"Yup, Totally Real"

Dax Shepard started off his career as one of Ashton Kutcher’s field agents on the MTV show Punk’d. He then branched into roles in films like Employee Of The Month, Idiocracy, Let’s Go To Prison, Baby Mama, and When In Rome.

These days, Shepard is best known for his role as Crosby Braverman on the NBC TV series Parenthood. The 36 year-old talked with us about his latest film, a mockumentary-styled comedy known as Brother’s Justice.

In the film, Dax trades in his primary profession of comedy to become an international martial arts action film star. And co-stars Tom Arnold and Bradley Cooper helps him to achieve his dream. We asked the actor if any of the movie for him was autobiographical.

“It’s entirely autobiographical for Tom and me, because we’ve been friends for eight years now,” Shepard believes, “He was on an episode of Punk’d and that’s where we met and we became buddies. The relationship in the movie is identical to our relationship in real life”

“I’d say 60% of our conversations are full-blown arguments, screaming,” he adds, “We’ve been to Afghanistan together on a USO tour and we entertained the troops by getting in big, drag-out fights in front of them. We’ve exposed each others dirty laundry in front of strangers, that kind of stuff. So yes, that part’s very autobiographical.

The question was then expanded to whether the movie’s autobiographical nature extended to Shepard’s relationship with Hollywood.

“Yes,” he replies, “The movie’s about trying to set up an action film starring me, which is kind of metaphorical to me wanting to do a comedy with just my brand of comedy, which I wasn’t able to do either, so then I was just forced to make what I think is funny. Literally, the movie was made with four people.”

“David Palmer, who co-directed, and my friend Nate [Tuck], who’s in the movie, produced the movie,” Dax continues, “And then Tom, who’s in everything. So in that way it’s almost

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identical to the real life situation, which I wanted to do a comedy that was just what I thought was funny and no one was handing out money to do that.”

Dax talks about whether or not any of his co-stars were aware that they were being spoofed.

“Some of the movie is legit real,” he says, “Some of our friends we thought it was better just to pitch them the real movie. Like our friend, Andrew Panay, who produced Wedding Crashers, we thought it’s best to just film his real reaction, so that was his real reaction. Or like going on talk shows and doing karate demonstrations, that part was all real. But obviously the actors knew what was going on, what the story was. Although again, like Tom said, his and my real life relationship would somehow overpower our knowledge of the project, and we would be in a real situation.”

“When we shot there’s the movie within the movie called Jung Guns, and in that one it’s David Koechner, Tom, Michael Rosenbaum, Ryan Hansen, Bradley Cooper, myself made,” Shepard adds, “And when we were leaving we all had the best day ever shooting that stuff, and we were like had one of us had a birthday party or got married we could have never gotten everyone to show up, but because it was to work or to act everyone somehow found the time. So it was almost a great excuse to get us all together.”

Shepard was asked if he’s ever had a friend who’s had an idea and not been able to tell them how bad it is because they are that person’s friend.

“Well daily, because 98% of ideas or not great ideas or everyone would be a billionaire,” Dax replies, “I think you field a lot of that but I also think people have had a lot of experience being told that their idea was bad or their performance was bad or that they

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didn’t get the part.I do think that one common thread between all working actors is they have a pretty thick skin, or you’d like to hope. That’s not true. But you’re used to rejection, that’s for sure.”

“You have to be semi-sociopathic to endure as an actor,” he continues, “To be told you’re terrible for years and years and years and still keep the conviction that you’re not terrible is nearly sociopathic. I remember when [Tom] told me that idea I was like, I don’t know that America wants to see celebrities get even with common people. I don’t know that that’s such an endearing quality. Like seeing Brad Pitt go to Arby’s and grab the guy. I would love it, but I just don’t know how many people.”
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Dax then recalled a moment he had where he thought he had a great idea that he pitched, only to end up being told it was terrible by the person he pitched it to.

“Believe me, I’ve pitched a lot of movies and not had a lot of buyers,” Shepard says, “Marc Platt, who’s a gigantic producer and produced Wicked, he owns the rights to this ninja cartoon book where a kid gets a mail order ninja.”

“And they convinced me that this would be a great movie and then I spent months writing a 30 page treatment and then we went all over town with it and the look on people’s faces in those meetings were like ‘You really think a kid getting a mail order ninja’s going to be a big movie?’” he adds, “And at that moment I was like ‘You’re right; that’s not going to be a big movie. I just wasted three months.’”

Shepard talks about the experience of doing an independent film that is 80% improvised.

“The script is basically 40 pages of every scene that’s got to happen and what’s going to happen in the story, so when we would show up we’d

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go basically, this has to happen,” he says, “But then we would just shoot for an hour and a half and it was really mostly the editor who got screwed who had to sift through all this stuff and try to steer it back to what the direction of the movie was. Side note is I’ve never had more fun in my life working, because in a scripted comedy you know what’s coming so you’re not really going to break unless someone does something crazy. But this you never, ever knew what someone was going to say so definitely it was much harder not to break throughout the whole process.”

“One of the funnier moments was in a scripted thing I had written it the night before, sent it to the guys, and Dave Koechner had a line,” Dax adds, “I thought I had written ‘Lights out, motherfucker,’ and then we start shooting and he keeps going, ‘Lights our motherfucker!’ And I’m like what a weird improve, lights our motherfucker. I just couldn’t stop laughing and finally after like four takes I was like ‘Koechner, that’s one of the most inspired, weird improvs I’ve ever heard. Lights our’ and he goes “I’m just saying what’s on the page,” and then he showed me and I had written our and not out. Now in our household we constantly say ‘lights our motherfucker.’”

