Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant Interview, Balls of Fury

MoviesOnline caught up with Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant at the Los Angeles press day for their new movie, "Balls of Fury.” Written by Lennon & Garant and directed by Garant, the outrageous new comedy serves up the unsanctioned, underground and unhinged world of extreme Ping-Pong where the competition is brutal and the stakes are deadly.

Down-and-out former professional Ping-Pong phenom Randy Daytona (Tony Award winner Dan Fogler) is sucked into this maelstrom when FBI Agent Rodriguez (George Lopez) recruits him for a secret mission. Randy is determined to bounce back and recapture his former glory, and to smoke out his father’s (Robert Patrick) killer – one of the FBI’s Most Wanted, arch-fiend Feng (Academy Award winner Christopher Walken).

But, after two decades out of the game, Randy can’t turn his life around and avenge his father’s murder without a team of his own. He calls upon the spiritual guidance of blind Ping-Pong sage and restaurateur Wong (James Hong), and the training expertise of Master Wong’s wildly sexy niece Maggie (Maggie Q), both of whom also have a dark history with Feng.

All roads lead to Feng’s mysterious jungle compound and the most unique Ping-Pong tournaments ever staged. There, Randy faces such formidable players as his long-ago Olympics opponent, the still-vicious Karl Wolfschtagg (Mr. Lennon). Can Randy keep his eye on the balls? Will he achieve the redemption he craves while wielding a paddle? Is his backhand strong enough to triumph over rampant wickedness?

Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant are the screenwriters of the blockbuster "Night at the Museum” and the creators of the hit television series "Reno 911!” One day, the duo saw a news item about a Ping-Pong champion who, says Lennon, "couldn’t walk down the street without being mobbed, as if he were a rock star.” Cross-breeding that concept with their penchant for martial arts, the pair wrote a screenplay to rectify the fact that one of the world’s most popular sports hadn’t yet been exploited in motion pictures. Garant elaborates, "We’re big Bruce Lee fans, and we thought, what if you took all the kung fu out of a kung fu movie and replaced it with Ping-Pong? So we researched the game for a year.” Lennon adds, "We like to look at silly things in a serious way, and serious things in a silly way.” Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant are two very funny guys. Here’s what they had to tell us about their new movie:

Q: It's fun to see you guys out of character. Was that Reno 9/11 tour strange?

Robert: Very weird.

Thomas: Yeah, really weird. That was so odd.

Robert: It was very strange.

Thomas: A strange afternoon.

Robert: Very, very surreal.

Q: Was that fun?

Thomas: We did almost three straight weeks in the middle of January around the country every day as the characters. All day.

Robert: It was insane. Like there were 10 appearances per town, freezing cold. Always in character.

Thomas: Get up at 4:30 and like go to the center of town with the local weather guy at 4:45 AM. "Hey, here we are! It's 4:45 AM and it's about to snow and here's a guy in shorts. I'm not so familiar with your program but apparently people like it. It's been on for about five years now? Wonderful, and here's a big front coming in." It was that every day for a month.

Robert: Yeah, in bed by two, up at four next day.

Q: So you were over it?

Robert: It was fun.

Thomas: You know what? Actually we got to a point where did you ever get so tired that you start to hallucinate a little bit? You just start talking.

Robert: We would read transcripts of the interviews and we were like, "Wow, we said that?"

Thomas: That was often when we'd been up for 28 hours or something. It was like the funniest thing we ever said and I don't remember it. It involved Dangle shooting a kid dressed up like an M&M.

Robert: Right, while he was a cop, right. Because he was hallucinating and he shot a kid dressed as an M&M for some reason.

Q: But you had to wear the shorts for an entire month?

Robert: And in freezing Detroit in January.

Thomas: Detroit, Chicago, New York.

Q: Iowa?

Thomas: We skipped Iowa. I don't know why.

Q: You wear shorts in this too. Are you obsessed with shorts?

Thomas: I did. Here's the thing. I don't even own a pair of shorts. I kid you not. I don't own a pair of shorts in my private life. I have swim trunks for swimming in water, and pants. I don't wear- - I just consider them to be a very silly piece of adult menswear. It's like any time you're an adult man and you want to be taken seriously, you come in in shorts like, "Look guys, if you guys don't knock it off, you're going to be in serious double trouble." You look like Lord Fauntelroy. You don't look appropriate in shorts so that's why I always tend to wear them.

Robert: And they get smaller every thing we do.

