EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with Andy Dick

Oh. You know what? That's my only--I don't have a lot of fears. I'm not afraid of spiders, I'm not afraid of snakes...I had a rattlesnake as a pet for a little bit. My friend was going to kill it in his garden but I said, "No, no, no, no, no! I'll take it." And I kept it in an aquarium right on my kitchen table. I'm not afraid of a lot of things, but the one thing I AM afraid of is electricity. And I think it was because I was electrocuted twice as a child. Literally. I was like thrown across the room once. My fingers were all black.

Do you think that electrocution possibly inspired you to do the kind of comedy that you do today?

I know what you wanted to say, "Do you think that electrocution rewired your brain to make you the retard that you are?" You can say it, lady.

(Lisa laughs)

So then, you shouldn't be afraid of it, you should embrace it.

No, I do. I embrace it and I actually think that the electrocution rewired my brain in a good way because I think I was even...much worse off before--pre-electrocution.

Exactly. Kind of like shock---shock treatments.

Umm hmm. Shocked me into submission. It really helped me. I really do believe I, uh...oh, that's just a long philosophy of mine that I made up and has no basis in truth whatsoever---I just made it up in my head, but how are you doing?

I'm doing really well. I, um, got the screener for "Danny Roane" and---

Did you watch it?

I--I watched it this morning because that's the only time I had and I got up to the part with the bloody butt rag and started screaming, I was laughing so hard.

(Andy laughs.)

Isn't James Van Der Beek great in that?

I was just going to say, he does such a great---when he said, without laughing whatsoever, "and he bleeds from his ass...constantly," without breaking a smile, I was like, "Wow. Good job."

He is the consummate professional. He is SO good. I wrote it with him in mind.

You did?

A James Van Der Beek type. And then, surprisingly, James Van Der Beek took the part and I was very, very, very, very happy. And he's a--I hope people think that that guy is just--he's an incredible actor. And if you look at his work--after I shot the movie, I'm like, "What else has he done?" I really didn't--I just knew that he had done "Dawson's Creek," which I had never seen. What else has this guy done?

I don't want your life...

You probably know the name of it, but it was this drug movie...

(And then it took us a little while of going back and forth and me jumping on Google before we figured out the movie Andy was talking about was "The Rules of Attraction".)

Well, I like that you wrote it with him in mind and I want to ask, how many of those characters who are in the film did you have in mind? Because I know a lot of people are people you've worked with in the past, friends of yours. And how many of the people who were cast did you have in your head?

I always knew that I was going to---that's a good question--I always knew that I was going to use---and I use that word in the way that it's meant to be used---that I would use Ben Stiller and use Jack Black, you know, the way they have used me. I've done cameos for them and I've done favors for them and now it's time for me---time to return my favors, to pull my strings and make you dance like a puppet! And I got Ben Stiller and Jack Black to be in my movie cause, you know, we're friends and they were gracious enough to show up for forty-five minutes to shoot their part out. But, you know, those parts even though I knew I was going to use them, they were just themselves and I would have a very loose idea of, you know, what I would be doing in their scenes and improvised a lot. Actually, I wrote it out, the scene with me and Ben, but then there was a lot of improvising. There was, you know, this movie was not like this improvised free-for-all. There was a script that took me two years to do---it took me about four years of research and then two years to actually write. I call it very semi-autobiographical.

Well, I was going to say--that was probably going to be my next question was how scripted it was because it felt--it--like, I know bad improv looks like improv, but it didn't really look like improv to me. I could tell that a lot of it had been scripted because there was structure.

We probably--we did such a good--well, I hate to toot my own horn, but we really did such a good job of melding the two together that I bet you would not be able to tell me lines that were written or lines that were improvised. I'd love if you could remember any--and you only saw about fifteen minutes of it, so you didn't even see, you didn't see the part where James Van Der Beek gets fired from the movie, did you?

No, I didn't. I didn't get to that part, I was so sad.

You've gotta---what happens...let me just you, my character starts drinking again immediately---three days into the film---and he decides to turn it into a musical and he fires James Van Der Beek in front of everybody because he's replaced him with Broadway's Anthony Rapp, who by the way, I knew I was going to use the whole time because it was written for him---

That's awesome.

--because not only is he a talented---an immensely talented and great guy, he's been a very dear friend of mine for over twenty years. We grew up together in Joliet, Illinois, outside of Chicago.

Oh, that's awesome.

A lot of it is that I've had great, good luck of the great--what's it called--to know these fantastically talented people, so that I was able to put them in the movie. And I didn't really finish answering your question before, I did the movie with people I knew could not only handle the script, but improvise around and add more to it. That's the Mo Collinses of movies.

Oh, she---when she does her little wink and "of course you know me!"

Umm hmm. Kevin Farley, Chris Farley's brother, Bob Odenkirk, who I did not include in the conversation, I did not include him in the Ben Stiller, Jack Black category, because he's not really known--he's not really a star--but he, to me, is one of the funniest people I know, one of the top three funniest people I've known in my whole life.

Did he--how much of that "in a nutshell" conversation was improvised, cause that was one of the---that made me laugh out loud.

He improvised, um, that had a structure that the scene had a structure that we need to get to this point, Bob, but now, I'm going to open the gate and I want you to run, run run!

(Lisa laughs)

He made up the "in a nutshell" I--we had to stop his outtakes for---I don't know if they made it onto the DVD, but there's outtakes where---Bob's scenes originally could be a half hour long.

Yes.

He was just going on--I think he was so inspired by it a year later, he made a film that's on SuperDeluxe that's called "Bob Pitches a Movie."

Oh, I didn't look at that, but I'm going to look at that on SuperDeluxe.

He very nearly stole a scene in my movie, and I didn't call him on it because I was just like, "Hey, I saw some stuff on SuperDeluxe and how many different films do you have on there?" And he goes, "This one, this one, Comedy by Numbers and this one and one called 'Bob Pitches a Movie.'" And I'm like, "Oh!" And then I was thinking he would say, "which is very similar to the one to the one I did in your movie," but he never did. I just let it go. I don't care.

That's really funny. Yeah, it's such an amazing cast, just from what's on the cover of the DVD.

The thing about it is there's some comedy gold in it that's untapped, you know, look at Kate Flannery, who is the casting director. She had a lot more to do too, had the movie--the movie would have been five hours long, had I kept everybody's funny stuff in. But, I had to keep the story moving along and get to the end.

And quite honestly, that's kind of how I feel about this interview. I had a great time chatting with Andy, who upon hearing that this would end up being transcribed because the sound quality probably wouldn't be good enough for a podcast, reacted by saying of his interviews:

"Whenever I read them in black and white, I don't hear my inflections, I don't hear my accents, I don't hear where--it really makes a difference when you HEAR it. People, when they hear it, they get that I'm joking."

So, hopefully, you all get that Andy's joking. Except about the electrocution--that really happened. I'm not joking. Seriously, I'm not.