By 
As one-third of the legendary comedy trio The Lonely Island, Jorma Taccone is best known for his originality. Alongside childhood friends and collaborators Andy Samberg (star of Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and Akiva Schaffer (director of The Naked Gun), Taccone has helped introduce the world to novel concepts like SNL Digital Shorts, Grammy-winning comedy rap, and the hot mess that is MacGruber.
Taccone’s career is so wrapped up in originality that, when presented with the opportunity to direct Over Your Dead Body, an adaptation of 2021 Norwegian action comedy The Trip, he hesitated.
’ll be completely honest: I did not want to make a remake,” Taccone tells Den of Geek. “Then I watched the original and I absolutely loved the original. I love [writers Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney’s] first draft that I read. It was the challenge of it. Can we do all of these tones?”
There are indeed a lot of tones to tackle when it comes to Over Your Dead Body. Jason Segel and Samara Weaving star as Dan and Lisa, an unhappily married couple who abscond to Dan’s father’s cottage upstate, each with secret plans to murder the other. While that premise alone could easily sustain 105 minutes of a dark romantic comedy, the film continues to up the ante in increasingly grim and unexpected ways. A pair of escaped convicts (Keith Jardine, Timothy Olyphant) and their collaborator guard (Juliette Lewis) stumble their way into the plot and before you know it everything and everyone is covered in blood.
“It feels like it’s almost three movies in one,” Taccone says. “It’s sort of a suspense drama, then it becomes more of a home invasion movie, then it becomes an action movie.”
According to the movie’s writers, the duo known as BriTANick, that escalation and diversity of tone was a blessing, not a burden.
“I think what’s so fun about adapting it is that the story structure is excellent,” Nick Kocher says. “It basically remained intact. The way that we’ve been describing it is we got an empty house that we got to decorate. We changed stuff up with the characters, the motivations, and the dialogue. And got to inject our humor into it. It was really fun and easier than having to come up with structure all by yourself.”
“Structure’s the hardest thing to write,” Brian McElhaney adds. “This movie just worked and we just got to take it, make it our own thing and add our comedy to it. It was actually a really great writing process, which isn’t always the case.”
The end result is a movie that Taccone says he is happy he bent his “no remakes” rule to make.
“I’m just so proud to have made a remake that I feel like has teeth. I feel like American remakes don’t always have the teeth of the original. It’s dark, it’s fucked up, and it’s more gory than the original, weirdly enough.”
Over Your Dead Body premiered March 14 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival. It releases in theaters on April 24.
The post Over Your Dead Body: Jorma Taccone Wants a Remake “With Teeth” appeared first on Den of Geek.
