A Comedy Legacy: Broken Lizard on “Super Troopers 3”

There’s a sequence in director Jay Chandrasekhar’s “Super Troopers 3” that acts as a synecdoche for the film’s charms as a whole. State trooper MacIntyre “Mac” Womack (Steve Lemme) discovers a conspiracy at a maple syrup factory, and his assailants, played by Jon Rudnitsky and Chace Crawford, encase him in a vat of maple syrup until it solidifies, like Han Solo in carbonite. It acts in many ways as an image for the type of humor that the members of Broken Lizard (Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, and Lemme) have kept preserved throughout the years. For better or worse, “Super Troopers 3” is more of the same, and those who were already accustomed to the troupe’s sensibilities will find plenty to love.

That isn’t to say that this is a film that replays the hits, the way many sequels that come out many years later tend to do. This time, Farva (Kevin Heffernan) has fallen for Thorny’s (Chandrasekhar) sister Sarita (Hannah Simone), and to Thorny’s dismay, his sister reciprocates Farva’s feelings and the two plan an extravagant Indian wedding. While Thorny recruits his other super troopers to crash the wedding, they are also swept up into a new drug conspiracy that has unexpected ties to the nuptial plans.

For the members of Broken Lizard, who have been on the road sharing the film, they cherish how opportunities like this are a way for them to remain connected amidst the busyness of their lives. “We’re like a band in many ways; every time we have a new movie, we tour again, go out, and you get more fans. Someone’s dad comes, they’ve introduced their son to the films, and your audience keeps getting larger and expanding,” they shared. While they stopped by in Chicago as part of the film’s tour, RogerEbert.com spoke with the group about the gift of time when working on this project, their memories of working with the great Donald Sutherland, and how they modified the film’s approach to cop humor when considering this political moment.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

There were seven years between “Super Troopers” and “Super Troopers 2,” and then six years before we got“Super Troopers 3.” I’m curious what the gift of time affords you when you were developing this story?

Broken Lizard: If we had our druthers, we’d make them more quickly, but we’re making other movies in between. I think if we only made “Super Troopers” movies, and didn’t show that we had more to offer, we could dry that creativity quite quickly. That’s how “Police Academy” had eleven movies.  They just kept doing it, and then they were not allowed to do anything else. Time helped us write a lot of drafts and helped us learn to love it. If we were in post on another project, we’d say “let’s just work on another draft.” Those drafts are really what made those movies.

I think what drew us to the wedding angle was that we haven’t seen them in that world; this was our attempt to mature them a bit. You know the characters, and now we’re going to show you another side of them or get behind the curtain a little bit more with them, which I think is a fun thing for fans of the franchise. It’s not as though the first two were so beloved because of their revolutionary crime plots. The guys were beloved; it was fun to see them deck around, so why not go ahead and take them off the road a little bit more? And it’s still the same dynamic. It’s still humorous.

I think we’re lucky as well because we caught the culture the right way. If it came out on Netflix, it might not have had the same because there would be no advertising. You never know. It could have just disappeared on Hulu if it just came and probably would have found an audience, but it’s not quite the same. Everything has felt a bit like a summer camp with being able to tour this film. You spend a year shooting, six months in the edit room, and then you can go out to see fans. It’s nice to hear that the humor is landing. When you make a movie, you write a joke where you don’t get to hear the laugh one year later.

I know that “Super Troopers 2” was crowdfunded, so were you able to connect with those fans who helped with that campaign?

We have, and there’s been such genuine gratitude to meet the folks who made the movie. I’d say for all of us, we’re grateful we’ve been able to connect and spend such intentional time. When we were writing the other installments or other films, when we were young, we didn’t have families; we all lived together. We would spend all of our time together. So there was this kind of great organic blend of just what was goofing off and what was writing. Now our writing sessions are much more structured; it’s like “Okay, we can do two hours on this one day, and it’s a lot of pressure.” So the tour has been a gift because times on the road are probably the only times when we can just laugh with each other, have a good time, and be fully relaxed.

We’re like a band in many ways; every time we have a new movie, we tour again, go out, and you get more fans. Someone’s dad comes, they’ve introduced their son to the films, and your audience keeps getting larger and expanding.

On the note of growing, I think your audience might say that what they’ve loved about your works is that you’ve found a way to make immaturity endearing. As artists and creatives, how do you feel you’ve grown with your audience? Do you feel pressure to change your humor as your audience ages or give them what they might have enjoyed when they were young?

The maturity over the years has in many ways manifested in the storytelling and craft. Whereas the sense of humor, in the best possible way, hasn’t really matured. We think that’s actually what people like about it.

This question is specifically for you, Jay, as the director: how has your approach to action shifted throughout your filmmaking career? It’s interesting to compare the stunt driving and fights in this film to the earlier installments.

