Actor-director Jay Chandrasekhar comes clean on his hilarity
AT HIS core, Jay Chandrasekhar, 49, is a storyteller. The actor/ writer/director/comedian has been telling stories all his life - often raunchy, hilarious ones with his collaborators in Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe that formed at Colgate University in 1990 and went on to make the cult films “Super Troopers” and “Beerfest” in the 2000s.
In his memoir “Mustache Shenanigans,” released in March, Chandrasekhar tells the story of how an Indian-American kid from suburban Illinois grew up to become an improbable Hollywood success story. He also writes about smoking weed with Willie Nelson, directing acclaimed TV shows like “Arrested Development” and finally getting to make a (crowd-funded) sequel to “Super Troopers.”
Q: You’ve written plenty of scripts, sketches and jokes. How did writing a book compare?
A: The thing about writing a book, particularly a memoir, is that you know where the story is going and you know the details of what happened along the way - as opposed to a script, where (anything is possible). What you end up thinking about is all the major moments in your life. You can just write about those moments and connect them. I’ve written close to 20 screenplays and 100 sketches - I know exactly how to do them, they’re judged by set criteria that I know. But with a book, because I’d never written one before, part of me just wanted to show the publisher: “I know what you think - you think we’re just these Hollywood writers that can’t write books.” So I spent a lot of time trying to make it as great as I could.
Q: What should fans going to your stand-up shows expect?
A: I tell a lot of stories. They fall in line with some of the “Beerfest” era and “Super Troopers” era. They’re more stories from my real life. They’re dirty, for sure - there’s a fair bit of hopefully smart sexual stories and hard- drinking and drug stories and then I tell stories about all the movies, too.
Q: Basically every studio passed on “Super Troopers” before Miramax decided to develop it and Fox ultimately released it. Is that part of why you went the Indiegogo route for the sequel?
A: Fox owns the rights to the movie, and at the end of the day the studios have been gripped with superhero fever and if there’s not a superhero in it, they kind of don’t want to make it. So they said to us, “We’ll release your movie wide across the world but you guys have to come up with the money.” Luckily, the fans responded because if they hadn’t Fox would have been like, “Nobody wants to see the movie.”
Q: Does it put more pressure on you because the fans literally paid for it?
A: I mean, we’ve succeeded by making movies that we like. We put jokes in that we have already laughed at and the gamble is if we think it’s funny, the audience that so far has thought we are funny will think it’s funny. All we can ultimately do is kinda go for it, and if ( Broken Lizard member Kevin) Heffernan and I think it’s funny, it’s gonna be in the damn movie.
Q: Your book at times acts as a Hollywood how-to guide. What advice would you have for aspiring filmmakers today?
A: We can’t make movies without scripts and there’s no cost to writing a script, so my advice to newcomers is do it yourself: Write your own script, shoot your shorts, edit your shorts. It’s going to seem like it’s a waste of time, and it feels like nobody sees them, but eventually you’ll get better at them and people will see them. Then, you’ll be a low- cost alternative to me and somebody may give you a chance. — Washington Post