Kyle Mooney stars as James in Brigsby Bear. (Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)
When The Lonely Island — Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaeffer — left Saturday Night Live, the show suddenly had an opening for an established comedy group capable of generating offbeat viral videos. Kyle Mooney, Beck Bennett, and Dave McCary—three-fourths of the Good Neighbor group—joined the show in 2013, with the former two in front of the camera and the latter behind it.
Mooney hasn’t yet garnered the level of attention and stardom afforded to his higher-profile castmates. But all that might change soon with Brigsby Bear, co-written by and starring Mooney, and directed by McCary. It’s difficult to describe this amusing but melancholy film, opening in D.C. today, without spoiling an early twist. Suffice it to say it follows James (Mooney) as he adjusts to living in the real world after devoting most of his life to obsessing over a low-fi children’s sci-fi show called Brigsby Bear. Supporting cast members include Bennett, Mark Hamill, Greg Kinnear, Matt Walsh, and Michaela Watkins.
DCist sat down with Mooney and McCary to discuss the film’s distinctive tone and their leap from TV to film. They even offered some tidbits about a recent standout SNL sketch. Here’s a transcript of the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
DCist: I didn’t know the premise going in, and the first few minutes are pretty ambiguous. How did you decide how much to show the audience at the beginning and when to break the illusion?
McCary: We really liked the idea of that misdirect and not knowing the time period we’re in. There’s just a fun element to surprising people that way. People go into the movie who know Kyle Mooney or know it’s from SNL people and think it’s going to be a silly film. It’s just fun to throw people off.
We enjoy that moviegoing experience ourselves. I don’t love watching trailers of movies I’m about to see where you’re just spoon-fed every plot point.
DCist: Were you concerned the marketing for the movie would force you to reveal more than you otherwise would have?
Mooney: At some point you have to be okay with information getting out there.
McCary: Maybe in New York and L.A., there’s a bunch of people who will go see the movie knowing the people involved. It’s a harder sell on middle America who probably doesn’t know our work, and the film probably looks a little too strange for their taste.
Mooney: I definitely found myself today thinking I wish when people asked me to describe the movie, I could be like, ‘It’s a guy who doesn’t want to be in the army, but now he’s in the army.’
DCist: [Minor thematic spoiler] The story in some ways resembles Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. I know you came up with the idea for the movie before that show came out, but were you kicking yourself when you saw someone doing something similar?
Mooney: I love all the people who work on that show. I can’t claim to have seen every episode. I think we knew tonally we were going to do something different. For some reason in the process of coming up with this idea and scripting it, Room came out. The Wolfpack came out—a documentary about a family living in New York secluded in their apartment. Their whole thing is making movies and being in love with movies. When that came out, I thought maybe this true story is already better than this fictional one we’re coming up with.
DCist: Did this movie come from any solitary experience that you had or witnessed?
Mooney: No. We have a love for ‘80s and ‘90s children’s television, and we definitely love low-budget, poorly produced, straight-to-video kids shows. It’s one of those dream state notions — what if a guy had a TV show made just for him? And it sort of blossomed from that.
DCist: There’s a sincerity and depth of emotion in the movie that’s not as present in your earlier work. Was it a conscious decision to differentiate this movie from other stuff you’ve done before?
McCary: The most interesting version of the script that Kyle and Kevin wrote was the most authentic, sincere take that didn’t lean too heavy into the jokiness of it. Our entire life we’ve made relatively silly videos, but we’ve always felt that our approach to comedy was less about the jokes per minute and more about the honesty of a given character or situation. This is clearly our first stab at really dramatic moments.
Mooney: I don’t think we set out to make a dramatic film. It was a story that we all liked and enjoyed and wanted to explore. We thought it was to play it as earnest as possible.
McCary: A lot of our references took a lot of tonal notes from movies like Being There or The Truman Show — movies where the acting surrounding this fish out of water is so sincere.
DCist: Was it a big transition going from telling a story in three or four minutes to telling one in 89 minutes?
Mooney: There is something almost relieving to some degree about not having to make a three-minute comedy video that’s funny at every moment. We got to take our time and explore a scene.
McCary: I’ve felt over the years starting to get a little exhausted with the expectation to make things consistently funny. For Saturday Night Live, they’re watching the show to laugh. Luckily [executive producer Lorne Michaels] and a number of the higher-ups at SNL do appreciate that we sometimes go after a more odd concept or something that is less joke-heavy but just more of an interesting experience. Sometimes they’ll let us take stabs at more…
Mooney: Nuanced? We use that word a lot. ‘We want to do another nuanced sketch.’
DCist: I thought Greg Kinnear in particular was really fantastic in the movie. What was it like to work with him?
Mooney: He was rad. Greg was one of the first dudes we thought of. He’s so good at what we needed for this film. He can play either comedy or drama without any trouble.
McCary: He’s really good at general realism. He can make a scene so real in the way he can add the simplest gestures, eating in the middle of the line of dialogue. It’s very effortless and he doesn’t need a lot of direction. It was a really impressive thing to watch.
DCist: Kyle, you seem to have this talent for stuttering on camera. It’s the kind of stuttering that people do in real conversation all the time. Is that scripted ahead of time or do you come up with it in the moment?
Mooney: I’m not mapping out every breath and consonant repeat. I think it’s just like, I’ll have a line down. That’s how I see the character and that’s how I imagine the character interacts. That’s how I feel like at times any one of us could react given a situation that makes us nervous. Having to talk sometimes is very difficult. James obviously is in a completely new world, and interacting with people in a way that he never has.
McCary: You see the character processing a brand new thing—‘I can say that too!’ As a fan and friend of Kyle, I’ve been able to watch him take inspiration from real-life YouTube kids that we’re both obsessed with. Discovering awkward or insecure kids where we see a little bit of ourselves from when we were younger or even now. Kyle subconsciously will obsess over videos and watch them hundreds of times over the years, and he’ll absorb little mannerisms.
DCist: Before we go, I have to ask a couple SNL questions. There’s a couple taped sketches you’ve done imagining a behind-the-scenes relationship between Kyle and Leslie Jones. In the most recent one, Kyle shot Colin Jost. Tell me about making those.
Mooney: That was such a fun thing to do this year. With the first one, we were kind of operating off of the template we created with the Kanye West documentary video. We just liked the idea of doing these slices of life of the people who work on the show. Leslie and I are such a fascinating combination. That first one was cool because we got to pull from Leslie’s life. You get a real honest narration from her.
McCary: That’s also an example of us seeking a different format for the show. When you make something like a documentary for SNL, you’re kind of allowed to build for a minute or two without jokes. That’s always fun for us.
Mooney: After that, throughout the season, there would be little Leslie and Kyle moments. We just had fun with the feud between Colin and I. We were like, we don’t know if we’re ever going to do it again, so we might as well shoot the guy. The second one made some pretty big leaps from the first one. We have a 4-year-old kid. If there were to be a next one, there’s a lot of ground to make up.
McCary: At the end of that episode where Kyle shoots Colin, Colin was on the crutches [during the show’s goodbye segment, as if he had really just been shot]. Just the fact that Lorne lets us do those things that are so just for us and for the diehard fans who are really looking for that stuff.
DCist: Were the crutches your idea?
McCary: Yeah.
Mooney: [joking] Colin would never come up with something like that.
Brigsby Bear is now playing at Landmark E Street Cinema, ArcLight Bethesda and Angelika Film Theater Mosaic.
