When it comes to time travel, Hollywood has never been short on ideas for jumping to the past, present and future. From burning rubber in the stylish silver DeLorean of “Back to the Future” fame to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s electric orb of nakedness in “The Terminator” movies to Bill and Ted having an excellent adventure through time via a phone booth, films incorporate both the awesome and the preposterous to go where no man has gone before.
The latest comedy from director Steve Pink (“Accepted”) certainly takes the latter path, choosing a mode of time transportation that’s as ridiculous as the film title suggests. At a recent press junket, The Badger Herald met up with Pink and the stars of “Hot Tub Time Machine” to discuss the making of this unusual time travel flick.
Hoping to ride the comedic coattails of last year’s surprise blockbuster, “The Hangover,” “Hot Tub Time Machine” is a raunchy, buddy flick about Adam (John Cusack, “2012”), Nick (Craig Robinson, TV’s “The Office”) and Lou (Rob Corddry, “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay”), three out-of-touch best friends who’ve become bored with their adult lives. In an attempt to reconnect, the three, along with Adam’s nephew Jacob (Clark Duke, “Sex Drive”), return to a once-popular ski resort where a crazy night of drinking in the hotel hot tub sends the group back to the halcyon days of their youth, in the year 1986.
If at this point you’re thinking the film’s premise sounds like a bit of a joke, you’re exactly right.
“Josh Heald, the writer, went to college with the ‘Harold & Kumar’ guys [writers John Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg], and they all wanted to be screenwriters and ‘Hot Tub Machine’ was just like a joke for them,” Corddry said. “They were going to pitch a movie called ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ and they were like, ‘That’s ridiculous!’ And it was just this running joke for years and then Heald actually wrote it and here we are.”
Regardless of the film’s origin, Pink, a contemporary of Cusack since the two attended high school together in Illinois, believes the best movies are the ones where you care about the characters “no matter how insane and ridiculous the premise is.”
“The more you empathize with the characters, the more you like them, and the more you laugh at their ridiculous behavior because you’re identifying their flawed behavior as funny,” Pink said. “Unless you know what their behavior is you can’t identify it as flawed.”
The star of the show
When dealing with a talented ensemble cast, it can be difficult at times to pin down one character as the film’s main protagonist. This was by no means the case with “Hot Tub Time Machine.”
“The hot tub wasn’t a character in my movie until we built the thing, and then it was a big fat fucking character,” Pink said.
Realizing the star of his film was more than just a piece of scenery, Pink researched numerous hot tubs to ensure he picked the one that best represented the type of time travel that would take place in the film.
“I almost went with above ground, like the crazy, weird fake paneling one, but then I was like, that’s more of a spaceship,” Pink said. “So then I started looking at other designs of hot tubs for more of a vortex concept. Someone has to make these decisions. It’s the hot tub. I couldn’t fuck that up. What if I fucked up the hot tub? That would have been bad.”
Because the final tub design had to serve as both a functioning hot tub and a time machine, the film’s sets had to be built 10 feet higher than what you would find on a normal stage so the crew could install massive propulsion jets to give the tub the effect of a giant toilet bowl that’s constantly flushing during the time travel scenes. When it was completed, this colossal diva was difficult to ignore.
“We were always staring at. It was always in the room. I had to keep dealing with that hot tub. But it eventually grew on me,” Pink said.
Bringing back the ’80s
When the film’s main characters wake up the morning after their booze-soaked night in the hot tub, they are shocked to find they have travelled back to their 1986 teenage lives. Therefore, to provide audiences with the ultimate ’80s cinematic experience, Pink stuffed as much of this iconic decade as he could into the film.
“Some of the references are small, and some of the references are more substantial, and some are cold rip-offs of other movies depending on whether you are talking about a piece of dialogue or storyline or just a visual reference,” Pink said. “I was trying to paint a picture of as much stuff that was going on during the ’80s as possible.”
In addition to the leg warmers, Members Only jackets and a soundtrack featuring the likes of David Bowie, Public Enemy and M?tley Cr?e, the film also stars one of the biggest products of the ’80s: John Cusack himself.