Jay Chandrasekhar: Having worked on “The Dukes of Hazzard,” I got a real close knowledge of what real stunts look like. The great stunt coordinators are artists, and the okay ones are just crashing cars around. As a director, I’m thinking, “How much time can I give someone to do their job and be great at it?” We didn’t have a lot of time on this film, but Robert Alonzo, the supervising stunt coordinator, was such an artist that he was able to pull off a lot of these stunt elements in a way that was just perfect for our movie. Robert’s doing MCU movies … I was watching “Knight and Day” the other day, and he’s one of the stuntmen in the airplane fight, so him working on ours is a gift.

I thought Farva crashing out from his lobster allergy was also a great moment.

When we watch our stunts in the older films, we did a lot of our own stunts because we had limited knowledge and budget. If someone’s going to jump over the counter and tackle a guy, one of us is going to do it. So on one hand, you see us more, but on the other, the extent of the stunts is limited to what any one of us is able to do at a given moment. The lobster fight in particular was a blast to shoot because I think they tailored it to make it very effective for what we–as people who are not action stars–can do.

Kevin, in that fight though, you’re put through the wringer. Your stunt double, Heath Hensley, didn’t step in for you?

Kevin Heffernan: (Laughs) There were some. He’s been in a bunch of movies with me, and we did “Tacoma FD” together. He’s got a good look like mine, a good mustache. And he’s also super nice. Those guys, when they’re your stunt double, they’re super protective of you, and so he was very nice in that way.

Paul Soter: What’s interesting, though, was that even though we did our own stunts, it still felt like there were new things to learn. For driving scenes, I had never done “array” driving where the car is stationary, but it’s the background that’s changing. I showed up being like, “Oh man, we’ve come too far away from getting our hands dirty and the gritty.” But then you put us in that thing, and we’re passing around a cheese basket for our scene. I’m like, “This is pretty nice.” We had a grand old time. Sitting in that immobile vehicle eating cheese and crackers.

I loved the reference to Donald Sutherland in “Animal House” here. I know you collaborated with him on “Beer Fest,” and in light of his passing, I’d love to hear of any special memories of collaborating with him or discuss his influence on you all as an artist.

He didn’t really know that we were a comedy group. He just inspired a movie. So he was very kind to Jay, but he thought Kevin was the sole writer, and so he would frequently ask Kevin, “What does this mean? Why would I say this?” He would push us to understand the interiority of the characters. But he was super method. Super method. He drank all those beers, and when somebody offered for him to go to the bathroom, he said, “I’m in a hospital bed. I wouldn’t get up and go to the bathroom. Bring me a catheter.”

Especially in an age where police misconduct is more visible and a frequent topic of conversation, I’m curious how that impacted your approach to the humor, especially the image of cops being “crass and silly” when they’ve caused genuine harm and destruction to communities at large.

The question that guided us was “Who is the victim?” There’s a character in this movie who is nicknamed the “douche driver.” We make Andrew Dismukes, who plays Trooper Coy Burns, a real dick and make him the but of the joke, less so the civilian. I think it meant we had to work harder as well in a good way, to show fewer scenes of characters being pulled over and those types of shenanigans because that’s when the optics can be picked apart. I think that’s why the focus of this film shifted to wedding, love, and friendship.

When you’re shooting a movie, you can’t hit topical elements because you’re working a year out. We couldn’t have predicted the increase in self-driving cars, for example, but under the hood, we’re looking at timeless ideas: old versus now, how friendships evolve, etc. It is something we think about in terms of what might age well, though. The first movie is a thing that people watch and watch over years and years and years. So I think we’re always thinking, okay, let’s try to make sure that something we do doesn’t suddenly come across as dated in five years so that it will still have a timeless feel.

A line in the film that has stuck with me is “Is it possible that we’re no longer the cool guy in our own story?” How has making movies or filmmaking helped you all through these questions of legacy?

Making this third one is very humbling in that now we are kind of veterans. When we made that first one, we didn’t necessarily know what we were doing, and it was a bit more renegade. In those days we’d bring guys in like Brian Cox, and now we’re bringing in folks like Andrew Dismukes. Dismukes is an awesome guy that we’ve become friends with, and he grew up watching our movies and looks up to us in a little bit of a comic world. It really kind of flips the script a little bit now when you start doing these things, and you realize that there is a bit of a legacy, that you have a legacy in the comedy and filmmaking world, which is nice.

It’s good to put that reflection in the movie, because it humbles us. We can fall into the temptation of thinking “Nothing has changed, we’re all still young and cool.” Then someone recently told us, “You guys are the age that Brian Cox was in the first movie.” It gave us heart palpitations for a second, but then we thought, “This is an opportunity to bake this into the story. Let’s not run away from it.”

“Super Troopers 3” is in theaters now via Searchlight Pictures.

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