 you know I'd always hoped right before I died my life would flash before my eyes and I would see wonderful things but as I was hanging up there I didn't really see much of anything I did see you Hi this is Matt McDonald with CalTV Entertainment News and I'm here with the directors of the upcoming film Swiss Army Man, Daniels, Daniel Scheiner and Daniel Kwan so I want to start off talking about the fact that you guys are a directing duo so I know in my family they might think that I'm probably not super good at compromising so how does the dynamic between you two work on creative making decisions and how do you formulate the film together? Yeah when I was a kid I hated like class projects because I had to like collaborate and that would be like oh these kids like they're gonna bring my grade down but in retrospect it's like so valuable to learn how to compromise you know like very few things in life allow you to do things by yourself Yeah except for when I was in film school I had the same feeling like collaborating with a bunch of kids who had very different tastes was just the pain in the butt so I just went into animation which allowed me to just be by myself which is pretty pretty funny because The problem with animation was he would never finish things so like I would see his animations and be like these are great except you're halfway done and you gave up I'm going to convince you to finish things and that's why we became a directing duo was so I could convince Dan Kwan to finish things That's not entirely true but we definitely balance each other in a strange way he went he did a lot of like improv when he was in college and that was kind of his main focus there and so like he was kind of the opposite he was like a pro collaborator and that was a pro isolation creator or whatever in some ways it actually is similar to how what the characters in our movie go through it's really odd but our our relationship definitely bleeds into the Hank and Manny relationship so it's pretty so if you watch the movie you'll understand how our working dynamic is yeah it's basically a autobiographical documentary yeah you've also said that working on music videos also functioned as a type of film school for you so what did working on music videos provide for you that film school didn't okay uh he's gonna love this well I uh we we kind of always say we didn't learn much in film school like the the biggest thing that happened for me in film school was like a bunch of kids who I really respected also got tricked into going and then we all met each other and made stuff outside of class um and then at music videos what we kind of did was we we pitched ideas based on what we wanted to learn and so we would kind of like convince a band like hey let's uh we want to do a car chase music video and then we'd learn about stunts and car chases and how to photograph that and orchestrate that um so like for six years we've just been kind of um experimenting you know and just making stuff which is kind of like the only film school you need is to just make things the best they can you can lift sentences your turn we don't know how to talk anymore um we don't make movies but we don't know right dang it um we uh we also like realized that uh music videos is probably one of the only uh form of video that's experimental but still has money it's a it's a really weird thing that we accidentally um landed in that world because it ended up being a really good outlet for us because we could still have our voice and still maintain something um individual um take risks that like you know when you make a Fritos commercial you can't take many risks but when you're making a music video for battles like kind of anything goes right um and I'm talking the last thing I'll say that like is crucial that you'll never learn in a film school is like uh the politics of of making anything for money like uh like we we got to we got to learn on a very small scale you know starting with really small budgets just like who gives you the money and how do you treat them and how do you make sure everyone is happy while you're still making something unique and interesting um and sometimes it doesn't work out but uh we got we got really lucky um we found a lot of good relationships and that kind of stuff really helped once we got to the bigger stuff once we got to this movie you know when there's much more money on the line and huge actors who have big teams and big agents and big managers who are ready to you know smack you down if you do something wrong so that was a big thing that I don't think you could ever really learn um at a film school something that I love about the films that I watched growing up like the goonies or hook or these like big sets and things like that we don't really get anymore but in this film there's a lot of like puppetry and set making so what was the process behind making those and where did those ideas come from yeah I think we we similarly loved those kinds of movies and and it's it's sort of selfish like we just it's more fun to build things with your friends than it is to like have someone make it in a computer later but also I think you know 90 99 percent of human beings have like been watching movies since they were kids and and there's something about like making stuff that is kind of transfers like through the lens and you kind of tell that like a bunch of friends made this and that like they actually went out there and built these things and we felt like it grounded the story in a really fun way if you could kind of see what for those who haven't seen the movie or the trailer like you get to watch these characters build things in the woods out of garbage and sticks and and we literally did that we built things in the woods out of garbage and sticks um and it was kind of a really janky but fun celebration of movies like uh et or like michelle gondry music videos or or things where you can kind of see like oh they built that look at that little puppet and I can tell like that that's fake but it makes it more fun yeah we got to we got to take a tour of ilm yesterday which is insane but like they took us down the hallways and just pointed at like a prop from almost every movie that ever needed visual effects and it's kind of it's kind of fun to be reminded that like that's why we make movies um is because of those films and those films had a texture to it that I think a lot of movies lack today and we wanted to do that but on a smaller scale and then more intimate scale and just create something that kind of exudes um creativity and uh yeah that's why that's why we made all that stuff awesome well thank you so much for being with me today uh swiss army man comes out in theaters on july 1st yeah see in theaters it's kind of a musical and there's action scenes go bears on three thanks guys