{"id":513965,"date":"2026-04-05T09:21:24","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T09:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/513965\/"},"modified":"2026-04-05T09:21:24","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T09:21:24","slug":"pizza-movies-surprising-homage-to-chalamet-for-hulu-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/513965\/","title":{"rendered":"Pizza Movie’s Surprising Homage to Chalamet for Hulu Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t[This story contains spoilers for Pizza Movie<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

\n\tNick Kocher<\/a> and Brian McElhaney<\/a>, the creative duo known as BriTANick<\/a>, are keenly aware that a movie called Pizza Movie is not the most compelling title for their now well-received feature directorial debut. The former SNL writers hemmed and hawed over what to name their \u201cstoner comedy for theater kids\u201d starring Stranger Things\u2019 Gaten Matarazzo<\/a>, until the internal working title of Untitled Pizza Movie officially became Pizza Movie.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s weirdly on-brand\u00a0for the Atlanta natives and NYU classmates considering they also struggled to name their sketch comedy partnership two decades ago. They settled on the fusion of Brian, Nick and the word Titanic. (If you\u2019re a devout reader of my byline, then you might recognize Nick from one of the 21st century\u2019s most remarkably honest images<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe title only endeared itself to Kocher and McElhaney when they wrote a joke about it that pays off in the most unexpected way. I won\u2019t give the game away here, but they do get into the weeds of it during the subsequent Q&A.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe had all these polls we\u2019d send out to our friends, and there was no unanimous title idea that everyone loved,\u201d McElhaney tells The Hollywood Reporter. \u201cI remember shouting, \u2018We cannot call this Pizza Movie! That is the worst title in the world.\u2019 And I still do feel that way. But then we added the joke in the movie. Now I deeply love it because it is all the setup for this punchline 83 minutes into the movie,\u201d Kocher adds.<\/p>\n

\n\tPizza Movie chronicles the hallucinatory misadventures of Jack (Matarazzo), Montgomery (Sean Giambrone) and Lizzy (Lulu Wilson), as they journey to the lobby of their college dormitory in order to eat a pizza that will alleviate the effects of an experimental drug they all ingested. The film is a Hulu release, continuing the rather unfortunate trend of comedy no longer being the box office powerhouse it once was. BriTANick knew they were making a streaming release from the start, but they did broach the theatrical subject to no avail.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe collaborators then decided to poke fun at the lack of a theatrical release by taking a page out of Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet\u2019s Marty Supreme playbook. Instead of the Las Vegas Sphere, they had Matarazzo and Giambrone stand atop a random picnic table<\/a> to explain that their wish for a big-screen release was rejected. Kocher and McElhaney credit Hulu for having a sense of humor about it all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHulu was totally down for it. They knew that we wanted it to be in theaters; we\u2019d had the conversation before,\u201d McElhaney explains. \u201cHulu has been really cool the whole time about us making fun of the things we want to make fun of and making the movie we wanted to make. So we knocked that spot out in an hour while we were in between press during South by Southwest.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKocher believes that one of the contributing factors to comedy\u2019s box office decline is the fact that the genre has become so prevalent across social media. And given that the duo were at the forefront of internet comedy via their BriTANick<\/a> YouTube channel and various other comedic web sites, they know they\u2019ve contributed to the genre\u2019s current predicament.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe\u2019re complaining about the thing that we began,\u201d McElhaney says. \u201cIt\u2019s a double-edged sword. It\u2019s an undeniably good thing to remove a lot of the gatekeepers so it\u2019s much easier for young people to break into the industry. But it has also created a ton of noise and distraction,\u201d Kocher adds.<\/p>\n

