Out on Digital HD from today is Daddy’s Home, the hilarious comedy that stars Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. Ferrell plays Brad Whitaker, is a radio host trying to get his stepchildren to love him and call him Dad. But his plans turn upside down when the biological father, Dusty Mayron, played by Mark Wahlberg returns.
A sequel to the film was announced on Friday with the original movie’s director Sean Anders returning to helm. We caught up with him to talk about his film.
You wrote, as well as directed Daddy’s Home – where did your idea for the film come from?
Sean Anders: Well it started with a writer named Brian Burns who was loosely basing it on some of his own experiences of being a step-dad and the script went through a couple of iterations before it got to us and then when John and I read the script we thought it was great and we thought it was just a great area for comedy and then we went in and did a couple of passes ourselves at the script and that’s how it all came to be.
You write most of the movies that you direct, do you write with particular actors in mind?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In this case by the time we were writing the script we knew it was going to be Will and Mark and that’s really fun especially when they are actors that you really love, you find yourself doing impersonations of them and trying to do their voices in your head and write their voices the best you can.
How early on did Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell come on board?
Will has been on this project for a long time, this project has been in existence for I want to say seven years before we got involved. Will has a successful production company, they always have a lot of different projects working out and trying to get to the starting gate and then once we got involved really at our very first meeting sat down with the guys and started to discuss who would be the perfect Dusty with Will. You never know if actors are willing to re-team again, so it was Will that brought up Mark and we were really happy to hear it Will because we were happy that Will had had a great experience and some of The Other Guys that wanted to do it then because Mark was really the perfect fit for Dusty. So then we went to Mark and then it turned out that Mark really loved working with Will and was really eager to do it again so it was a very smooth process.
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Do you think it was their superb chemistry in The Other Guys, in that film that contributed coming back together for this?
Yeah no question they had a blast making that movie and they were both really eager to work together again and I can’t say for sure because it is up to them but I wouldn’t be surprised to see those guys re-teaming again in the future because they really enjoy each other they get along and they have great chemistry.
We also have the wonderful Thomas Haden Church who is simply superb in this. How did he come on board?
Well I’ve been a fan all the way back to Wings and just always thought he was really funny and he is one of those names that whenever John and I are working on a script we’ll always say wouldn’t it be funny if Thomas Haden Church would play this guy or that guy and so we brought him up to Will and the other producers, everybody thought he was a riot and so we called his agent and got lucky that he was available at the time so we bought him in and had a great time of it.
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He has some great one liners. How much was in the screenplay and how much was improvised on set?
Yeah he definitely improvised, there were great lines that came in from Chris Henchy and Adam Mckay who really had a good time with that character. You know John and I wrote it and then Thomas Haden Church came in and he has his own crazy take on things, and improved. He can improvise the most and he definitely brought a lot to it for sure.
Being the film’s screenwriter, how open are you usually to improvisation?
I’m very open to it, the way that we generally go about it is you know we try to get it, we’re all doing the best we can with the script and we really want to get a few takes where we nail everything, either exact to the script or pretty darn close to the script but then once we get that When we run back with Will and Mark it is really fun to open it up and just let it play.
Once we get a solid take of any set up at that stage we write another page at that point and then we just see where we can beat it. Sometimes it becomes a real struggle at the edit stage to decide between the first or the improvised great takes.
As a producer, how much does Will Ferrell bring to the table?
Oh a lot. I mean, Will’s production company is a serious production company; a lot of actors have their production companies but you know more than anything its just a show and in Will’s case you know obviously those guys created Funny Or Die, they do a lot of TV, they do a lot of movies with Will. But they are a serious heavy duty production company they know what they’re doing and they are also very artist friendly production company, they just are great guys to spend time with. And again they have a sterling reputation in the business, so no Will’s a serious producer.
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You’re obviously known for your comedy films, but have you ever wanted to jump genres?
Yes very much, my writing partner John and I are working on a thriller right now which is something we’ve always wanted to do. We are also looking to branch out into movies that have more adventure. When we get out of comedy, outside this we will always have a sense of humour but we’re looking out of it.
What’s up next for you? You obviously have Mean Moms with Jennifer Aniston on the cards.
That one is not in production yet, that is something that has been a labour of love of ours for a couple of years now. The author of the book, Rosalind Wiseman who wrote the book that mean girls was based on wrote a book about parenting and we worked on a script about mums and it became a weirdly personal script that really a fun project to work on and if that’s something that we have a lot of love for then we’re hoping for it to get made in the future but it is not quite at the starting gate just yet.
What is next?
Well like I said currently , John and I are writing a thriller and we’ve also been working on the script about the adoption, which will still be comedy but slightly more dramatic comedy so those are two projects that we have in the pipeline now.
Daddy’s Home is out now on Digital HD, and available on Blu-ray and DVD 2nd May
