How Directors Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher Break The Rules In Pizza Movie

Pizza Movie adds Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone into the long lineage of stoner comedy duos. The duo play outcasts Montgomery and Jack who are on an urgent quest for pizza after taking mystery drugs. The film marks the featured directorial debut of sketch comedy duo Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, better known as BriTANick.

Like Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger before them, their sketch comedy roots influenced every aspect of the production. “We've been making our own YouTube sketches since 2010, so, from a very practical standpoint, it gave us a ton of film experience in every capacity,” said Kocher in an interview with Pop Culture Planet. “Brian is our editor and has directed most of these sketches. I held the boom mic for myself for a lot of them. We just did everything. So we had a basic understanding of that.”

“It also helped us write this movie because there's so many series of phases of this drug, which essentially operates as their own little sketches within the film,” McElhaney added. “We were hopefully able to blend the idea of what we could do as sketch comedians with a deeper, more rich storytelling structure of a film and making the two work hand in hand. I don't know if we accomplished it, but we tried.”

Not only did BriTANickmake their directorial debut with Pizza Movie at SXSW, but they also wrote the film Over Your Dead Body, which premiered at the festival as well. “It's been really fun to have two different movies that are very different in tone to come out at the same time. Pizza Movie is obviously an original film. We wrote and directed it on our own,” said McElhaney. “Then Over Your Dead Body is an adaptation that we wrote that Jorma Taccone directed from The Lonely Island. It was fun to expand our mental pallet doing Over Your Dead Body and Pizza Movie. One is a little more bit more horror-focused and one is just purely comedy-focused. It's fun to be able to ping pong between two different styles of writing, so you don't just get locked into one.”

Actors Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Jack Martin both had plenty of college memories of their own, although none quite as crazy as their characters. “That's such a good question. I like definitely have so many memories that I've like tried to repress,” Lee joked. “My freshman year of college, I lived in a dorm that was 16 boys and girls all sharing one bathroom. I think there would be some gross humor in this movie about that bathroom from college.”

“Nothing that is as crazy as this movie,” Martin laughed. “But after one of the screenings we had a group of people, two guys and a girl, come up to me and they were like, ‘That's literally us. That's our friend group.’ That whole dynamic of you start as friends and then one of them leaves and then it's like, ‘Did they abandon us or not?’ That is the most relatable college experience ever, so I just felt like that was so real.”

The film leans fully into the absurdity, with trippy sequences and unexpected references. “My favorite scene to shoot was the Inglourious Basterds scene where I'm in this dorm room and looking for weed at the beginning of the movie. That was the first scene I shot in the movie. Inglourious Basterds is one of my favorite movies so I was nervous. I couldn't sleep the night before ‘cause I was like, this is a big task, especially playing this completely insane character,” revealed Martin. “But it was so much fun. It was such a crazy scene. We worked so hard to make it that way. Bella Gonzalez, our DP, worked so hard on scoping that out and lighting everything, blocking everything. Nick and Brian and I, we were all together in this conference room planning every inch of that on a Saturday before we shot. That was just really cool. I'll remember that forever.”

“Something that was really fun for me to shoot was the whole band performing outside on the lawn when the bodies fall out of the sky into the trash can,” laughed Lee. “It was just so ridiculous and absurd, but super fun.”

A standout sequence in the movie is “The True Horrible Nature Of Reality,” an unexpected fourth-wall break that fully commits to the film’s anything-goes energy. “Those actors are really hard to work with in the true world of reality, I’ll say that,” joked McElhaney about directing… themselves.

“It was one of the first ideas we had when we came up with the idea for the movie,” said Kocher. “We love that type of humor.”

“We love breaking the rules,” continued McElhaney. “We knew this movie was already kind of going insane and we were taking it to the most ridiculous levels it could go. So when it got to that point, we were like, you know what? If you're not on board at this point, you'll never be on board. We're just going to go and see if we can crack through this movie interdimensionally to some other new place and see if it sticks the landing. It just felt right.”

“It's also just a fun hack ‘cause anybody who has anything negative to say about the movie, that section kind of buys it back,” explained Kocher. “We go, ‘Yeah, we agree. We agree. There's a lot wrong with this.’”

“That might have been the most fun scene to shoot in the movie. It's such a hilarious ending that they wrote for Blake because he's this guy who is so confident in his worldview and controlling everything. To be so insanely wrong and realize that he's this evil character I think is just such a funny ending,” Martin revealed. “I also got to shoot with Nick and Brian, who are not only great writers and directors, but are also amazing performers. They're great actors and comedians. That was so fun to get to shoot a scene with them. It was a treat.”

There’s definitely room for more Montgomery and Jack adventures. “Look, if people are clamoring for it enough, yeah!” said McElhaney. “Those two are so fun together, so fun to work with. They understood the characters and they're just so funny. We would love to put Sean and Gaten back together again in any capacity.”

“If people want a sequel, we could absolutely make that happen,” echoed Kocher. “It does deeply exhaust me, the idea of that. But no matter what we would work with Sean and Gaten again for the rest of our lives. They were such a delight. They're so good. They're so professional and truly so, so funny.”

Next time, though, they have one request. “Coming to movie theaters!” said McElhaney.

Pizza Movie is streaming now on Hulu. Just make sure you don’t watch it on an empty stomach.