Interview with Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, the writers, directors, and stars of Hell Baby
Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon are perhaps best known to the public as Deputy Travis Junior (Garant) and Lieutenant Jim Dangle (Lennon) from the comedy series Reno 911! (2003-2009). But they’ve also been working steadily behind the camera as writers, having written numerous big budget screenplays including Night at the Museum and Balls of Fury (they also created Reno 911!). Altogether, their films have earned an impressive $1.4 at the box office. They have also written about this, and other accomplishments in their 2011 book Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can Too! It was inevitable then that they would want to try their hand at directing a film together. The result is the new horror comedy Hell Baby.
Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon in “Hell Baby.” © 2013 – Gravitas Ventures.
Hell Baby tells the story of Jack (Rob Corddry) and Vanessa (Leslie Bibb), an expectant couple who have just moved into the most haunted house in New Orleans. Things go from bad to worse and it becomes apparent that a demon has designs on Jack and Vanessa’s unborn child. With the situation so dire, only the elite exorcism team sent by the Vatican (played by Garant and Lennon) has any chance of saving the day.
Lennon and Garant recently spoke with CinemaNerdz about Hell Baby, the co-directorial debut of the longtime friends. During the discussion they were very adamant of their love for the film, saying that it is the most “them” of anything they’ve done to date. Other topics included the challenges they faced during production, the importance of alcohol on the set, and, of course, the brilliance of Keegan Michael Key.
CinemaNerdz: What were some of the challenges getting Hell Baby made as an independent feature?
ROBERT BEN GARANT: We’ve never really done an independent before. We consciously tried to write a movie cheap. We tried to use the Reno 911! sensibility of doing something that we knew wouldn’t cost a ton of money, so that hopefully we would have the freedom that buys you. Reno let us do anything we wanted because it was so low budget and not a lot of chefs were watching. And that was the theory behind Hell Baby.
THOMAS LENNON: Exactly. Most of the movie, as you can probably tell, was shot within about one square block of New Orleans; a lot of it in just two different buildings. So, the great thing about it is that you can also tell, as a result of it not being a big budget giant studio movie, most of the material in it has not been vetted by a committee. So, it’s a pretty weird movie.
GARANT: I think more than any movie we’ve ever done, it’s really our sensibility, one-hundred percent; which is really great. We love Hell Baby and it really is all us in a way that the larger movies that we write are not.
LENNON: Exactly.
GARANT: The guys from Darko, who did Donnie Darko, read it. They’re our type of sensibility guys. They thought it was funny and they just gave us the cash.
LENNON: When you do little movies like this, it’s really fun. They don’t give you any notes. They also don’t give you any money. (Laughs) You just have to figure it out.
CinemaNerdz: Did you approach writing the film the same as other projects?
LENNON: A lot of this movie, I’d say is sort of like our id. It was like we didn’t over think anything. We would say, “what if we made up something funny for Keegan Michael Key?” Just because we love Keegan and he’s a genius. And then it was very sort of organically like, what if Keegan gets to be someone funny and then Riki (Lindhome) will be in a shower which will be fun for awhile. It was just sort of a very relaxed atmosphere to write a movie as you can probably tell from the expertly crafted script we brought to the screen.
GARANT: It’s really a fun, free thing to write something knowing that you’re not going to put it into a studio committee. Like you’re not trying to think ahead to what kind of back story the studio exec wants so you really kind of write what you think is funny.
LENNON: There was never the “hey your thing needs more heart” conversation.
CinemaNerdz: Why did you choose the horror genre for your theatrical co-directorial debut?
LENNON: I think to me it’s probably the difference between making someone laugh and startling them. While the movie is not terrifying, it’s certainly startling a couple of times. The difference between those two things I think are very closely related sensations and I also know that Ben and I, those seem to be the kind of movies we watch the most without a doubt.
GARANT: I watch and own way more horror movies than I do modern comedies for sure. We’re both fans of The Orphanage. It’s interesting – the great new horror movies come out like every couple of years. A new horror movie will come out that totally changes the rules. Like The Orphanage, Paranormal Activity, and then Mama. Horror movies are really inventive and we both really love those. It was kind of just natural. Like in comedy, Tom and I have very much the same sensibility. We watch a lot of the same comedy, and horror too. We both really love the same sort of horror movies. We both grew up with The Exorcist, An American Werewolf in London, and those types of films.
LENNON: I guess the whole idea of Hell Baby is that if you had to pick a movie that I would rent one night [Hell Baby] would be it. It has all of the elements that I would be looking for.
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CinemaNerdz: Were there any additional challenges for the two of you when directing in addition to everything else you were doing while making the film?