Thomas: The shorts in this one were fine. It was the singlet that was much worse.

Q: You had to train for the singlet?

Thomas: [Stammers] It wasn't easy to get into, I assure you. Nor to get out of.

Q: Was there less improvisation in this movie than Reno?

Robert: Not like Reno. Reno we don't have a script at all. It's funny because in this one, the first real person to sign up for it was Christopher Walken. He called us and in the very first phone call said, "Hey, I really like this script. I'll do it but don't change a word. I don't want to sign up for this movie and have you change the script on me."

Thomas: People often start working on a movie and the studios want to just keep rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. That's what happens with 99% of the studio movies.

Robert: He said, "I want to do this movie with this dialogue" so we promised him we're not going to change it. So that meant there were certain giant scenes and sections of the movie that you couldn't riff. You couldn't touch. You had to leave Feng exactly Feng. So if there were scenes with like Dan and Thom and scenes with Dietrich Bader where we were able to play with it a little bit.

Thomas: George actually improvises a lot. He's downplaying it a little bit.

Robert: Yeah, a lot of his stuff in the movie is all him, like a lot of his, "What does she weigh, like 40 pounds?"

Q: It seems like Walken is?

Robert: I don't know if any of them are in the movie. I don't think any of them made the final cut.

Q: Even his little reactions?

Thomas: Oh, that? [Makes noises] No, that's him. There's no way to describe that sound.

Robert: That's him, yeah. But the dialogue is all- -

Thomas: The dialogue's pretty much all in the script.

Q: And you're still obsessed with Reno because the film starts out there?

Thomas: Here's the thing. Either Reno is going to make us honorary mayor and give us the key to the city- -

Robert: Or they're going to send somebody to kill us.

Thomas: Or they're going to ban us for life. I don't know why.

Robert: Thom is grand marshal of their University of Nevada, Reno homecoming parade this year. So they like us, they like us, they like us.

Thomas: And you know what? We like them back. Nobody's paying attention to them except for us.

Robert: Yeah, Reno is the new Mayberry. Reno is much more, if Mayberry was the way that America was at some point, Reno is the way America is now.

Thomas: You know how many people live in Reno? 300,000.

Robert: Very small.

Thomas: There's more people in this hotel.

Q: You put it on the map.

Robert: A local guy actually said that to us.

Thomas: He was a Hell's Angel by the way.

Robert: He was a Hell's Angel and he also ran a brothel.

Thomas: "You guys put us on the map."

Robert: We're like ooh, wow, okay.

Thomas: All right, thank you, owner of a brothel.

Robert: We're not so sure it's good because now people can find you. Maybe it's not a great idea.

Thomas: Yeah, we were laying low. You put us on the map.

Q: So why go back there if you've done five seasons of a show there?

Robert: We love them.

Thomas: You know, they're the ugly stepsister that no one's- - they're Las Vegas's ugly stepsister who's the one actually cleaning out the chimney every day, not going to balls with the prince.

Robert: Except there is no fairy godmother. This is the real world.

Thomas: Yeah, so she's still just cleaning out the chimney.

Q: Are you doing another season of Reno?

Robert: It's already in the can.

Q: So that's it?

Robert: We don't know.

Thomas: Season five's in the can.

Robert: Yeah, we just finished shooting 16 episodes. We finished editing them like three weeks ago, like final sound mix. So they're probably going to air them in the fall. After that, we don't know.

Thomas: And it just went into syndication too so it'll be on every day.

Q: And you're writing Night at the Museum 2? Will you write parts for yourselves?

Thomas: We have not yet. I suppose if we were slightly smarter we would have. We were almost going to play Lewis and Clark in the first one and I'm so glad we didn't. They didn't do anything.

Robert: No, they just stood in the background.

Thomas: Long days, long days doing that while Ben Stiller's being hilarious over here.

Q: Ben's a hands on guy. Is he involved in the writing?

Thomas: Oh very.

Robert: Yeah, I think people have different experiences with him.

Thomas: Ours is great, easygoing.

Robert: Ours is great. He has a crew that he's made and he brings us in so normally, he brings us in when he's not happy with somebody else. So we're kind of on his team. His notes are always to make things funnier.

Thomas: How can this be funnier? They're never weird, esoteric like- -

Robert: What's my Joseph Campbell arc at this point?

Thomas: He's not that.

Robert: He's like, "Well, this scene with the basketball, don't you think we can do better than a basketball scene, guys?"

