‘You’re Cordially Invited’ Writer-Director Reveals Nick Jonas Was Actually Will Ferrell’s Suggestion

Summary

• Collider’s Steve Weintraub talks with writer and director Nicholas Stoller for You’re Cordially Invited.
• In this interview, Stoller discusses the challenges of making good comedy sequels, working with Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon, and how much of the movie was improv versus scripted comedy.
• Stoller also talks about Andy Serkis’ upcoming Animal Farm adaptation, his next film with Ferrell, Judgment Day, and revisiting the 21 Jump Street/Men in Black crossover.

Nicholas Stoller is a massive force of comedy. He’s reinvented The Muppets with Jason Segel, introduced the world to Bros, a genre game-changer starring Billy Eichner. He’s also ushered in some of the funniest movies of the Judd Apatow era, not at all limited to Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the beloved Neighbors flicks. He’s also written twice as many blockbusters as he’s directed, including unexpected bangers like Dora and the Lost City of Gold. Now he’s joined forces with comedic heavyweights Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell for his latest “com-rom” You’re Cordially Invited.

Written and directed by Stoller, You’re Cordially Invited is a hilarious, kind-hearted farce following Ferrell’s ultra-attentive single father, Jim, as he helps plan his daughter’s (Geraldine Viswanathan) wedding on Palmetto Island, Georgia. Unfortunately, due to an unforeseen hiccup, the venue has been double booked by Witherspoon’s Margot, who has been planning her sister’s (Meredith Hagner) wedding. Unable to change dates, the two wedding parties agree to share the venue—for better or for worse.

With the movie available to stream now on Prime Video, Collider’s Steve Weintraub had the absolute pleasure of talking with Stoller about the filmmaker’s self-proclaimed “com-rom” and a ton of projects in the pipeline. In addition to realizing his dream of working with Ferrell and Witherspoon together and getting Nick Jonas on board, Stoller also discusses the latest season of Platonic, as well as that rad and powerful 21 Jump Street/Men in Black crossover concept, Andy Serkis’ adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and his upcoming Dog Day Afternoon-inspired comedy-action film Judgment Day, also starring Ferrell.

Good Comedy Sequels Are Tricky to Pull Off

Will we ever get that 21 Jump Street/Men in Black crossover?

COLLIDER: Have you ever thought about making a sequel to any of your previous films, and if so, have any come close to happening?

NICHOLAS STOLLER: Good question. I only wanted to make a sequel to Neighbors. I always said to myself if I had a movie that’s financially successful enough to make the studio want to make a sequel, I would do it, and that happened with Neighbors, and we did Neighbors 2. It was so creatively hard to make a comedy sequel that I don’t think I want to do it again. And there’s no gossip. Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg] are geniuses. Andrew [Jay Cohen] and Brendan [O’Brien] are so funny. The studio was very supportive. I have a lot of theories as to why it’s hard to make comedy sequels, but creatively, it’s just a very difficult endeavor. And I love that movie. We figured it out finally. I think it’s an awesome movie, but it was just so hard.

I’ll tell you my theory since you’re that aspect of the artistic side of it. Basically, a comedy requires a premise that creates surprising situations, and when you do a comedy sequel, unless it’s a procedural movie like Jump Street or Beverly Hills Cop, where you can have a new case, you can’t create the same surprising situations because you already get what the premise is.

No, it totally does. I think the only way is if you take the characters that you came to love and throw them in a completely different situation and just call it Neighbors 3.

STOLLER: But then when you do that, you end up in The Hangover 3 situation where people are mad that it’s not the same premise. But you can do it. [21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street] are two of the funniest movies I ever made, but you can do it because it’s a procedural. You can have a new case. And not to say it isn’t hard for anyone to figure out a sequel to anything. Obviously, it is. It’s hard to make a sequel as good as the first one, but I think there’s an extra challenge with comedy, which is the premise of the comedy is what causes all the surprising and funny shit to happen, and then you’re just repeating the same jokes, basically, and you can’t repeat a joke.