Dax also talks about an injury he got in a jiu jitsu stunt during shooting and whether or not it affected the shooting of Brother’s Justice.

“No one cared, first off, and then we just kept going,” Shepard says of it, “This was a very unconventional process. Normally you have set amount of shoot days, you’ve been bonded for that, you have location permits. We were just at the whimsy of anyone’s schedule. It was more like filming the show Punk’d where it was like you just had to shoot next Wednesday because that was the day

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you could go see [Jon] Favreau at Iron Man, or you had to go catch Tom while he was shooting his movie.”

“It was very loose and unconventional the whole way through,” he continues, “Oh, another really funny thing that happened was the truck I drive in the movie the whole movie my dad came into town and borrowed it without asking me and then drove over a Honda in it at an intersection and destroyed it. And we had scenes that involved the truck, so he ruined the picture car for like two months until he fixed it.”

Shepard was asked if he actually has studied any martial arts since the making of the film.

“Oh God, no,” Dax replies, “No, I want nothing to do with any of it now, especially after getting so injured in the jiu jitsu mix up.”

Dax talked about the experience of working with Tom Arnold on the film.

“I’ll say this about Tom,” he says of him, “Over the last eight years since I’ve known him he’s done all this really, really great dramatic work in Happy Endings and Gardens of the Night, all these great dramatic roles I think shocked people.”

“But then when we put together Brother’s Justice,” Shepard continues, “And I was watching and I was like oh my God, it’s so great seeing Tom be funny, because the thing Tom is absolutely unstoppable at is being funny. It was really refreshing because it had been years. So I loved seeing him be funny.”

Unlike most independent films that get small releases in arthouse theaters mostly in New York City and Los Angeles, Brother’s Justice is being released directly to Video on Demand. Shepard shares how he feels Video on Demand is changing the film industry.

“Well, there are just some very unavoidable facts now in the current climate,” he says, “It costs X amount to open a movie. If you think finding a few million to make your movie is impossible

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try to find someone to give 10 million to open the movie. So unless you have that kind of a P&A commitment to go out into theaters wide, or even to platform a release it’s impossible to do it at this point. Maybe once every three years one slips through the cracks and it succeeds, but by and large it’s no longer an option. So VOD really becomes your best option to get people to see it, which I paid for the movie myself, I had no expectations other than I want to do what I think is funny in a movie to see how that turns out.”

“So there’s really no goal on our end other than for people to see it,” Dax adds, “So if VOD gets it to the most amount of people, great. I don’t think this model’s perfect yet, I don’t think you’re seeing the huge amount of viewers that have been projected or you would want, but it’s definitely a better option to it just coming out in one theater and then hoping someone finds it on DVD. We just want to go to the movies and buy a popcorn and watch this thing, because it was years out of our lives. It’s definitely one thing to go to festivals and see it on a big screen, that’s been a really cool experience and we won the Austin Film Festival and that was really flattering and cool, but to actually go see people who have bought a ticket is something that is very nice.”

Dax also talked about how much research went into distributing Brother’s Justice both theatrically and on Video on Demand.

“Nate, who co-stars in the movie and produced, he is the most tireless work machine on the planet,” he says, “He went to all these conventions about independent distribution and he would put together these bullet points of what he had learned. I learned through his research but it

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was all eye opening to me. Although, I had also done The Freebie last year and I kind of saw how that process worked.”

“It signed at Sundance and then the different deals that came out of that,” Shepard continues, “So I had been a little bit familiar with it because of that movie, so I knew some of it going in. But yeah, there was a whole lot to learn as far as getting an independent movie out there. This is indie, indie, indie, indie. I learned because I had to so I knew what they were talking about on these phone calls.”

Shepard was asked to give his best description of Brother’s Justice for those who haven’t seen it.

“Tom has been using the term mock-buster,” Dax answers, “I guess for me it would be like if Spinal Tap was about martial arts I guess. No? I don’t have a great description for this movie. It’s just the weirdest comedy, hopefully. It’s a unique comedy, that’s all I can say. I think the best part about it is you’re not watching it going “Man, this is so much like blah blah blah.”

“I think the fact that anyone’s even distributed it on VOD is a testament to the movie,” he continues, “Because we have the three worse things you could have going for you trying to sell a movie, mockumentary’s the worst, and if it’s inside and about LA that’s second worst to mockumentary, and then a comedian doing karate I think is third on the list. We had all the least desirable elements in trying to sell a movie, and yet somehow people like it.”

Finally, Dax touched on how Parenthood has considerably made an impact on his career.”

“Prior to Parenthood, the people who recognized me were typically young men,” Shepard says, “So I had seven years of training of dealing with them, but what I had never experienced was being at the movies and hearing “That’s

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him! Look, there he is!” That’s my 45 year old Jewish woman impersonation. So having aggressive, middle aged women, who are more aggressive than teenage boys, shockingly. Being on Parenthood has been very cool. It’s the first time people say nice things about me in reviews and whatnot, but luckily for my own sanity I stopped putting a lot of stock in what they were saying because it was just crippling to read those things.”

“Now they’re saying nice stuff,” he adds, “I try not to give that too much weight either, but I mean that’s certainly nice that people have liked what I’m doing on Parenthood and can get past the fact that I had done comedies. I think Tom will say the same thing; I’m not trying to be Jim Carrey. I’m not trying to be Robert Downey, Jr.., I’m trying to work. I want to work the rest of my life. If I can do that in dramas, I’m happy to do that in dramas. If I can do it in comedy I’d love to do it in comedy. I just want to be on a set my whole life with my friends working. I don’t have a hierarchy of what would be better for me to do, I just want to work.”