This weekend, Warner Brothers’ new comedy, “Cop Out”, opens nationwide. We’ve talked to the actors, now it’s time to talk to the folks behind the scenes. Today, Tara Lockhart spoke to the screenwriters, Rob and Mark Cullen – highly spoken of by everyone involved in making this picture.
TL: Have you seen the movie with an audience?
A: Yes! Yeah, we have.
Q: Were you happy with the screening?
MC: Yeah sure, they laughed in all the right places and some of the wrong places.
RC: We wanted to do a movie that’s just fun, you spend your 10 bucks or 15 bucks, what ever it costs now, and it should be funny from the start, and it should be funny at the end. To us it still makes us laugh.
Q: Every character had their own story, how do you do that?
A: We think about it in terms of characters, everybody in the movie is a person, and they each have their own back story, people have inadequacies, people have weird things that they do, we only have a brief moment with those people, how can we bring out who they are as quickly as possible.
We hate wasting an opportunity to have somebody in the movie just to service the other two guys. Why not give them something f***ing weird or something real or not real, they should be doing something, something that makes us laugh. A woman pulling a gun from her purse protecting her place is funny. And Sussie Essman is very funny, so you get that voice and that attitude with it then that takes us to another place.
Q: How involved were you guys with the writing after Kevin Smith came on board? He’s known for his writing/comedy writing.
A: We did a pilot for a Showtime show called Manchild, and Kevin was in the cast as one of the characters, We were his bosses, we all just shared a similar sense of humor. So we became friends immediately. So when Kevin’s name came up to direct the movie it was like the perfect choice. He called us and he goes ‘dude I got this f***in script, you guys, we should make this movie’. And so it was very easy, and then it being the first movie that Kevin directed that he hasn’t written….He was extraordinary respectful of our work and would never do anything in terms of overriding any scene he would always go hey you guys how about this scene, can we talk about it, can we add something here can we add something there. We were on set everyday, every single day we were there, yeah which is unheard of….. you don’t get to do that in a movie. And movies writers are for the most part janitors, it’s like go over there… You show up day one and go home, thanks for playing. Warner Brothers & Kevin thought we were so valuable in the process that they actually made us executive producers in the movie also. He could not have been more respectful toward what we did and what was on the page. When things were going to get changed we were always there to say how about this, how about that. From day 1 Kevin always said this is your movie, this is our movie, but this is as much your movie as it is my movie, so you need to be a part of this and see every aspect of it and be happy with it. But don’t get me wrong, when Kevin is directing and he finds a moment and he can push Tracey in a direction or Bruce in a direction and let them go he does that really really well. So what starts on a page goes a direction that he sees or he hears, and tells Tracey go with that. And that’s the fun part.
Q: What was the birth of the project?
A: “Freebie and the Bean”. It was during the writers strike, we had been TV writers for about 10 years and we didn’t know which way TV was going. And we knew we needed to diversify. We need to write a movie. Our father was dying around the same time. So we wanted to write the kind of movie that our father liked to see. He like action cop movies, so we wrote him one. We wrote it for him.
Q: How do you write something together?
A: We get together every morning at 9 am at a coffee shop in Santa Monica and we sit outside with a pad of paper. Mark writes and we just start talking scenes & then we’ll do that for about 4 hours. Go home and come back the next morning and swap what we’ve worked on.
Sharing the same sense of humor is key. What’s great about writing with your brother is that it’s neve personal so if you go this is awful or this stinks, or I’ve seen that before or you mailed it in, it’s never personal. It’s in service of whatever it is we’re writing. We can push each other because we know we can’t break up.
Q: What do you excel at?
A: Mark enjoys the structuring of things more than Rob, Rob writes the way that people talk, Rob know’s that there is a cadence that he sees in his head that seems to work.
Q: What do you want to write next?
A: For Universal, we’re reinventing the Hope and Crosby movies, the Road to Ö Movies, an untitled wrestling movie ( Men in Black meets Gladiators) for Warner Bros. Rob thought it would be interesting to take the WWF champion and he had to fight aliens to save the world. WB bought it. We’ve also finished Uptown Saturday Night for Overbrook featuring Will Smith.
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