It still kills me that they never made the Jump Street/Men in Black movie.

STOLLER: They could make unlimited Jump Street‘s. They figured out that the dynamic between those two guys was so funny. Rodney Rothman is one of the great comedy writers, and that script, I read a version of it, was just amazing. So, maybe one day it will happen. It was so funny, though.

It kills me that that movie didn’t happen. Which film of yours changed the most in the editing room in ways you didn’t expect?

STOLLER: That’s a good question. Honestly, Neighbors 2, putting aside Bros. I didn’t do reshoots on Bros. I barely did reshoots on You’re Cordially Invited. I always want to do reshoots. I want to have them be built into the budget, but on those two movies, they didn’t require them. But I did three days on all my other movies, and then on Neighbors 2, we did five days because we just had a lot of stuff to figure out. When we tested the movie, we were like, “We need to bolster these kinds of different emotional scenes.” So, that movie probably changed the most in the edit because we shot for five days. There were still huge sequences that were really funny, but there was kind of an emotional core that was missing that we added in the reshoots.

Andy Serkis’ ‘Animal Farm’ Will Be an “Updated,” “More Darkly Comic” Adaptation

The movie is set to release later this year.

Andy Serkis talked to me about Animal Farm a number of times. What can you tease about the project? What pulls you in to say, “I want to work on this writing?”

STOLLER: Andy Serkis and Animal Farm made me want to do it. [Laughs] My agent was like, “Do you have any interest in this?” And I was like, “100%.” That was one of those things where then I read the book to make sure I could have a take. They had a script, but he was very much like, “Let me know what you think.” So I read the script, and then I read the book. I hadn’t read it since I was in school, and it’s such an amazing story, in addition to being this incredible allegory. I told my oldest daughter, who now is 17, but at the time was 11, “You should read this book, Animal Farm.” She was like, “Okay.” She started reading it, thinking it would just be about cute animals, and at the end, she was like, “That was crazy. That’s the craziest story.” It blew her mind. She loved it.

So, I wrote it. He had a very clear idea of the tone he wanted, and he wanted the central dynamic that’s not in the book between the kind of Napoleon, bad pig and a younger pig who kind of gets corrupted through the system and then pulls out of it. I thought that was a really good structure, and so he developed it with me, and then I just wrote. It’s a bit updated because, obviously, the book was written in the ‘40s, so if you were to update that exactly to what it was, it would feel a bit dated. So, I updated it a bit and made it more darkly comic than the book is. The book is comic, but it’s serious. I’m excited for people to see it. I think it’s going to be awesome. It’s been a passion project of his for a long time.

I think it finally comes out this year.

STOLLER: I’m so excited. I’m psyched to see it. I haven’t seen anything. I know that they’re doing the mocap thing. I’m probably going to get the mountain wrong, and he’s such a badass, but I did one Zoom with Andy Serkis, and he was like, “Yeah, I’m about to summit K2.” And I was like, “I don’t understand your world, but I love it.”

Yeah, those are things that I will never do.

STOLLER: Exactly.

Expect a Very Will Ferrell Action Comedy in ‘Judgment Day’

“It’s a crazy movie.”

Is Judgment Day your next film?

STOLLER: Yes.

What do you want to tell people about it?

STOLLER: You’re Cordially Invited is this weekend, and then my wife and I are in post on Platonic, which will come out later this year, the second season. It’s turned out great. So, that is coming out this year. We don’t have a release date yet for that. Then Judgment Day is about a TV judge, played by Will Ferrell. I don’t know if we’re allowed to talk about who the other guy is, but we’re pretty close to knowing who the other guys are. Basically, he’s a TV judge—kind of a blowhard, kind of a jerk. You find all this out over the course of the movie, but the backstory is he ruled against this guy years ago, and it caused this guy’s life to spiral, and he ended up in jail. He gets out of jail, and he takes the judge’s show hostage live on air in order to put the judge on the stand, is basically what it’s about. It’s a crazy movie.