“I think if you’re going to make an ’80s movie you probably want to do it with John Cusack. Or else you’re a hack,” joked Lizzy Caplan (“Cloverfield”), who plays Cusack’s onscreen love interest.
The film also features supporting roles from two other ’80s acting icons: Chevy Chase (TV’s “Community”) as a mysterious hot tub repair man and Crispin Glover (“Alice in Wonderland”) as a one-armed hotel bellhop. Although Glover admits his casting likely had a lot to do with his defining role as George McFly in another time traveling flick, “Back to the Future,” he’s grateful to take a part in more commercial pictures as it allows him to fund his own experimental films like “What is It?” and “It is Fine. Everything is Fine!”
“Years ago, after ‘Back to the Future’ came out, I felt a certain obligation towards finding projects that somehow psychologically reflected what my interests were,” Glover said. “Now I realize it makes much more sense for me to work with other filmmakers to help what they want to get forth and then I can put the money I’m making from these films into my own projects that I’m so passionate about.”
Despite Pink’s efforts to cram as many ’80s references as possible into the film, he believes the film will still appeal to all audiences no matter what decade they grew up in.
“I had to at least drive the film in a way that you would think was entertaining if it was in any decade otherwise you would be like, ‘Haha another ’80s joke I don’t get, haha fucking idiots. I don’t get that joke,'” Pink said.
Surviving life on set
When the cast of your film is jam-packed with jokesters there’s bound to be some pranks every now and then, and the set of “Hot Tub Time Machine” was no exception.
“Oh god, there were so many pranks,” Corddry said. “I would take a dump in Clark’s trailer every day. And I would eat like chili and beer the night before.”
“That was you? What the hell?” Duke replied.
“He got like four people fired,” Robinson chimed in.
“I kept firing fucking teamsters. I ruined like four dudes’ lives, man. They’re out of the union. That’s sick, dude,” Duke joked. “I don’t know how you shit so much on command. Just the volume is ridiculous.”
In the midst of all this clowning around, the stars did find time to get some filming in. However, some scenes were certainly better than others.
“All the scenes on the boat at the end were fun,” Corddry said. “I got drunk. I drank a whole bottle of white wine.”
“Did you sprain your vagina at all that day?” Duke joked.
“Oh my god man, yeah,” Corddry replied.
“A whole bottle of white wine? I’d be careful. You wild man. Keith Moon over here,” Duke said.
The cast and crew also had to survive the harsh reality of filming in the isolated mountain community of Fernie, British Columbia, where cold climates and long days lasting from 4:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. made shooting sequences at night a rather complicated task.
“We lost 10 minutes of light even because the birds would come on first and then the sun. So as soon as I heard those goddamn birds, I knew we were fucking toast,” Pink said.
“And being funny at night in the freezing cold, didn’t really think about that. I was like whose fucking idea is this? How about ‘Tropical Cove Time Machine’? Would that have been so hard? Hey, we go on vacation, we fucking swim in the fucking Mediterranean fucking cove with the fucking beautiful white sandy beaches and turquoise waters. We come out of there and we’re in the fucking ’80s. And it’s fucking Hawaii. What the fuck?”
Oh, the places you’ll go
We’ve all wished at some point or another we could go back in time to do things over again or to prevent some past disaster. Having spent enough time in the ’80s, the stars of the film discussed what their dream destinations would be if they had their own hot tub time machine.
“I said the ’60s the other day and some guy said, ‘Because of the drugs?’ and I said, ‘No!’ but I feel like that’s just what he took away from it, so I’m not saying ’60s today because that’s not true,” said Collette Wolfe (“Four Christmases”), who plays the onscreen sister and mother of Cusack and Duke, respectively. “So I’m going to go with the ’20s.”
“Because of the moonshine,” Caplan joked.
Taking a more nostalgic route, Corddry said, “I would love to see New York in the ’70s. I drove through New York once when I was a little kid and I became obsessed with New York. It was like another planet. I would have loved to see that.”
“I would hang out with Rob in New York,” Robinson replied.
“I would probably just do 2009 again,” Duke joked.
“Yeah, I agree, it was a pretty good year right?” Corddry said.
“Hot Tub Time Machine” opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, March 26.
