Right, well, again, it’s your baby, right?
Well, to be fair. It’s really my wife’s baby. She’s the one who identified this material, brought it to me, came up with the idea of a Jacques Audiard, insisted that we go meet him and every step of the way she, she was the one guiding it. So let’s not get it twisted. She is the woman behind the curtain.
It’s cool. My wife is the brains behind the operation too.
[Laughs] I think the movie has a lot of female energy to it actually, despite there not being many female characters in the film. We talk a lot about what it means to be a man and if you do that, of course, you can touch on feminine things.
Like this film is being released by Annapurna, which is led by a very strong woman like Megan Ellison and she has so many amazing women working for her and the fact that they chose to become part of this movie that has very few female characters in it really speaks to it and they’ve said some really gratifying things about the movie.
It’s, in a way, as brutal as it can be, a kind of tender consideration of what it means to be a man.
Yeah, it’s a bit of, who is the old man? Where are we at now? And where is the new man going? Where are we supposed to go from here? I think the movie is very timely for that reason. It’s hitting us right at that moment. In light of #MeToo, of what’s going on politically, the power shift in the world. All of us I think are looking at a brutal past and thinking like, “okay, well that’s the way it’s been happening so far, but it’s not sustainable.” There’s no way we’re gonna make it if it stays that violent, there’s no way we’re all going to survive.
I think that idea applies to the film and it applies to the way we’re reconsidering life right now as a culture and looking back on what we once accepted and what we won’t tolerate now.
It’s funny how these things happen because I don’t even know that we were intentionally doing that. Maybe Jacques was intentionally doing it because I know it was very interested in this idea of utopia and he expanded Jake [Gyllenhaal] and Riz [Ahmed’s] parts.
Right. Their characters serve the thematic idea of utopia and in a way, they’re catalysts to helping the boys change and awaken to the world.
I think Jacques was considering all of that from the very beginning. Like, why make the movie? What makes this story relevant? Why should we tell it? We don’t just need another Western about two guys that kill people.
The world is asking us to look at civilization. Like, what the hell are we doing? And this moment in the 1850s was exactly like that: we settled the west through violence and murder and how are we supposed to sustain ourselves? We can’t keep doing it that way. I think technology is linked to that too. Cartridge bullets came out around this time and I think people suddenly realized like, “Hold on a second, if everyone can reload that fast, we’re all going to kill each other.” We don’t have enough sheriffs to like maintain. So anyway, there’s lot to unpack.
While I have you here and as we wrap up, I have to ask you about “Step Brothers” because the 10th anniversary just happened. Sequel?
I hope so. It’s funny to talk about ‘Step Brothers,” right after we talked about having agency in something and being a part of something. And it sounds like the opposite, but I was very involved in it from the beginning. Will [Ferrell], Adam [McKay] and I developed that story together. That’s a beloved movie and I love it too because I put so much of my personal life into it with stories from my childhood, like true stories that are part of it. So, it wasn’t just a slapstick comedy, it was something that had a lot of subversive ideas about family and had a lot of emotional stuff in it even though primarily it’s a comedy.
To answer your question, I have no idea. People want sequels so bad and then they go, “hey, this isn’t as good as the first one!” It happens almost every time. So I don’t know. We’ll see. If it makes sense, I would definitely be into that. Every time I go out into public, someone mentions that movie every single time! I think that’s true with Adam and Will too.
So eventually we’ll all just have to decide. I think part of the reason it resonates is that we improvised so much and when you’re improvising, you’re just telling the truth. Whatever’s coming out of your subconscious is often like, “holy shit!” and it’s hard to write that. I think audiences respond to it when you tell the truth like that.
Still slowly expanding “The Sisters Brothers” is now playing in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City, Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and St. Louis.