\n\tFortunately, the duo does have a theatrical release coming out this month. They wrote Jorma Taccone\u2019s Over Your Dead Body<\/a>, starring Samara Weaving<\/a> and Jason Segal. Dated for April 24, the pic is a remake of Tommy Wirkola\u2019s Norwegian dark comedy-thriller, The Trip (2021), and the experience was a dream come true for the long-time admirers of Taccone\u2019s own sketch comedy trio, The Lonely Island. The latter group left SNL four years before BriTANick arrived.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen we first met, [Taccone] didn\u2019t know that we had written for SNL, and I was like, \u2018We actually wrote for SNL.\u2019 He then gave me a huge hug \u2014\u00a0the hug of war veterans who\u2019ve been in the battle trenches together,\u201d Kocher recalls. \u201cSo he\u2019s been such an influence on us, and we all had an immediate shorthand. We would love to work with him for the rest of our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBelow, during a conversation with THR, Kocher and McElhaney also discuss how Daniel Radcliffe wound up voicing a butterfly in Pizza Movie.<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tAs someone who dealt with overzealous RAs, thank you for shining a light on their tyrannical ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBRIAN McELHANEY It needed to be said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tNICK KOCHER Democracy dies in darkness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDid you guys have your own blood feud with NYU\u2019s RAs? Is that the basis here?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER We actually had cool RAs. Some of our friends did not, but ours were great. Our freshman year RA was named Nora, and she was very cool.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY Yeah, she was cool. We didn\u2019t really have any crazy RA experiences. It took a minute to figure out where to set this movie, and once we set it at a college, it just became so obvious that RAs were the natural antagonists. They break up parties and tell you not to drink. So we said, \u201cLet\u2019s treat them as if they are the Orcs of the Lord of the Rings world or the roving Nazis of Inglourious Basterds. Let\u2019s exacerbate them to their full antagonist extreme.\u201d It just felt like the right choice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER Yeah, we love scenery-chewing villains who luxuriate and enjoy being villainous. It was just such a fun vessel to include one of those [in Jack Martin\u2019s Blake]. I love that he\u2019s wearing a \u201cspread love\u201d t-shirt the whole time while he\u2019s doing all this psychological torture on people.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tJack Martin as Blake in Pizza Movie.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDisney<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, Jack Martin\u2019s highly committed performance as Blake did remind me of Hans Landa in Inglourious, especially when he busts the kid with the pickle-jar bong at the beginning. We had a lot of Blakes at my college. My roommate once jumped out of a second-story window to avoid being written up, and the experience inspired him to install a secret kegerator in our huge entertainment center\/TV cabinet.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY Oh my god.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER When RAs busted up a party freshman year, I ran into a bedroom and hid in the closet. I was a little drunk, so I ended up passing out while waiting there. Then I woke up several hours later and came out of the closet to find the person whose room it was. I was like, \u201cAre the RAs still here?\u201d And she was like, \u201cThere were RAs here? What are you talking about? Who are you?\u201d The party had long since ended. (Laughs.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThat sounds like a funny sketch. Maybe you should look into that.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY I think so!<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER Yeah, put that on YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tDid you direct Jack to play his character as straight as possible?<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY Yeah, that was always the intention.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER That\u2019s also why we cast him. We auditioned a ton of people for Blake, and Jack was in the first readthrough of the movie. We hadn\u2019t seen anybody else read. One of our producers knew him and thought he might be good for this. He killed it at the table read, and then he had a great audition [afterwards]. A lot of the people who read for Blake were really big comedy actors, and while they were really funny, Jack Martin actually scared us by playing it so straight and so serious. It became so much funnier to us than someone who was just hamming it up in the part.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY Yeah, we wanted to shoot it and have it be performed as if it was from a different film. Blake does not exist in a college comedy; he exists in a prestige film. So Jack Martin really delivered on that challenge.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tGaten Matarazzo\u2019s Jack, Sean Giambrone\u2019s Montgomery in Pizza Movie.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDisney<\/p>\n

