..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

..Wedding Crashers Trailer ..Play Quailshoot

Vince Vaughn's slouching in the hotel room chair, looking like all he'd like to do is put his six-five legs up on another one. He's shooting his next movie, The Break-Up - where he's acting and producing - in Chicago, but he's taking a Saturday afternoon to talk about The Wedding Crashers, the smart, charming, dirty-talking, relentlessly funny comedy he stars in with Owen Wilson. They're a winning, genial pair, talking at each other with their diametrically opposed rhythms: Wilson's laconic, reactive persona and Vaughn with his character's too talky-to-be-a-tic all-ADD ids. But in their R-rated depiction of a pair of thirtysomething juveniles not quite ready to admit they're no longer young, they're alternately tart and sweet, each readily wounded by the other but also attentive enough to the temperature of the room to roll with any curve in their sensation-greedy game. It's an inspired set-up: giddy and yet optimistically romantic.

Think about it: whenever you go to a wedding, you're playing a role. Everybody but the groom and bride are wedding crashers in a way.

MCN: So'd the producers start with the idea," let's say "fuck" as often and entertainingly as possible?"

VAUGHN: I got the script originally, and a lot of stuff, the setpieces were there, the scene at the dinner table [a spirited act of masturbation], the football scene [a hard-charging send-up of mindless macho], that was in there. We wrote the entire third act. Because the original draft, it was more obvious. With the dialogue, we just would always, as always, I would write and Owen as well, think of funnier things to say. Then on the day, we'd improvise some as well but a lot of the dialogue, we'd written before we got there.

MCN: Did you work with the classic idea; let's shoot everything on the page, now we've got some room left to see what turns up.

VAUGHN: Most of the stuff, the jokes, yeah. A lot of my dating rant was written but then I would go off and do other stuff-

MCN: Like your explosion to Owen at one wedding when a woman hooks your eye: "She just eye-fucked the shit out of me"?

VAUGHN: Yeah, yeah. Anything like that, inappropriate or shocking at a wedding is good. "She eye-fucked the shit out of me!" "Shhh! Shhh!"

MCN: The characters show such affection for each other. How long have you known Owen?

VAUGHN: Only since Starsky, but we became great friends on working on this. I love him, I think he's terrific. He's funny, man, he's really funny. He's really quick. Owen's very quick, very smart.

MCN: There's an unusually cohesive quality to so many of the scenes, as if, in a good way, you'd been able to reshoot until you got it right, from the gangbusters first wedding crash sequence onward. It's a great running start to crosscut all those weddings and all that happy maniac behavior.

VAUGHN: What you want to search for is [a tone that] makes it all seem improvised, that it all just happened in the moment. That's the energy you're looking for. But you know, to have it feel that way, you can't go and improvise an entire movie and track a story from beginning to end. The thing that's confusing about improvisation, is, if you go and you're just trying to say funny things in the moment, you're going to destroy your movie because you might go off-story. It might be funny, but at what great cost? Can you improvise in way that makes it make sense with the next scene and the next scene? So you really have to be able to keep the scene on point, to how it's intended to serve the story. If it's a scene with me and Isla [Fisher, playing an ostensible virgin younger daughter of Christopher Walken] on the beach at the beginning, that scene has to end with me being uncomfortable and her coming off as reckless. Fighting about going on the island has to come to no conclusion except that [Owen and I are] both very determined in our own directions. So there's more to it than just, "Hey, what's a fun line to say?"

MCN: Is David Dobkin the kind of director who brings this out?

VAUGHN: Dobkin's my favorite. I share a sense of humor with him, he's phenomenal with the camera, he's got a sense of story, he's confident enough to collaborate and to listen. He has great ideas of his own. He's a workaholic.

MCN: Which shows in the attention to detail. If you look at the end credits, there's a roster of wedding consultants. Each of the weddings seems to have its own authentic look.

VAUGHN: I think says a lot. Even though it's a comedy, the more you can be real, the more it helps the jokes. It also helps the heart of the story. I know that David really wanted it to be authentic because it makes the crashing 'reality' more viable, or believable is a better word. Because y'know, you're going into these weddings with the burden of saying, okay, I'm trying to get into this reality, to not be caught in this circumstance.

MCN: Your guy likes his cake.

VAUGHN: Part of thing was he liked the girls, obviously, but he loved all the things about weddings. That's what makes them likable, forgivable for their adolescent behavior is that there's a real innocence to it. They're excited. They love to eat, they love to dance, they have a good time! They show the bride and groom a good time. When they cut the cake, they sort of elevate it for everybody, they don't' ruin it. There's their optimism, the possibilities of true love. My character is genuinely enthusiastic about the whole experience-drinking, dancing, the different rituals at the different weddings.

[More later in the week about improvisation and comedy.]

- Email Ray Pride