That could be played many different ways. Is it serious, or is it more like Will Ferrell getting to do Will Ferrell?

STOLLER: At this point, I’ve made enough things to be like, “I don’t know, it’s my tone.” I can’t do the Adam McKay tone, which is so amazing. I love those movies. They’re incredible. They’re some of the greatest comedies ever, but I don’t know exactly how to do that. Inside Man and Dog Day Afternoon are the two references, and A Few Good Men. Those are the three movies I keep looking at, teasing apart and trying to figure out how they work. I think it would probably, tonally, if I do it correctly, be closest to Neighbors in that it will be actually tense but very funny. That’s the goal.

Listen, Will Ferrell in anything means I’ll go see it, but this is a more advanced-stakes kind of movie for you.

STOLLER: Totally. It is. I’m kind of just like, “I hope I can pull it off.” But it’s a bit like with You’re Cordially Invited; I think Will Ferrell is this amazing actor, in addition to being a great comedian. Doing comedy is acting, but doing an earnest, emotional scene, he hasn’t… And in this movie, he has a bunch of pretty earnest, emotional scenes that really pull my heartstrings. He has all these other gears that he’s done stuff in, but it’s been fun to do that in this one, too. I want it to be a tense kind of action movie, but it’ll be like all my movies. With You’re Cordially Invited, people are like, “It’s a rom-com,” and I’m like, “Well, it’s more of a com-rom.” It’s more comedic than rom-com-y.

I agree with this. I wouldn’t call You’re Cordially Invited a rom-com.

STOLLER: Not that there’s nothing wrong with a rom-com. That’s just not what it is. And with this one, [Judgment Day], I wouldn’t say it’s an action comedy. I think at the end of the day it’ll be a comedy action movie.

Do you know when you start filming?

STOLLER: Late April if all continues according to plan.

Needless to say, I’m happy you’re making another movie this year. Obviously, I’m happy that Platonic Season 2 is coming out later this year.

STOLLER: Thank you. I’m excited.

How Much of ‘You’re Cordially Invited’ Was Actually Improv?

“Will Ferrell is a comedy god, and Reese Witherspoon is a comic genius.”

Jumping into why I get to talk to you, getting Will and Reese in a movie together is impossible. It’s never happened. You’ve made a lot of movies. Everyone knows your work. They know what’s going to turn out extremely well, but what was it like getting the two of them? They do get offered a ton of scripts.

STOLLER: I thought of the idea of a double-booked destination wedding a number of years ago, and I didn’t have anything else, so I didn’t really think about it. I kind of put it on a shelf. Then, I wanted to work with Will and Reese. I’ve wanted to work with Will and Reese Witherspoon my whole career. I’ve been obsessed with them. Will Ferrell is a comedy god, and Reese Witherspoon is a comic genius—Tracy Flick [in Election] and Elle in Legally Blonde are two of the great comic characters of my lifetime—and I just had an instinct that they would have good chemistry. There’s something about the size difference that’s funny. I just had a feeling they would be funny on screen together. Then, I heard that they wanted to work together, which I was excited about, so I pitched them the idea. I thought of two characters that I thought they would be into that they hadn’t done but were in their wheelhouses. I pitched them the movie, and they both said yes. Then I kind of developed it with them and for them, and it went pretty quickly.

Once they agree to sign on, talk about actually writing with their voice in mind. Will’s such a master improviser. There are moments where I’m like, “Did Nic write this or is this Will in the moment just coming up with stuff?”