GARANT: The hardest thing about this movie was the money constraint. Just because the cast was our dream cast. The cast was really our only choice for everybody. You know, if Keegan couldn’t have done the movie, we wouldn’t have done the movie because the movie is kind of about Keegan Michael Key. And so, the cast was a treat. They came in; they knew what they were doing; they were all funny. We think they’re funny. The only constraint was [that] twenty days is not a lot of time to do a movie, especially one that had some physical special effects.
LENNON: So, we were certainly moving very fast. But, you know, it was also fun to do. Almost every effect in the movie is something practical like the real puppet or real blood spraying in our faces. There’s nothing really digital in the movie. I kind of love it because it gives it that sort of Trilogy of Terror feel.
GARANT: It has that old timey Rick Baker or Creepshow [feel], where people would physically have to figure out how to make the baby work and not think you’re going to go back and fix it with CGI. That was a lot of fun. It was a pretty good time. It was hard. But it was a lot of fun.
CinemaNerdz: I was struck by how good those practical effects did come out. Were there any other problems using those types of special effects?
LENNON: Almost every part of the practical effects was pretty much a nightmare. Having just wrapped up saying how wonderful they all were…nothing really ever worked properly. But, like the shark in Jaws, it forces you to be a little creative. Every single baby broke or barely worked. The Ms. Nussbaum suit took almost twelve hours to get Alex Berg into it. Strange little detail, the same actor who plays the cheerful guy (Berg) also plays Mrs. Nussbaum. It’s just a strange little detail. Because we didn’t want to have a real eighty or ninety-year-old woman sort of naked out on the street for long sequences.
GARANT: It would have been really awkward at lunch.
CinemaNerdz: I can imagine. Getting back to the cast, everybody seemed to get along really well in the film. I was wondering if that carried over off set.
GARANT: There are very few movies that in the credits we give special thanks to a drink.
LENNON: Yeah, the drink made by the Rum House, which is on Magazine Street in New Orleans. We give them special thanks in the movie because every single day, we started by ordering the tray of like six or eight of them, then we started getting gallon jugs, then we got like a big, industrial five gallon jug that they would make us. So at the end of every day we would drink several gallons of something called the Painkiller.
GARANT: We had to take the shelves out of the fridge in the makeup room so that it would fit this jug. It was really great. People showed up to set on days they weren’t working, which just doesn’t happen. It was really fun. We had trailers and I think, Keegan said he hung his coat in one once. But people didn’t go to their trailers. People all hung out in this one kind of room on the set and just kind of cracked each other up. It was really cool. It was fun. It helps being in New Orleans. New Orleans is a really fun town.
LENNON: Great place to make a movie.
GARANT: Great food. Great bars. People love being there.
CinemaNerdz: You’ve mentioned that Keegan is one of the reasons you made the movie and that if you hadn’t had him you wouldn’t have done it. I was wondering how much of his character was your creation and how much was Keegan’s?
LENNON: Weirdly, I know it doesn’t seem like it, a lot of F’resnel is on the page like that. Like all the talk of pizza salads and things like that. But then there’s some really, some major moments that are all Keegan. Like his entire farewell speech in the film. Which is….
GARANT: …at the end, when they take kind of a weird side turn into the movie The Help.
LENNON: For no apparent reason.
GARANT: Which they just did. I don’t know if they ever discussed that or if that was pure improv.
LENNON: I think that was pure improv.
GARANT: The movie really doesn’t make much sense. Most of it is scripted. Most of it’s, like, Tom wrote most of F’resnel and maybe five percent more is Keegan kind of going off book.
CinemaNerdz: Was there a lot of improvising other than Keegan?
GARANT: I would say the movie is about eighty percent script.
LENNON: Something like that.
GARANT: Maybe a little bit more. There’s long stretches of improv that’ll be on the DVD. And you can kind of tell. Like when we talk about Ash-ton Kookener, that wasn’t scripted. There are a lot of like weird moments….
LENNON: Things that just seem too stupid to be in the script, although it’s hard to tell because so much of the movie is so wonderfully stupid. (Everyone laughs)
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CinemaNerdz: I did want to be sure to ask, what exactly is with all the chain smoking the two of you do throughout the film?
LENNON: I used to smoke a lot. I stopped about a decade or so ago. So I thought it would be fun to take a vacation back into smoking.
GARANT: He’ll often write characters who smoke so that he can play them.
LENNON: That’s true. It’s like writing a nude scene for your friend. It’s like one of those fun things you get to do.
CinemaNerdz: Any plans for more projects like this in the future?
LENNON: I wouldn’t be at all surprised. This is sort of the way, using our Reno 911! energy [to make] something sort of smaller, for a sort of niche audience. I would not be surprised at all if we did more things like this.
GARANT: It’s a lot of fun. It’s a nice, refreshing break between studio movies in a big way.
See Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon’s Hell Baby in theaters on September 6th!
Mike Tyrkus
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