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"  Tim and Eric&amp;#039;s Billion Dollar Movie comes out in theaters this Friday. Below is a conversation we had with the men behind this bizarre but joyful comedy back when they showed it at Sundance in January. PARK CITY, Utah \u2014 You might know Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, even if you aren&amp;#039;t necessarily one of the dedicated fans who stay up watching it every weeknight on Adult Swim at 1:15 in the morning. But the cable niche that the two have carved out is about to get considerably wider with Tim and Eric&amp;#039;s Billion Dollar Movie, which features a handful of really famous people, along with their usual absurdity and body humor. We talked to them over the weekend here from the Sundance Film Festival about this new stage of their career, why Top Gun isn&amp;#039;t so terrible, and what it&amp;#039;s like to make Will Ferrell look new again. ESQUIRE.COM: So when you get on the set, how do you work yourself up to say, &amp;quot;Okay, I&amp;#039;m sawing my hand off today&amp;quot;? ERIC WAREHEIM: That&amp;#039;s fun for us. To be able to write that and execute great special effects \u2014 that&amp;#039;s dream-come-true stuff. And then to go to a theater and see people screaming and giggling... ESQ: Did you stay during the screening to see how people reacted? TIM HEIDECKER: We popped in and out. The audience was receptive, but when anything doesn&amp;#039;t hit with a huge laugh, as comics, it feels like, Oh no, oh no, we&amp;#039;re sinking. ERIC: We gotta re-cut this. TIM: We have a terrible experience watching the movie because, not only have we seen it a million times, and it feels like walking through molasses, but we want the audience to be screaming. ESQ: So much of the comedy is based on squeamishness and awkward dead air. If the audience is always laughing... TIM: They&amp;#039;re missing something. ESQ: It&amp;#039;s all about anticipation. TIM: It&amp;#039;s the same reason a laugh track doesn&amp;#039;t work on our Awesome show. It wouldn&amp;#039;t make any sense because the audience laughs at different places, and sometimes it&amp;#039;s not about laughing. Sometimes the discomfort is more powerful. ERIC: There&amp;#039;s the gut-busting laugh, and then there&amp;#039;s the next morning you wake up and realize, Oh my God, this man took another man&amp;#039;s son \u2014 that&amp;#039;s a more heady, psychological laughter we love. TIM: We&amp;#039;ve been told by friends who see the movie, &amp;quot;I liked watching it when I was watching it, but the next day or the day after, some of the moments stuck with me and kept looping around in my brain.&amp;quot; I think there are a lot of things that happen that might not be super-apparent when you&amp;#039;re sitting in the theater watching it. ESQ: I was looking at the cast list and saw that one of the characters is played by an actress named Twink Caplan. TIM: Yeah. ESQ: Where, pray tell, did you find Twink Caplan? ERIC: Twink did a bit on our TV show that didn&amp;#039;t air. She was very willing to go the extra mile to do this weird tongue-twisting bit. She fit the character that we wanted \u2014 a little bit older, cute, not typically what I would be into. And then she was really awesome in the sex scene. ESQ: I love the introduction of the Spanish fly in that scene. Who thinks of Spanish fly anymore? TIM: Exactly. It also reveals the stupidity of the characters that he doesn&amp;#039;t know what Spanish fly is. It&amp;#039;s this new, cool idea\u2026 ERIC: We always want our work to be this timeless moment. You don&amp;#039;t really know if it&amp;#039;s the &amp;#039;80s or the 2000s. Things like Spanish fly, our outfits \u2014 we like to not be relevant with the times. TIM: I know, when I was a kid, Spanish fly was something you thought about a lot. That&amp;#039;s what sex was about.      ESQ: You built a mall for the movie. What was that like? TIM: Well, it&amp;#039;s a real mall in Palm Springs that&amp;#039;s been abandoned for years. We got lucky. It was about to be torn down, but that was a couple months away, so we were able to go in there and have it be our playground. It&amp;#039;s basically how you see it onscreen. It took a lot of work to do the last couple scenes where it&amp;#039;s supposed to look like a fresh, new mall. ESQ: What did the contractors who were cleaning it up think of what you were doing? ERIC: Everyone involved was pretty cool about letting us do our thing. The whole movie is pretty close to what we envisioned. ESQ: I want to try a little word association and see if you can tell me what comes to mind. ERIC: This is the best. ESQ: One I thought of was body image. Since you guys have a lot of beer guts hanging out. TIM: It&amp;#039;s difficult because I acknowledge how funny it is, how it helps the comedy. But at the same time I&amp;#039;m a human being who has feelings. So this compromise of giving away of some of your personal life to the audience for the joke... ERIC: One thing we&amp;#039;ve been very conscious of from the beginning is making ourselves look as horrible as possible, whether it be our bodies or our costuming or our attitudes. We&amp;#039;re monsters. ESQ: Robert Loggia, whom I barely recognized, is a different kind of monster in this