\n\tThe main characters take a fictional drug without food, and that mistake puts them through a half-dozen nightmarish phases. They can curtail their bad trip if they can make it to the lobby of their dorm to pick up a pizza. Were either of you inspired by a warning label on your own medication?<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER To some degree, yes, and also just drugs in general. The first time I did shrooms was on an empty stomach. It\u2019s what you\u2019re supposed to do because it makes it so much more intense. If you have food in your stomach, it\u2019s a less intense shroom trip. So I\u2019ve had some horrific trips on shrooms that definitely inspired elements of this movie.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY We were trying to figure out what drug they should take, and we realized that we wanted to turn the drug into different genres and sketches. So the nature of this drug\u2019s different phases \u2014\u00a0and its in-between moments of sobriety \u2014\u00a0 were structural choices. We didn\u2019t want them to be high all the time, and the actual highs are nothing you\u2019ve ever seen before. So we realized early on that it couldn\u2019t just be LSD or mushrooms. It had to be a fictional drug, and those side effects and phases just felt right in terms of working in these different types of genres and scenes and styles that we wanted to do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tPizza Movie is Gaten Matarazzo\u2019s first post-Stranger Things project. You can see the tonal swerve that likely appealed to him, but he\u2019s again playing a character who plays fantasy board games or tabletop games. Did you ever ask him about what he was going for on the heels of Stranger Things?<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY We were just like, \u201cWhy the hell this, buddy? What are you doing, man?\u201d So we talked a little bit about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER A big thing for us when we were casting the movie is that we didn\u2019t want to make any offers. We wanted everybody to audition. We knew we were going to have to move really quickly, and we wanted to make sure [ahead of filming] that everybody was a really good fit for their part. Sometimes, you\u2019ll cast a great actor [without auditioning them], but for whatever reason, the lines sound weird coming out of their mouth. You then need to rewrite their lines or really work with them, but we didn\u2019t have time for that. We also wanted people who were down to buy the ticket and take the ride for this movie. We didn\u2019t want to have to convince anyone or sell anyone to do it. So we auditioned everybody. Gaten read for both Jack and Montgomery, and he could have been cast as either, but his Jack read was so special and great. We talked with him a little bit while he was signing on because we did a huge rewrite of the movie. And he, understandably, wanted to know why.\u00a0 He was like, \u201cWait a minute, I liked the first script. What\u2019s happening to it now?\u201d So we went through it, one by one, and he was so smart about it. He knew the script so well. Finally, he was like, \u201cThis is going to work so much better.\u201d His own suggestions were also great, and he was enthusiastic the whole time. I\u2019m so glad he did this movie. As a fan of his, this is the type of thing I wanted to see him do.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY We did ask him, \u201cYou have the keys to the kingdom from Stranger Things. Why are you doing this low-budget comedy from two unknowns?\u201d And he was like, \u201cDude, I just want to do great stuff.\u201d He really wants to do things he loves, whether it\u2019s theater or weird indie films. The script connected to him, and I\u2019m sure he had to take a massive pay cut to work with two wildcards in us. It was a gamble. And he was just like, \u201cI just believed in the script, and it felt different, new and exciting for me.\u201d To go from something so huge to something truly different that expands your repertoire, that\u2019s the sign of a star.<\/p>\n

\n\t[Spoiler Warning.] When you say you did a massive rewrite, how different is the destination from what it was?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER The destination was the same, but there were different emotional beats. It used to be that Montgomery [Sean Giambrone] ended up with Ashley [Peyton Elizabeth Lee], and Jack ended up with Lizzy [Lulu Wilson]. [Writer\u2019s Note: Montgomery ends up with Lizzy in the actual film.] To do those original pairings, it took more time, and they didn\u2019t really feel right. The character of Ashley also wasn\u2019t a very exciting character to us, originally.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY She was cardboard.<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER She might\u2019ve had more lines, but she was just this sweet journalism major who was the object of Montgomery\u2019s crush. So we wanted to have more fun with this role, and then we made her fully insane.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY We wrote this in a weird way. We had the plot idea and the mechanics of all those drug phases. Then we slipped in the characters and the emotional story underneath it, which is not how you normally write a film. So we had to figure out these character arcs through all the new drafts we would do, but the plot always stayed the same. We also tightened up the stakes of the plot. It took us a while to figure out what would happen if they didn\u2019t eat the pizza, and some of the drug trips changed at the last minute. The head-exploding trip was discovered a week or two before we started shooting. The \u201cMake the Baby Like It\u201d scene was kind of discovered on the day. So we pivoted on a few things, but the main shape and structure always stayed pretty much the same.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tGaten Matarazzo\u2019s Jack, Lulu Wilson\u2019s Lizzy, Sean Giambrone\u2019s Montomgery in Pizza Movie<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDisney<\/p>\n

\n\tComedies and all its sub-genres, including the raunchy stoner comedy for \u201ctheater kids,\u201d have really gone by the wayside theatrically. Pizza Movie also does not have a theatrical release, and you and the actors have voiced your dissatisfaction in some funny ways. Whose idea was it to turn the lack of theatrical into a marketing bit<\/a>?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER Brian had the thought, and Hulu was down to make fun of themselves and us.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY I saw the Marty Supreme promo [atop the Las Vegas Sphere], and I was like, \u201cLet\u2019s do this with our guys.\u201d But it took us forever to figure out what they should be standing on. Then we went to Austin [for South by Southwest], and there was this picnic table next to a park. And we were like, \u201cThis will be perfect. Let\u2019s get a drone and our DP out there.\u201d And Hulu was totally down for it. They knew that we wanted it to be in theaters; we\u2019d had the conversation before. But Hulu has been really cool the whole time about us making fun of the things we want to make fun of and making the movie we wanted to make. So we knocked that spot out in an hour while we were in between press during South by Southwest.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER The movie was always going to be on streaming. We knew that going into it [despite having a theatrical conversation].\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2019, when Booksmart and Long Shot failed to light up the box office despite great reviews, that\u2019s when I knew the genre was in trouble theatrically. Superhero and action movies have also integrated a lot of comedy, so it seems like it\u2019s just being packaged with other genres now. But what do you think is the root cause of the genre\u2019s disappearance at the box office?<\/p>\n

