‘Bad Monkey’ Star Vince Vaughn Believes Young Filmmakers Should Be Allowed To Make Comedies Unafraid Of Offending Anyone: “Can We Get Away With This?”
Actor Vince Vaughn thinks comedies have gone soft and has been speaking out about his feelings often recently. He also offers a solution that is quite simple – Hollywood needs to get out of its own way.
On Hot Ones with Sean Evans, he blamed the neurotic overthinking of the studios. “They [execs] just overthink it,” Vaughn said (via Fox News). “And it’s like, it’s crazy, you get these rules, like, if you did geometry, and you said 87 degrees was a right angle, then all your answers are messed up, instead of 90 degrees.”
He also pointed to their waning obsession with IPs. “So there became some idea or concept, like, they would say something like, ‘You have to have an IP,’” he said. “The people in charge don’t want to get fired more so than they’re looking to do something great, so they want to kind of follow a set of rules that somehow get set in stone, that don’t really translate”.
Vaughn continued, “But as long as they follow them, they’re not going to lose their job because they can say, ’Well, look, I made a movie off the board game ‘Payday,’ so even though the movie didn’t work, you can’t let me go, right?’”
Despite the mentality of executives, the Made actor sees the pendulum swinging back someday in favor of the comedies he used to make with Todd Phillips and Jon Favreau.
“People want to laugh. People want to look at stuff that feels a little bit like it’s, you know, dangerous or pushing the envelope,” he said. “I think you’re going to see more of it in the film space sooner than later, would be my guess.”
However, up-and-coming filmmakers need to be given leeway again to take risks even if they offend a segment of the audience with crass characters and stories.
“I don’t know anyone who’s like, ‘I really love someone making a character be as polite and evolved as possible’ If anything, it’s like, ‘Can we get away with this?’” he explained in a Variety interview.
“I remember when we first shot ‘[Wedding] Crashers,’ we were going super [R-rated], and we would do stuff and it was fun because we were almost making a movie for ourselves to be funny and there was no ‘parents’ around.” Vaughn added, “I think that’s a big problem now – you’ve got to let young people go make a movie and leave them alone. They’ll figure it out in the end.”
Bringing up other past projects and directors, he continued, “Look how much that has resonated, because there’s something that feels provocative, in the sense that it’s allowing itself to be what it wants to be. It’s not worrying about offending anyone. Like Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘If you open a window and try to please everyone, you’ll catch pneumonia.’”
He added further, “I think the stuff that does resonate is always things that at least feel like they’re being authentic to the piece. They’re not trying to code it in a way that feels responsible. That feels like a snoozefest to me; a responsible comedy feels like a time to take a nap.”
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