Thomas: He's very practical which is kind of where we come from. It's probably that we both come from sketch and television that is just like a very practical way of talking about a comedy.

Robert: Like we asked, before we started Night at the Museum 2, you go through and you pitch your thing and you go to the studio and the director and everybody okays it, and then they asked for what he wanted out of Night at the Museum 2. A lot of actors would really send you a phone book of what they wanted out of it. What he said was, "Just make it funnier than the first one. I just want it be funnier."

Thomas: That was the only requirement.

Q: Is it the same museum?

Thomas: We probably can't talk plot too much.

Robert: It starts in the museum. It's all the same- -

Thomas: There are a couple major new characters.

Robert: Then it gets bigger.

Thomas: Two at least very major new characters.

Robert: But it's all the old guys too.

Q: Is it the most pressure to top the box office with the sequel?

Robert: We think it's fun.

Thomas: We didn't think about it a lot. Certainly I know everyone at Fox, in fact we were told going into it, "This is the number one priority for the Fox studio, for Newscorp this year."

Robert: The first one wasn't a struggle. The first one was really fun. We wrote it and they liked it. I think if the first one had been a struggle, doing another one would be really daunting but the first one, we just did what we do and they liked it so you don't really feel pressure because you're just kind of writing what you like and give it to them. If they like it too and you don't feel like Murdoch's breathing down your neck just because everybody's kind of on the same page.

Thomas: You don't think, "Oh, I'm going to try to write this so it's a blockbuster." It's just like let's just write some really funny scenes.

Q: Do you have to hold yourselves back to be family friendly?

Thomas: Our sensibility really is exactly the same for both. People always think, like the Reno movie is R certainly, and it was a hard R, but it was mostly because anything you could see in a PG Reno movie is on TV every week and now every night of the week. So we just thought, "Oh, we'll take advantage of- - we'll just separate it from the television show by content." Because everything else in it is the same sensibility. And also, our sensibility is the monkey peeing on Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum, and the Reno 911 movie where we're all pushing a whale on a nude beach. I guess it's all man versus animals, isn't it?

Robert: Man versus animals, man versus man, man versus man. Then a big giant buildup to the ancient Chinese ping pong master and it turns out it's a little girl. It's kind of the same joke. It's kind of the same sensibility, kind of what we do all over the place. Just kind of different versions of it.

Q: Do you have any ideas for a new TV show?

Thomas: We've talked about it.

Robert: We're talking about doing like a screwed up sketch show. Which we haven't done in a decade.

Thomas: Like going back to our roots and doing, now that we've figured some stuff out.

Q: You're more mature?

Thomas: We're actually less mature. We take ourselves way less seriously than we did at 22. At 22 we took ourselves really seriously.

Robert: Yeah, we were fuckin' Checkov.

Thomas: Oh, we were crafting the $240 worth of pudding.

Q: What took so long for this movie to come out?

Thomas: The CGI was shockingly long.

Robert: It was eight months. Eight months.

Thomas: We pitched the movie and we said to people, "And you're doing the easiest special effect. It's ping pong."

Robert: It's been done. They did it in Forrest Gump.

Thomas: But they do it in Forrest Gump for about 30 seconds.

Robert: And in all fairness, the special effects company also said, "Oh, it's the easiest thing in the world." That's not true.

Thomas: It's not true at all.

Robert: It's very easy to do badly.

Thomas: It's very easy to do badly and you saw the film, right? I mean, the ball's got a reflection when it passes the table every time. It's wildly time consuming and there's a fair amount of math involved. It just took long.

Q: So did the studio overestimate with an earlier release date?

Thomas: They did, yes.

Robert: They missed the window. We were supposed to come out January or February and honestly, the special effects weren't done. Even by March, it was like- -

Thomas: By March then you're up against Transformers and stuff so we said,

Robert: "Maybe let's not go up against Transformers."

Q: When you got the first pass, were you freaking out?

Thomas: Yeah, it was horrible.

Robert: It's was horrible.

Thomas: Freaking out is an understatement.

Robert: Because we knew- -

Thomas: There were some foul words and things thrown across the room.

Robert: Everything else in the movie would've been pointless if the ping pong were fake. All the work with Christopher Walken, if the ping pong looked fake, the movie's pointless.

Thomas: And it drove you crazy. Your eye can tell so fast. It's like- -

Robert: "That's not real."

Thomas: The second it's not the right size, it will just make you crazy.