movie, but he&amp;#039;s just as much on that level of caricature. TIM: He went big. We don&amp;#039;t have a rehearsal process, so Robert showed up on set, and we started shooting. We were like, Okay, this is going to be it. Let&amp;#039;s embrace it. Let&amp;#039;s make this character just crazy. ESQ: Something else that comes to mind: promotional videos. Where do you get these promotional videos you&amp;#039;re riffing on? ERIC: Starting in college, we had a network of people who would share these funny, weird industrial videos \u2014 training videos, clips from cable access. We would have screenings of those before YouTube and Everything Is Terrible were around. We were obsessed with that kind of stuff. [A waitress comes by.] TIM: That looks pretty good. What is it, a burger? WAITRESS: Yes. [She turns to Eric.] I&amp;#039;m feeding you. Would you like a snack? ERIC: Sure. TIM: It might be just what we need. Thank you. ERIC: Oh, it&amp;#039;s good. TIM: Oh, this is like a gourmet Big Mac. ESQ: Going back to YouTube, now that people have these outlets to watch all this taboo stuff, does it change the way you look at these videos? ERIC: They&amp;#039;re not as special anymore. Everyone&amp;#039;s doing that. I&amp;#039;ve been gravitating toward animal videos only \u2014 interspecies play, like a bear and a kitten. TIM: We get sent so much stuff. People seem to be like, Oh, this is some bad &amp;#039;80s stocking commercial. Aren&amp;#039;t you just gonna love it? No, it has to be special. This is a little off-topic, but one fun thing for us with this movie is, we&amp;#039;ve been doing all these promotional videos, and it&amp;#039;s occurred to me that the movie itself is just one piece. The interviews, the commercials, and all these things we&amp;#039;ve made \u2014 I think they all have to be considered in the context of the movie, because it&amp;#039;s sort of part of it, you know? ESQ: Even though part of the pleasure of the movie is that there is no context in which this stuff makes sense. TIM: Yeah. ESQ: I also wanted to ask about celebrity impersonators. There are at least two I can think of in this movie. ERIC: Well, people always love celebrity impersonators, but the role of Johnny Depp \u2014 we did go out to Johnny Depp, and Tom Cruise. Our original idea was to have a big, crazy name to stir up the movie. Then we realized that an impersonator is way funnier. ESQ: For a moment, I wasn&amp;#039;t really sure if it was Depp or not, whether it was him trying to look like an impersonator. You also worked with the actual John C. Reilly, who plays Taquito. What was that like? TIM: I think he likes working with us because it&amp;#039;s very collaborative, and he gets to contribute a lot to it. It&amp;#039;s a lot of him improvising, his ideas. Taquito \u2014 he really wanted to contribute a lot to the way that character talked and looked like. He&amp;#039;s not just an actor showing up to read something somebody else wrote. He&amp;#039;s invested in it creatively. ESQ: Whose idea was it to have Will Ferrell watch Top Gun? TIM: It just seemed so broad and timeless and ... irrelevant. ERIC: [laughs] That mall felt very &amp;#039;80s. We thought it might be a video they&amp;#039;d have around. TIM: It&amp;#039;s not a terrible movie. It&amp;#039;s not like, Oh, do you wanna watch Striptease? It&amp;#039;s like, Yeah, I guess I&amp;#039;ll watch Top Gun. It&amp;#039;s not a bad movie. It&amp;#039;s okay. ESQ: Ferrell is everywhere these days. When you&amp;#039;re working with him, do you think at all about what he&amp;#039;s done recently or his image? ERIC: We do a refresher course in what he&amp;#039;s done character-wise. It&amp;#039;s hard. You&amp;#039;re putting a wig or a moustache on. You want it to not just be Will Ferrell sitting there. You want to create something new. He&amp;#039;s done so much, and a lot of it is so great. I think we have an awareness of not wanting to rip off an old Will Ferrell character. But I think he&amp;#039;s fresh in this movie, and so fucking funny in a way you don&amp;#039;t usually see. He&amp;#039;s very serious and kind of crazy. ESQ: Do you think having more cast, more story \u2014 more of everything, basically \u2014 changed the way you work together? ERIC: It was mainly time constraints. Everything was tightened. It restricted us in the time we had to improvise. We&amp;#039;re in almost every scene, so it&amp;#039;s hard to look at tapes. We had to trust our guys to make sure we got it. This is a little less experimental than our show. It&amp;#039;s based more on budgets and schedules. ESQ: Did you not review footage after shooting? TIM: We did, but it was slightly irrelevant, because there wasn&amp;#039;t time built into redoing things. If we saw something we didn&amp;#039;t like, we were just like, Okay, nothing we can do about that. ERIC: The most important thing was, since this was our first movie, I went through to make sure we&amp;#039;re consistent. Our characters are crazy, but they have some sort of dynamic throughout the whole thing that makes them believable. Stay Tuned to Esquire.com for More Conversations from Sundance with Spike Lee, William H. Macy, and a Beautiful Woman &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/interviews/a12476/tim-and-eric-movie-interview-6642876/>