{"id":361033,"date":"2026-04-02T23:31:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T23:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/361033\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T23:31:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T23:31:15","slug":"britanick-interview-on-their-hulu-stoner-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/361033\/","title":{"rendered":"BriTANicK Interview on Their Hulu Stoner Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The premise of Hulu\u2019s new comedy \u201cPizza Movie<\/a>\u201d reads like a riff on beloved stoner comedies such as Cheech and Chong<\/a>\u2018s \u201cUp in Smoke\u201d or the cult classic \u201cHarold and Kumar Go to White Castle<\/a>\u201c: two college friends (Gaten Matarazzo<\/a> and Sean Giambrone) get high and have to go on an epic journey to make it downstairs from their dorm room to pick up a pizza. Yet if the concept is familiar, the execution couldn\u2019t be more distinctive \u2014 in first-time feature directors Brian McElhaney<\/a> and Nick Kocher<\/a>\u2018s hands, \u201cPizza Movie\u201d is one of the most visually and structurally inventive comedies in years.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was important to us to not just shoot this like a basic comedy,\u201d Kocher told IndieWire\u2019s Filmmaker Toolkit\u00a0podcast<\/a>, noting that the intention was to make a movie like \u201cHarold and Kumar\u201d or \u201cDude, Where\u2019s My Car?\u201d but with the high style of a director like Edgar Wright or the Daniels. \u201cFrom the outside, the stakes for these characters look small \u2014 they\u2019re going downstairs for a pizza. But to them, this is life and death. Their emotions are at 11 \u2014 this is their \u2018Lord of the Rings.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\"French<\/a> \"Ally\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

McElhaney and Kocher, best known to comedy fans as the sketch comedy duo BriTANicK, found inspiration not just in stoner comedies and Peter Jackson fantasy epics but classic Looney Tunes cartoons, the Coen Brothers, and dozens of other influences. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of \u201cPizza Movie\u201d is the exuberant and infectious passion for cinema that permeates every comic set piece; this is a movie by filmmakers pouring everything they\u2019ve ever loved and thought about into their first film<\/a>, and it makes the 92 minutes of \u201cPizza Movie\u201d feel packed with ideas.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s really impressive is how the film doesn\u2019t feel at all derivative \u2014 it doesn\u2019t exploit or lean on its influences but absorbs and synthesizes them into something completely new and unpredictable. \u201cI\u2019ve often been frustrated by how comedies don\u2019t utilize the filmmaking toolbox visually,\u201d McElhaney said. \u201cHopefully our style is more slick and polished.\u201d It\u2019s a style the filmmakers have honed over years of creating sketches and short films, often paying tribute to a specific genre.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur sketch stylings throughout the years on YouTube are very genre-heavy,\u201d McElhaney said. \u201cWe\u2019ll pick a style to parody, and sometimes we spend half a year editing a two-minute sketch because we want it to feel grander.\u201d That kind of meticulousness is another hallmark of BriTANicK\u2019s filmmaking that gets at why \u201cPizza Movie\u201d is so special \u2014 the content is incredibly silly and lowbrow, but McElaheny and Kocher treat it with the utmost care. The movie, as Mel Brooks would say, \u201crises below vulgarity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s smart, but it\u2019s idiotic at the same time,\u201d McElhaney said. \u201cWhen something really dumb is shot with a lot of skill and thought, something happens to your brain where you go, \u2018Wait, what am I feeling right now? Is this the dumbest thing I\u2019ve ever seen, or is my brain being ignited in an intellectual way?’\u201d Adding to that, Kocher said that one of the duo\u2019s primary goals is to generate opposing emotional responses right on top of each other to keep the audience engaged.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething we shoot for is to make people get goosebumps from something and then laugh at the fact that they just felt an emotion over something so stupid,\u201d Kocher said. That \u201cPizza Movie\u201d is so genuinely emotional at times comes largely from the casting. In Matarazzo and Giambrone, the filmmakers found two actors whose onscreen chemistry is up there with the great comic duos of coming-of-age classics like \u201cSuperbad\u201d and \u201cLicense to Drive.\u201d Kocher said that came out of an extensive audition process during which the filmmakers looked at as many people in as many combinations as possible \u2014 and made them all read, regardless of star status.<\/p>\n

\"Pizza\u2018Pizza Movie\u2019Hulu<\/p>\n

That said, in the end, the casting was a roll of the dice. \u201cThe truth is, we got very, very lucky,\u201d Kocher said, with McElhaney adding, \u201cYou don\u2019t really know until you get to set. The chemistry read we saw was pretty great, but then we were moving so quickly, and you show up on set and are like, \u2018I hope this works.’\u201d Although the directors encouraged the actors to contribute as much as possible, the airtight nature of the script \u2014 in which the characters have to accept a number of outrageous, complexly linked challenges to survive their high \u2014 meant that most of what ended up in the movie was carefully planned months before shooting.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re structure nuts, and we really put a lot of work into that,\u201d Kocher said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t move too much around in the edit, because it was a house of cards. We couldn\u2019t move stuff around after we wrote it, which I think is what you want. You want every scene to not be cuttable, because if it is cuttable, you should probably cut it. We like to write and watch really intricately plotted stories where you set something up that feels innocuous and then it comes back in a big way in act three \u2014 this movie has 17 different threads that all come back in hopefully very satisfying ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a busy time for Kocher and McElhaney; just a few weeks after \u201cPizza Movie\u201d premieres on Hulu, \u201cOver Your Dead Body,\u201d which Kocher and McElhaney wrote for director Jorma Taccone, opens in theaters. \u201cWe have said yes to everything for the last five years,\u201d McElhaney said by way of explaining their current prolificness (as well as the multiple drafts they owe to various employers before they can get moving on something new). \u201cNow, do we keep doing that or do we focus on our next big personal project? Who knows? I feel like in six months we\u2019ll have a very different answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPizza Movie\u201d begins streaming on Hulu April 3. To hear the entire conversation with Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney and make sure you don\u2019t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on\u00a0Apple<\/a>,\u00a0Spotify<\/a>, or your favorite podcast platform. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The premise of Hulu\u2019s new comedy \u201cPizza Movie\u201d reads like a riff on beloved stoner comedies such as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[176822,156,593,68215,409,111,139,176823,69,170201,49],"class_list":{"0":"post-361033","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-brian-mcelhaney","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-film","11":"tag-filmmaker-toolkit-podcast","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nick-kocher","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-pizza-movie","18":"tag-podcasts"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}