. They were all from different agents in L.A. who were interested in signing us.

V: Whoa.

JH: It was a crazy thing. Matt told us “maybe we’ll hear something in the next few weeks” and it was literally the next day, right after he sent the script out. A week later we flew out to California. I was actually on a sell weekend for Goldman Sachs, considering working for them out there and Hayden came out and met up with me.

We ended up staying there for a week with a friend. We met up with a whole bunch of agents and managers and we signed up with one of each. It all happened really quickly. I remember it was on the leap day of 2000, February 29th, that our script went out on the market and we sold it a week later.

It was the most surreal, strange experience. It was so lucky. We literally made one phone call.

Learning Not to Add Water

V: How much does a screenplay go for?

JH: Could be as little as $10,000. Could be as much as $4 million. Our first script went for roughly $100,000.

V: What was that script called?

HS: It was called Filthy. It was basically called that because the content of the material was not the cleanest. It was really similar to Harold and Kumar in tone. It was the first time we had ever written anything and so we decided to write it about what we know better then anyone: ourselves.

In the early drafts, it was basically about two guys in college who were about to become an investment banker and a lawyer who ditched those dreams to become screenwriters and the main characters were called Jon and Hayden.

V: What happened to that script?

HS: We sold it. We worked on it with the director and the studio. We were very young at the time and we just sort of did whatever they asked us to do because we wanted the movie to be made. The script got sort-of watered-down, as a lot of scripts do. We learned a lot as a result of that experience.

We learned that studio development could hinder a movie, especially one that has something unique about it. That was why we wanted to write a movie like Harold and Kumar, because the concept was so unique, having a Korean-American, Indian-American protagonist in the script…

Changing the Face of Comedy

V: Yeah. I think it was the first American-made movie to do that? Wasn’t it on NPR?

JH and HS: Yeah. It was.

HS: Yeah. The first with an Asian guy as the star that wasn’t into martial arts.

V: Oh shit.

JH: We talk about the R-rated stuff and pushing the envelope, but the most important element of the Harold and Kumar movies are the characters feeling real. It’s about authenticity. And the Asian and Indian guys we grew up with behaved just like any other typical American kid.

Harold and Kumar are characters that live in the real world. We allow them to be flawed in real world ways, we allow them to talk the way people talk, and we allow one of our protagonists: Kumar, to say filthy and immature things that aren’t appropriate or “likable” from a studio point of view. The truth of the matter is it’s that lack of “likeability” that helps an audience connect with the protagonists. No matter what their background, they often see Harold and Kumar and say, “This is real. This is like me and my friends.”

I think that was special about the TV show Seinfeld in a lot of ways. Those were characters that were not traditionally likable. You like them because they’re like you, because in reality nobody’s likable. People are likable but nobody is “movie likable.”

HS: It’s those flaws that make everybody unique, because everybody’s flaws are different.

V: In the movie you make such a point of having people who are definitely more asshole-ish than others.

JH: Yeah.

HS: We’re really into making Harold and Kumar real people of a certain generation and everybody else around them is sort of more of a satire. The emphasis on reality is with Harold and Kumar in their own little universe. They meet crazy characters who may or may not be exactly the people you would meet, but at least we’re making a comment on those types of people.

One of the things that I think makes Harold and Kumar feel real is the fact that they don’t have accents. That was something we had to over-emphasize when we wrote the script for the original movie.

V: Wow. I didn’t even think about how tough that must have been…

HS: If we didn’t write it in specifically that they didn’t have accents everyone would have just assumed that they had accents. Any time you saw an Asian guy in a movie, and particularly in a comedy, they had some sort of goofy accent. That was sort of the role of Asians in comedy. Up until Harold and Kumar.

When we went to high school in the nineties we went to school with the kids of the immigrants. It was funny growing up. We went to high school and college and it was all multi-cultural. You make an Asian friend and they’re like you but when you see them in movies or on TV they’re like Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles. It seemed like a good idea to have characters that defied that stereotype.

Katie Holmes’ Bush

V: What envelopes are you looking to push in the new movie?

JH: Issues that are relevant to Americans today. You’ll see some satire on the “War on Terror” — things that are relevant to everyone, not just stoners or young people. We consider ourselves really patriotic Americans. We love our country but we don’t always love every thing that goes on in America. The Harold & Kumar movies have a lot in common with what Trey Parker and Matt Stone do with South Park. They take things that are actually going on in society and find a fun way to expose the ridiculousness, and generally in a pretty non-partisan way. The truth is, most Americans are relatively middle of the road. Most people want their freedoms and respect other people’s freedoms. It’s the people on the far left and the far right who are douchebags. Comedies like South Park or Harold & Kumar 2 help the rest of us laugh at these douchebags.

HS: Harold and Kumar 2 is going to be awesome. There are more jokes, more nudity, and everyone’s gonna love it.

V: Oh. Does Katie Holmes show her breasts in the second one?

HS: She’s going to show her bush in the second one.

V: Excellent. There wasn’t any bush in the first one.

JH: Oh, there may be some bush in the sequel.

V: Will you guys push for it?

HS: We’re the directors now. We basically have the opportunity to correct all the mistakes of the first movie. We love Danny Leiner and he did a great job on the first movie, but his biggest mistake he made was not showing bush.

JH: We just want the sequel to be even better then the first. We want to amp things up a notch. We’re in the process of assembling a team of really, really, really, really funny people. And we’re confident this sequel will not disappoint.