‘Between Two Ferns’ movie makes next to no sense, making it wonderfully awkward
All 21 episodes of “Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis,” the long-running talkshow parody on Funny Or Die, have the same format: a brief intro to a Muzak version of the theme from “Taxi Driver,” followed by several minutes of Galifianakis’ excruciatingly awkward host interviewing various celebrities. The questions are often barely veiled insults, delivered in a mirthless deadpan that’s somewhere between stupidity and sociopathy – the exact opposite of the breezy sycophancy that passes for most late-night banter.
Over 10-plus years, Galifianakis has mercilessly cut down stars like Bruce Willis (“Do you know some actors turn down roles?”) and Jerry Seinfeld (“Actor. Writer. Comedian. Producer. Which of Larry David’s skills do you admire the most?”), and politicians such as Barack Obama (“What is it like to be the last black president?”). But its nofrills production – two ferns, two chairs, a black backdrop and mics affixed to the host and guests with masking tape – seems piped in from some unknown public access hinterland. There was never any reason to think about anything surrounding it.
So how is this a movie? “Between Two Ferns: The Movie” is literally the answer to that question, but the absurdist mock documentary, which premiered on Netflix on Sept. 20, stretches the definition of what a movie can be. The wisp of a plot sends Galifianakis and his crew on a road trip from his public-access studio in Flinch, North Carolina, to Los Angeles, where Will Ferrell has promised him his own latenight show if he interviews 10 new famous people along the way. Nothing about that premise makes any sense, but for Scott Aukerman, who co-created the show with BJ Porter and who wrote and directed the movie, that’s by design.
“It’s a lot like making a real documentary where you just shoot a bunch of stuff and make sense of it later in the editing,” Aukerman says. “The whole movie is filled with scenes that we have slightly different or wildly different versions of, and in some cases are entirely on the cutting-room floor.”
Working from an improvisatory framework is natural for Aukerman, a sketch-comedy veteran whose weekly podcast “Comedy Bang! Bang!” invites various funny people on for conversation and games that regularly drift into hilariously unpredictable terrain. The cult favorite had a five-season run as a TV show on IFC, so there’s precedent for Aukerman to change formats as he does with “Between Two Ferns” and keep the essence of the show intact. Galifianakis’ interviews with famous people are still the heart of “Between Two Ferns: The Movie,” which functions almost like a stealth marathon of the show, with big names such as Matthew McConaughey (“Of all the things you can win an Oscar for, how surprised are you that won one for acting?”) and Brie Larson (“Your parents got divorced when you were 7. Was that your fault?”).
One of the challenges of a “Between Two Ferns” movie is making a character out of Galifianakis himself, who never had to be more than a sour misfit asking questions off a piece of notebook paper. Even though Wayne and Garth in “Wayne’s World” were broadcasting their own public-access show out of a basement in Aurora, Illinois, it was easy enough to imagine them as real people with personalities that could adapt well to a movie. The “Zach” of “Between Two Ferns” is such a blank slate that Aukerman and Galifianakis could make up anything they wanted. And they did.
“In one version (of the script), he was the real Zach who was in ‘The Hangover,’” says Aukerman. “And we filmed this long scene with him and the improviser Andy Daly as a financial adviser who goes through all the bad investments that (made him) so broke and desperate in the movie. Then we had an alternate universe where Zach passed on ‘The Hangover’ and they literally go see ‘The Hangover’ in a theater and it stars Jack Black instead.”
But Aukerman and Galifianakis settled on a parallel universe where Galifianakis never became a huge star at all. Aukerman describes him as “a local North Carolina oddball who goes to the public access station every single day from very early in the morning until late at night. He carries a briefcase in there and pretends to work when he only has one half-hour show every single week.” In this universe, “Between Two Ferns” is Galifianakis’ one and only claim to fame, and Ferrell, one of the founders of the web comedy outlet Funny Or Die, is his primary benefactor.
The history of big-screen – or, in this case, big-streaming – adaptations of sketch comedy shows is notoriously littered with failures such as “Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy” or “The Onion Movie,” where the films can’t accommodate the spirit of the original, or any number of “Saturday Night Live” bits (hello, “It’s Pat: The Movie” and “A Night at the Roxbury”) that can’t be stretched more than a few minutes. Aukerman himself was involved in scripting the 2002 flop “Run Ronnie Run!,” a spinoff of the brilliant HBO series “Mr. Show” that wound up going straight to video. The lessons Aukerman learned from his experience on that movie had an impact on “Between Two Ferns.”
“We had Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, who are two of the best sketch performers in the world and incredible improvisers,” says Aukerman. “And yet when we got on that movie, because of the way the shooting was structured and the budget was allocated, they were only allowed to do maybe two or three takes of each scene. And so they could never improvise it all, right?”
“What I tried to do is just leave a lot of time to improvise,” he continues. “There’s so much stuff that’s in the movie that came out of the improv part of it, that would never have been in a script if we had just written it. And that’s the reason to do it this way rather than to be too ambitious with your movie and squeeze out what people are really watching it for, which is funny scenes.”
The hours and hours of improv footage did leave Aukerman with some difficult choices in the editing room. In the original cut of “Between Two Ferns: The Movie,” the first act alone was 1 hour 15 minutes, just short of the length of the final cut that’s premiering on Netflix. Entire subplots and backstories and alternate character concepts and realities had to be jettisoned, but as a loose-limbed road movie filled with mostly interchangeable interview sequences, he could essentially choose his own adventure.
He does dream of a longer version, however. “I would love to put together a threehour, 3½-hour, Altman-esque meditative cut that’s less fastpaced and not really designed for comedy in a way. But when you’re making an 82- or 83-minute movie, which is how long movies like ‘Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping’ or ‘This is Spinal Tap’ tend to be, you just don’t have the time to luxuriate inall the character’s backstories.”
“I sort of pitched (the longer cut) to Netflix,” he jokes. “But I don’t think they took me very seriously.”