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Dan Goldberg talks The Hangover: Part II

By Anne Brodie May 30, 2011, 14:09 GMT

In "The Hangover Part II," Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms), Alan (Zach Galifianakis) and Doug (Justin Bartha) travel to exotic Thailand for Stu\'s wedding. With the memory of Doug\'s nearly disastrous bachelor party in Las Vegas still fresh—or at least well-documented—Stu is taking no chances. He has opted for a safe, subdued, pre-wedding trip brunch, with pancakes, coffee...and no alcohol. However, things don\'t always go as planned. Two nights ...more

Dan Goldberg’s got the golden touch. He produced the highest grossing (in both senses) R-rated comedy The Hangover, and has just released his sixth collaboration with director Todd Phillips the sequel “The Hangover Part II.”  

His touch is on Old School, Road Trip, School for Scoundrels, and Due Date as well as Howard Stern’s Private Parts, Space Jam, with Michael Jordan, Ivan Reitman’s romantic adventure “Six Days Seven Nights,” starring Harrison Ford, Stripes, Heavy Metal and Meatballs.Not bad for a kid from small town Ontario, Canada.

He and Reitman were contemporaries at Hamilton’s McMaster University where he served as the first Vice-President and second President of the McMaster Film Board.  Reitman and Goldberg still work together under their Northern Lights shingle. 

Monsters and Critics spoke with Goldberg in Toronto.

M&C: R-rated comedies are huge and biggest of them all is The Hangover.  So does that make you nervous for The Hangover Part 2?

Goldberg: It’s interesting and daunting thing because we didn’t know that the first one made us laugh but didn’t know until we screened and we had no idea it would be embraced.  The studio wanted to do the sequel for business reasons, and wanted a good weekend, but for us, we didn’t want a crappy sequel.  It was daunting. 

Todd said ‘It happened again’ it opened the floodgates.  This is going to be our artistic device - it happened again. We are a well-oiled machine and friends and one of the reasons we made the second one because we love working with one another. 

The first one was successful; we knew we were starting from a better point character-wise.  For the first one, we’d be on the streets in Vegas laughing our asses off and looking at each other wondering if anyone would like this. Truly we didn’t know. We were making it for ourselves.  

M&C: Brad Cooper says it was much more difficult making Hangover Part 2.  How was it on your side?

Goldberg: Working in Bangkok was great.  Bangkok is teeming with people, it was so hot, but they were the nicest people ever, probably their Buddhist culture, truly.  The country embraced us. 

But if you want to go to a location, you have to go through fourteen government agencies and it takes months to secure a location.  Sometimes there was a fifteenth agency, if, for example, you wanted to remove a fence or bring things into the country.  

It was very hard and nothing was easy, and the people were great but we were doing a comedy and if we were doing a scene and Todd and the actors wanted a change, it informs everything else before and after.  If we wanted to make a change for two days from now, we were locked down. 

They had wonderful production services, they were dealing with things no one had ever done in Bangkok.  There was great food, massage places on every street corner, food is cheap and best food I’ve ever had. 

It was wonderful.  Making the movie was dirty, gritty, teeming with people.  You can’t move the same way there.

M&C: How do you reign in Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong)?

Goldberg: We don’t.  We have to surgically edit him in the movie because he just pops out lines and there was no coverage for his scenes.  He has to do it one time. He puts himself in Todd’s hands, and he’ll do anything for him, knowing and having confidence that Todd won’t embarrass him. 

He serves a platter that’s quite delicious! A lot of the stuff is over the top and so disgusting!!! Chow is a finely- tuned character.  A millimetre left or right and he’d be lost.  Chow’s a bad character and Ken knows this but he also understands the way to get the audience is so go to both sides. 

Also you know he’s a medical doctor so on the set in Bangkok, people got sick, so he would actually give good advice.

M&C: Where will the boys wake up in the third Hangover?

Goldberg: Well, we have not stopped working for three years, not one day off, so we’re pretty burned out.  Obviously I think we did a good job on The Hangover: Part II and everyone wants to work again but can we do something as good in a threequel? 

That’s daunting. Where to have them wake up? My family wants them to wake up in Hamilton!  But I don’t think it’s going to be waking up somewhere to tell the truth.

M&C: I’m glad the tattoo matter was settled so the film opens as planned.

Goldberg: The tattoo – of course!  But it’s one thing to say that someone has the rights but to injunct it is just rude.  Warner was always behind us.  Anyway, it’s not injuncted and it’s opening on Thursday.

M&C: Your resume features some of the best comedies in recent years. You can’t call it luck.  How do you do it?

Goldberg: I look for something that makes me smile.  There was no formula at all. We were thinking we should we do a sequel and Todd said "Okay here it is.  The guys wake up in Bangkok!" and a smile comes over your face.  We had a storyline.
 
Todd gets that kind of stuff, that’s the DNA we're going to. We had to write it and that’s organic and simple.  In comedy you can't let them see you sweat, be desperate, you have to be confident. 

That’s why working with Todd is so great.  He has a vision and knows what he wants.  What I do is try to protect that vision and put bubble around it.

M&C: There’s a hilarious story on IMDB about you and Ivan Reitman screening a sex film at McMaster and getting arrested. 

Goldberg: In my college days I didn’t know what I wanted to do producer Lenny Blum and then Ivan Reitman and I did movies in university.  I never meant to.  I fell into some stuff by accident and Ivan was a great mentor.  He had a plan, I didn’t, and I did whatever seemed fun. 

I had said I'd like to do a movie about summer camp so Lenny and I wrote it.  Meatballs. We wrote it in six weeks. Lenny and I fooled around a lot writing things unsuccessfully. 

We didn’t know what we wanted, we just created. Ivan had confidence and we were stupid and yes, that summer, Meatballs was a hit, but that was happenstance.  And suddenly it’s your job.

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