\n\tNICK KOCHER I don\u2019t know the ultimate answer, but it could be because everything is a comedy now. Like you said, there\u2019s comedy in action and superhero movies, but everything on your phone is also a comedy sketch. There are so many tweets or TikToks or Instagram posts that are genuinely very funny, and it\u2019s all in your pocket. So that probably contributes to the barrier to entry of having to drive to a movie theater to laugh. But it\u2019s so great to be in a communal setting with people laughing together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY Yeah, people have been talking about this a lot in the last ten years. In the \u201990s and 2000s, there were one-to-three huge comedy films every year that everyone would see and quote. They would become part of the zeitgeist, and that doesn\u2019t really happen really at all anymore. I don\u2019t know if something happened that made people not want to go see comedies, or if it\u2019s just that people got scared and stopped making them. Is it a chicken or the egg thing where both are happening? But people still show up for horror and action movies. So everyone in comedy believes that comedy absolutely has a place in the theater. They should be trying to make big bold comedies and get them out theatrically. People aren\u2019t done seeing comedies in a group because that\u2019s the best way to see them. But it is a head scratcher as to why they\u2019ve fallen off.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER I think it\u2019s ultimately what Ryan Gosling said. This is the world we\u2019re in, and you now have to give people a reason to go see something. You have to make something so good and so undeniable that it gets people to the theaters. Everyone should do their part and support the theaters, but that\u2019s not how we keep them alive. We keep them alive by trying to make the best, funniest movies we can.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tNick, you mentioned that comedy is always at our fingertips through social media, so that makes you guys the J. Robert Oppenheimers of this situation. You were at the forefront of internet comedy.<\/p>\n

\n\tBriTANick (Laughs.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER That\u2019s true!\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY We\u2019re complaining about the thing that we began.<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER It\u2019s a double-edged sword. It\u2019s an undeniably good thing to remove a lot of the gatekeepers so it\u2019s much easier for young people to break into the industry. But it has also created a ton of noise and distraction. It\u2019s the double-edged sword of social media too. There\u2019s good and bad with these things, and you just hope that it\u2019s all trending towards good, ultimately.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Pizza Movie, Dan Radcliffe voices a butterfly named Lysander. Did he owe his agent a favor? Did he lose a bet?<\/p>\n

\n\tBriTANick (Laughs.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY That guy\u2019s in trouble, man. I don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on with him.<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER We knew Dan a little bit through some mutual friends, and initially, the butterfly was not as big of a character. Then it became a bigger character with a whole monologue at the end, and we immediately thought of Dan. So we asked our mutual friends if they would ask him, and they all braced us, saying, \u201cHe\u2019s probably going to say no to this. \u201d But he came back with an immediate and enthusiastic yes. We just loved working with him. He tried multiple different voices. There\u2019s a version of Lysander that is done as a British fop. That would be fun to release on the special features one day.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY He was so eager. That guy\u2019s a star. He just commits no matter what the project is. Clearly. He went into a recording booth and knocked it out of the park in 30 minutes.<\/p>\n