STOLLER: I always say my movies are, like, 80 to 90% scripted and 10 to 20% improv or jokes we throw out on the day. On this movie, because a lot of the scenes have, like, 10 people in them, it wasn’t as improv-y. You just can’t improv when there are 10 people in a scene. It’s hard. They’re both really good at improv, and I would certainly use it sometimes, but I also had the great Brendan O’Brien, who co-wrote the Neighbors movies and is awesome. He was on set and was pitching amazing jokes, too. So, it’s kind of a combination. We had jokes pre-written, and we would yell them out when they were shooting, but also there was improv. I also used improv to kind of loosen the scene up a little bit if it feels too written. So, I use it, but I don’t ever want the movie to feel riffy at all because I think that can take the audience out of it.

Say you’re filming a big scene, and you know that Will has to deliver a joke. The night before filming begins, are you and Brendan writing down all these alts, or is it in the moment you’re sitting there, and you’re like, “Oh, I got it. You should say this?”

STOLLER: On this movie, we wrote everything down in pre-production, so we had a lot of stuff written and ready. And I do that more and more. I’m more prepared. I also write a really long script, and then I’ll, to make it make sense to everyone, just cut out a lot of the extra jokes. Because sometimes, I’m just writing extra jokes in the script so I’ll have them on the side. Then sometimes you’ll think of something in the moment and I’ll be like, “Oh, what about this? What about that?” I did improv in college, which, just doing any sort of improv at any point, gives you some confidence—that fear of not failing, I guess. I’ve certainly pitched jokes that have been bad, and then everyone just kind of laughs and no one cares, and so you move on. So, there is some pitching, but it’s also prewritten stuff.

Then also these actors, I mean, the cast is a deep bench of really funny people. Leanne Morgan is so funny, and this was the first thing that she was in, that she ever acted in. At one point in the scene where the siblings are bonding, I said to her, “Just talk about being old,” and she just gave that monologue about the tube sock that was just so funny. I didn’t just say, “Say whatever you want.” I was very specific, but then she came up with that amazing thing.

Is the movie rated R?

STOLLER: It is, but it’s barely an R.

As far as I can tell, it’s all because Reese and Will curse.

STOLLER: Yeah, that’s it. Because he calls his son-in-law a motherfucker in the first scene.

How much is Prime Video saying, “Hey, can we ditch these curses so we can just get to a PG-13?” And how much is it like, “It doesn’t really matter. It’s streaming and the curses work?”

STOLLER: They don’t care for streaming. Honestly, Amazon was so cool. They had notes, but they were mainly just smart notes about the story or about just making sure everything made sense. They weren’t ever a note to get viewers if you know what I mean. But I imagine if I had a really intense sex scene in the middle of the movie, which would be bizarre because it just wouldn’t tonally make sense, that they might have a note. But even that, as I say it, if the story demanded it, they would be like, “Okay.” The fact is, last year, I played an early cut for my extended family, so my in-laws were there, and they’re, like, 80; my youngest daughter was there, and at the time, she was seven; I’m in my 40s. It was a wide swath of people, and everyone enjoyed it. It was kind of like Meet the Parents, that sort of experience, where everyone is having a good time regardless of age.

I find awkward sex stuff really funny, but there’s nothing in this that’s even… This is my lightest R. I think that with streaming, people don’t care as much about that stuff. Especially with curse words, I don’t think people care. I think if this had been a legacy studio and been released in theaters, it might have been more of a conversation that I’d be having with the studio and that I might want to I might want to defer to them on. I might want it to be PG-13 in order to get more people to see it.

I totally get it. I’m a little bit mad you didn’t invite me over to watch it with the family.

STOLLER: I know, exactly.

Nick Jonas Was Game for Anything in ‘You’re Cordially Invited’

“I knew I wanted a sexy pastor.”

So, Nick Jonas singing Creed—where did that idea come from?

STOLLER: I knew I wanted a sexy pastor. I thought that was a very funny idea, that there’d be two pastors kind of representing the fight that Reese is having with her mom. Originally, I was going to cast just a hot pastor, like some actor, but then [producer] Jessica Elbaum and Will Ferrell have a personal connection with Nick Jonas. He’s a friend of the court. They pitched him as a name, and I was like, “If you can get Nick Jonas, that would be incredible.” They called him, and he instantly said yes and came for two days and took time out of his busy schedule. He was so funny. He was so game. At a certain moment, I went up to him, and I was kind of nervous. I was like, “Do you mind if we dump water on you as if you’ve just gone off the dock?” And he was like, “Oh, yeah, sure. Whatever you want.” He was totally game. He was awesome. Really funny.

