In Over Your Dead Body, a dysfunctional married couple retreats to a secluded cabin to repair their relationship, but each secretly plots to murder the other.
What follows is a chaotic, action-packed, hilarious, and occasionally frightening tale that takes Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving) on a journey unlike anything you'd imagine. The cast is rounded out by Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, and Paul Guilfoyle, and directed by Jorma Taccone (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping).
We recently sat down with Taccone to learn how he approached tackling a movie that mashes up several different genres. Before taking us through that, the filmmaker talks in detail about how he put together the perfect cast to tell Over Your Dead Body's unique, surprising story.
We also hear from Taccone on one of the movie's most offbeat scenes. It's a moment which perfectly balances humour and the kind of chaotic violence that ensues when this married couple decides that the only way out of this relationship is to put a permanent end to their spouse.
You can watch our full interview with the Over Your Dead Body director in the player below.
At the heart of this movie, you've got Jason and Samara. It's a great dynamic, especially with all the different places that you take them. How much fun was it casting them and putting them into these roles as Dan and Lisa?
Oh my god, so so fun. I've been saying that my wife, who's a terrific filmmaker, was like in the very early days, there's a head of every department, and there's a head of the acting department on any movie. And Jason was the first person we found for this movie. He's such a great tone because he's both sympathetic and funny, and such a good actor. And then what's really nice about casting any movie is when you start from somebody that people are really excited to work with, it just makes everything easier to cast, obviously, but then it's so fun to be like, I understand this character now. Now I understand this character.
And Samara is such a good pairing for Jason. In addition to being obviously one of the most stunning people on the planet, she's so funny. And I don't know if I can curse on this. She's so freaking funny. And I loved her playing Australian in this as well. But their dynamic is so great, and she gives it right back to him. She was so good at improvising, too. And so that was great to just see their dynamic. And then what I really like about this is it's based on a Norwegian film by Tommy Wirkola. And one of the big shifts from that film is that we then have in our bad guy team a female bad guy in Juliette Lewis. And Juliette and Timothy Olyphant are just phenomenal together as well. Really funny, but also scary and dark. And so it was really fun to work with them.
I was also lucky enough because we shot this in Finland. It's like a destination wedding; everyone's trapped. So we got more time to probably rehearse in many ways on weekends and things like that to really shape things. And as a director, you're kind of stealing people's talent. So just them as storytellers and having worked on so many movies, it was really fun to shape things and figure out the character. And then the last unsung hero, Keith Jardine, man. That dude is an MMA fighter. I've worked with him before on our MacGruber TV series, but he's a killer. And he's so funny in this movie. And I really like that we got to, it's a lot of different shades. Jason's such a different shade than you ever get to see him. And then Keith is so, because he's kind of like a sweet, lovable psychopath. Anyway, it was really, really fun, and I'm sorry I took like your five minutes just to talk about that.
No, it's such a terrific cast, so I can't blame you. And I think something that surprised me about the film is that you've got such a mix of genres here. You've got the comedy, there's suspense, we've got horror, home invasion, there's blood, there's guts, there's action. How was it to balance all those genres?
I'm always wanting to do something different. And this is obviously part of the thrill of this, one, liking the original movie so much, and then when you decide to do a remake, it's like, why, and can you add something to this. And I feel like, as you said, with all those genres, it allows me to do so many different things, and I love doing even the dramatic scenes that are just purely for building character and building the connection with these characters to then arc them into their lowest moments into the redemption kind of stuff. But to me, it was really the humour that sort of stitches it all together because even when building out really horrific moments or really violent moments, the humour is what sort of allows an audience, in my mind, to either process those things or have a release from those things or create more tension when the violence interrupts those moments.
And I had a great team in Nick [Kocher] and Brian [McElhaney], who were really, really funny writers who wrote this version of the script. And just working with those guys, and as I said, the cast to create all of these moments and push the comedy where we could, but then also remembering to always pull it back into enough of a danger and real situations to then make the comedy actually work, because without that, it all falls apart to me. So it was the challenge of all of it. I loved it.
I loved the comedy, especially the visual gag of when Jason is tased and that just line of drool that is coming out of his mouth. Was that something in the script, or did you add that on the day? How did that come about?
This bit was not in the script. But I think that's one of those moments that warrants pushing the comedy. I don't know what would actually happen to a person who is tased for that long. You know what I mean? It's really funny, actually, because I just did the thing that made me want to get back into the features. I did this Knuckles Sonic the Hedgehog spin-off TV show, and I did a crazy episode that was a whole musical thing, but Julian from Mighty Boosh is in my episode, and he tases Adam Pally's character for a very long time. So I was going from this, it was just like a tase fest. But yeah, that's one of the moments that you're like I think this warrants it. I think we can get away with really pushing these moments. So it's a fun one.
Over Your Dead Body arrives in theaters on April 24.