\n\t[Spoiler Warning.] We have to talk about the fourth-wall break. Jack Martin is transported to your writers\u2019 room where you\u2019re debating various choices in the movie including the title. Was Pizza Movie actually a placeholder title that stuck?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY The title was our albatross the whole time. It took us forever.<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER Well, we initially wanted to title the movie Oh God, No, Please Make It Stop.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s written on the whiteboard in the movie.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY That\u2019s right.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER We were told we can\u2019t call it that. But some people were referring to the movie internally as Pizza Movie, and that was sticking.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY It was called Untitled Pizza Movie on our slate, so we just removed Untitled. That\u2019s really all we did. But people were already calling it that. We kept pitching other ideas around, and then it got so out of control. We had so many ideas, and everyone had their opinions on what the movie should be called. We had all these polls we\u2019d send out to our friends, and no one could decide on anything. There was no unanimous title idea that everyone loved. People loved and hated each one. So we were just like, \u201cFor the next movie, we\u2019re just going to title it, and that\u2019s the title. No one can give their opinions.\u201d It was so annoying.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER I remember shouting, \u201cWe cannot call this Pizza Movie! That is the worst title in the world.\u201d And I still do feel that way. But then we added the joke in the movie where we get to say that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY We got to dunk on it.<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER And I was like, \u201cNow I love it.\u201d It\u2019s purposefully a horrifically bad title, and now I deeply love it because it is all the setup for this punchline 83 minutes into the movie.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY Aside from Oh God, No, Please Make It Stop, which we really liked, every other title just sounded cheesy. They all sounded like a teen comedy trying to be funny. So nothing was really hitting, and Pizza Movie just seemed to work for everyone. And like Nick said, when we found this joke about it, it became the only option.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t[Spoiler Warning.] Was that your actual writers\u2019 room?<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER It was the room, but it was production-designed by our production designer, Frankie Palombo. Throughout prep, Frankie came into the room and took photos of what we\u2019d written on the dry-erase board. So all of the things on the dry erase board were actually written on the dry erase board at one point.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY It\u2019s a very organized version of our room. Our room is messy, and we don\u2019t have stuff on the walls. It was white-walled like an insane asylum, but that was the room. We filmed ourselves having real arguments about real problems we had with the film. We have many, many minutes of footage of Nick and I literally arguing about all our problems with this film, and they will be in the DVD specials one day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t[Spoiler Warning.] You guys would usually perform in your sketches, so did you feel like you had to give your existing fans something with the two of you just to make it a proper BriTANick project?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER I wouldn\u2019t say we felt obligated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY I wanted to appear.<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER I didn\u2019t want to unless it made sense. And when we came up with this early idea about the \u201ctrue, horrible nature of reality\u201d being that they are characters in a movie, then it was like, \u201cOh, this is a really fun way we can come into this story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY Like Nick said, if we didn\u2019t fit in, we wouldn\u2019t have done it. But it did feel nice just because people know us as writers and also as performers. So for anyone who has followed us over the years, it\u2019s nice to give them a glimpse of us. It felt like an important thing to do if we could make it work, and I\u2019m glad we did.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSnackatron 3000 and Lulu Wilson\u2019s Lizzy in Pizza Movie.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDisney<\/p>\n

\n\tYou somehow made me feel something for an AI robot named Snackatron 3000.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER Yes!\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY Good!<\/p>\n

\n\tBut I\u2019m conflicted about it because we live in a time where corporate America is trying to force-feed AI down our throats.<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER Look, this is a movie that is meant to challenge the audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY I\u2019m sorry about that. It\u2019s a complex idea. I think Snackatron is the best version of AI. If AI leads to Snackatrons, I\u2019m okay with that. But Snackatron has, low key, one of the best arcs in the film. For a D character, he\u2019s got a beautiful little story.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen I saw that you wrote Jorma Taccone\u2019s Over Your Dead Body, I figured you\u2019d worked with Jorma and the rest of The Lonely Island at SNL, but they left long before you guys got there in 2016. So how did you end up on that remake?<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER Well, we were actually on it before Jorma was. We were brought on by XYZ Films to write the script for the remake. And after we wrote it, they were like, \u201cGreat, Jorma is going to direct it. \u201d And we were like, \u201cThis is a dream come true.\u201d The Lonely Island is one of the single biggest influences on our sketch comedy. We\u2019re such massive fans of MacGruber and Popstar, so it was incredible to get to work with Jorma. When we first met, he didn\u2019t know that we had written for SNL, and I was like, \u201cWe actually wrote for SNL.\u201d He then gave me a huge hug \u2014\u00a0the hug of war veterans who\u2019ve been in the battle trenches together. So he\u2019s been such an influence on us, and we all had an immediate shorthand. We would love to work with him for the rest of our lives.<\/p>\n