Kenny Rogers’ “Islands in the Stream” plays an integral role in this movie, but you have to locate that song. So how long have you been thinking about using that song in something? It’s pretty funny watching Will and his daughter sing it.

STOLLER: For that song, when I wrote the script, usually a lot of things I rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, and a lot of stuff gets changed. That was one of those things in the very first draft, and I think even in the pitch, I was like, “They sing ‘Islands in the Stream.’” It was always part of it. I did think I would replace it with a different song, and even Will was like, “I think we can maybe beat it,” but then the more we worked on it, the more it kind of hit the perfect bullseye of it’s G-rated enough that you would believe a father and daughter would sing it, so it’s not too outlandish, but it is a sexual song about two people who date each other, and it’s totally messed up that a father and daughter would sing it. So it ended up being kind of the perfect song for that moment.

Was Atlanta chosen for tax reasons?

STOLLER: Yes, but I love shooting there. The crews are awesome. And I wrote it to take place in the South. I’m from Miami, which is not the South, but there are aspects of Miami that are South, and I really did want a southern vibe to it. So I was like, “We’ll probably end up shooting this in Atlanta, and why not use Atlanta versus trying to run away from it?”

How much does shooting in Atlanta with a significant tax break play into getting more on screen?

STOLLER: Honestly, it’s so much money back, and it’s such a giant rebate that the studio won’t let you shoot elsewhere. It’s not even really a conversation. First of all, other places have a big rebate; New York now has a giant rebate, and then London, it’s not a rebate, but it’s cheaper to shoot there for a variety of reasons. So, there are other places, but they might let you shoot for a period of time somewhere else if it’s integral to the film that it takes place in that location. But for this film, first of all, I intentionally set it in Atlanta and outside Atlanta, but also, it could kind of take place almost anywhere that has a destination wedding. I did early on think, “Should this be at a resort in Mexico, or should it be like [Forgetting] Sarah Marshall in Hawaii?” And I was like, “No, it feels most correct and classic for it to be in one of these South Sea islands with that kind of vibe to it.”

One of the things that made me laugh the hardest was Will saying he’s the CEO of Delta. I laughed hard because it was so out there. Where did that joke come from?

STOLLER: Oh, I think Brendan O’Brien pitched it. I can’t remember. I’m not sure. Either he did or I did. One of us did. But then we shot it, and what was funny is we didn’t have it in the cut, and then Reese was like, “You should put that joke in. I think that joke’s funny.” This was after I’d watched it a lot, and I was like, “I guess we can try it.” I wasn’t sure, you know? And then we tried it and it destroyed in a way that was beyond my wildest expectations. I think it does because you’re like, “Oh, he does kind of look like the CEO of Delta.” That’s one thing, and then B, you realize in that moment you don’t know anything about him except that he’s close to his daughter and he has a dead wife. You don’t know anything else.

That’s one of the reasons I laughed so hard because it was like, “Wait, what?”

STOLLER: We never say anything else about it because it’s not pertinent. We know a lot about her work’s plot because it’s pertinent to the story that she has this big career. We don’t know anything about him. For a while, just so I would know because I like to know everything about the character just to answer questions for the actor or the production design or whatever, or the wardrobe, they were like, “What do you think he does?” And I was like, “I think he’s high up in human resources at Delta Airlines. That’s what I think he does.” Because I just needed to have an answer in my head, like, where he is on the socioeconomic bracket? That was the thought I had. Not that we ever reference it, but that was the thought. Then we came up with that at the end, and I was like, “Oh, that’s so funny.”

You’re Cordially Invited is available to stream now on Prime Video.