\n\tDid the collective name of Lonely Island inspire BriTANick?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER No, we knew that sketch groups and duos need a name, and so we came up with our name when we were 19 years old. We didn\u2019t think about it very hard, and we didn\u2019t realize we would be going by it for the next 20 years of our lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY I thought we would be. I was like, \u201cThis is us till the end, baby.\u201d But we did think of combining our names with the word Titanic, and we capitalized the T, the A and the N so that people might pronounce it correctly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tNICK KOCHER No one ever pronounces it correctly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY They\u2019ll say, \u201cBrittanic,\u201d or \u201cBrit and Nick.\u201d They think my name is Brit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER They think there\u2019s a British association or a genuine Titanic association or Encyclopedia Britannica association. And there\u2019s none of that.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY At the time we started, we loved a group called Derrick Comedy that was huge on YouTube. It was Donald Glover\u2019s group with Dominic Dierkes and DC Pierson. I loved that their name wasn\u2019t a comedy-sounding name; it was just Derrick. A lot of improv and sketch groups try to be funny and call themselves The Zany Bow Ties or whatever.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER We did, for one second, consider naming ourselves something like that. Brian\u2019s roommate at the time was like, \u201cYou can\u2019t call yourselves BriTANick. You should call yourselves The Mustache Diaries.\u201d So we entertained that for half an hour, and I don\u2019t know what our careers would be like if we were The Mustache Diaries. We would\u2019ve had to change the name at a certain point.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY It\u2019s now whatever you guys want it to be. We\u2019ve given our name up.<\/p>\n

\n\tTommy Wirkola, who directed the Norwegian version of Over Your Dead Body, was originally going to helm the remake. Did he have another movie go at the same time? Or did he realize that it would be unwise to remake himself?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER Tommy was amazing. He was like, \u201cI made my version of this. Do your own thing and change whatever you want.\u201d He trusted the whole creative team. He was a big proponent of Jorma directing it. He\u2019s also a massive MacGruber fan. And it\u2019s incredible to hear that he loves the remake.<\/p>\n

\n\tBesides changing the names, what was the key to adapting a Norwegian film for the States?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER We didn\u2019t really think too much about the States, per se. There\u2019s a lot of inside Hollywood jokes that we added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY I would say the lead couple\u2019s relationship and careers are more specific to acting and filmmaking.<\/p>\n

\n\tJason Segal\u2019s character directed an indie film years before languishing in commercials. The character is a soap opera director in Tommy\u2019s The Trip.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER Yeah. We loved the structure of the original, and while we did change some stuff at the end, Jorma wanted to revert back because, \u201cWe don\u2019t have enough money to do that.\u201d (Laughs.) So the main things we focused on were tweaking dialogue and character arcs. We put our weird brand of humor in there and threw Jorma some alley-oops that we knew he would be able to slam dunk.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY Changing the gender of one of the main antagonists was a pretty big move we made, and that opened up a different perspective of how we could write those characters. It gave us another relationship story to parallel [Jason Segal and Samara Weaving\u2019s characters\u2019] relationship story. So there were little details here and there, but like Nick said, the original is so well structured that the foundation was already laid for us. That can be the hardest part to write.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tBella Gonzales (DP), co-writers\/directors Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher \u2014\u00a0and Gaten Matarazzo on the set of Pizza Movie.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDisney\/Brett Roedel<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat\u2019s the plan going forward? Go through whatever door that opens? Or attempt to steer things in a particular direction?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKOCHER We\u2019d love to continue writing and directing movies \u2014\u00a0and specifically both. There\u2019s certain things we would love to write and hand off to different people. Then there\u2019s other things that we want to write, direct and really make our own. We\u2019ve got some stuff lined up that we can\u2019t really talk about. Who knows if they \u2018ll end up happening, but we\u2019re writing scripts. We definitely don\u2019t want to go through whatever door that opens, but we love changing things up and challenging ourselves. We\u2019ve had a lot of good experiences writing stuff that we didn\u2019t think we were right for. We\u2019ve got a movie at New Line, and we\u2019re doing a rewrite on that right now. It\u2019s in a very, very different area than any of these current movies, and it was a fun challenge to write. So we want to keep changing it up and playing in different genres, and we\u2019ll see what comes.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcELHANEY This month is actually a good distillation of what we like to do. We have two movies coming out. One is our film, and it\u2019s very much our BriTANick style. The other one is something that we wrote and collaborated on with other people. It\u2019s in a style that we had to learn a bit how to do. So we want to ping-pong between the two. Our very unique sensibility that we\u2019ve developed over so many years is always in our back pocket. But we also want to branch out and try to do new things before coming back home to do what we do.<\/p>\n

\n\t***
Pizza Movie is now streaming on Hulu. Over Your Dead Body opens in theaters on April 24.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[This story contains spoilers for Pizza Movie.] Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, the creative duo known as BriTANick,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":513966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[179679,179680,96,131212,2839,179681,134171,169952,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-513965","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-brian-mcelhaney","9":"tag-britanick","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-gaten-matarazzo","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-nick-kocher","14":"tag-over-your-dead-body","15":"tag-pizza-movie","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}