Q: Was Dan joking that he did 90% real ping pong?

Thomas: Yes.

Robert: Yes. He's sticking to that.

Thomas: He's sticking to that. It's impossible, physically impossible.

Robert: There's one shot in the entire film that's actual ping pong balls. There's a scene where he meets the Hammer, where he meets Patton Oswalt. There's a tracking shot of the gym that's all the people playing.

Thomas: It's Biba, it's Wei Wang, it's Diego Schaaf.

Robert: Those are all ping pong champions in that gym, the nun who's nailing it across the table, that's Wei Wang. She like bronzed in '92 and she trained all of our guys. So that shot is real ping pong balls. That room is real ping pong balls. Everything else is [CGI]

Thomas: If Dan could play ping pong like that, I assure you he wouldn’t need to act.

Robert: How do you mean?

Thomas: Well…

Q: Are there really sponsors?

Thomas: Oh yes. Oh God, it's very serious.

Robert: Killer Spin, all of the logos and stuff are real ping pong industries. It's a big thing. Iba, that blonde who's playing in that very first shot, if you see it again. There's the very first shot when they go to Reno middle school, it's like a very attractive blonde who is the Anna Kournikova of ping pong. Which means she's pretty good. She's ranked like sixth or seventh in the world but they have posters of her that they sell and she's got merchandising deals for Killer Spin and Top Spin, all the different products that they have. It's a small world, but like poker, it's pretty well funded. People take it really seriously.

Q: Will this movie kill in Asia?

Thomas: I wonder. We think that it might come off as a drama. Translated, it may depend. The music's pretty sincere. I make some sort of strange faces but you could believe it. No weirder than any villain in a Jackie Chan film.

Robert: No, not at all.

Thomas: In fact, I'm kind of based on the villain from a Jackie Chan film.

Robert: Very much.

Q: How did you feel about the reaction at Comic Con?

Robert: Oh, it was so much fun. We knew going up because- -

Thomas: We go to Comic Con pretty much every year now.

Robert: Yeah, we love it. And Patton Oswalt is like Leonardo DiCaprio at Comic Con. He walks around and everybody loves him. And James Hong is…

Thomas: Yeah, there's no other place you're going to find a room of 6000 James Hong fans.

Robert: There are 6000 in the world and they're all there. They're all in one room. So we knew.

Thomas: We had a good feeling about it certainly.

Robert: We're nerds.

Thomas: But it was nice that it went so good.

Robert: Like every joke in that movie cracks us up and sending it down to Comic Con, we knew there was a lot of like minded folks.

Thomas: People like us.

Robert: Nerds, people like us.

Q: How obsessed are you with Enter the Dragon?

Thomas: We like it a lot certainly.

Robert: There are shots in the movie.

Thomas: The shot obviously, the entrance to Feng's mansion.

Robert: The entrance to Feng's mansion is exactly. As soon as we started kicking around the idea, we were like, "Okay, you have to do a shot where everyone is playing ping pong in a big room." We had to do that.

Q: And the slaves?

Thomas: Yes, we wanted to do a spin on the slaves, yeah. Have you watched Enter the Dragon because the slave stuff in that is really weird?

Robert: They're on lithium and opium.

Thomas: Ooh, zombie girls, yeah.

Robert: Really great.

Thomas: Yeah, that sort of is a little bit of a play on that.

Robert: It's Enter the Dragon, it's also Dragon, it's also- -

Thomas: There used to be way more of the courtesans. Way more. And test audiences, it made the fellas very uncomfortable. People started to be like, by the third courtesan scene, they were like, "Guys, come on."

Robert: Dietrich Bader originally was very Princess Leia. Like he was in it a lot. They had a lot of scenes, they played Boggle for hours. There was a lot of Dietrich Bader.

Thomas: There's a scene where he offers him a peppermint foot scrub in the basement. It'll all be on the DVD.

Q: Isn't there a scene in one of the trailers?

Thomas: There's a lot that will end up on the DVD.

Q: Where did the inspiration come for the electric outfits?

Robert: There's that one James Bond movie.

Thomas: It's Never Say Never Again.

Robert: Yeah, Never Say Never Again.

Thomas: The wonderful, I love Never Say Never Again.

Robert: Where they play the video game. They're playing this video game- -

Thomas: It was this weirdest era of Bond films.

Robert: You can tell that it's right when video games were like hip.

Thomas: And it's obviously based kind of on Tempest.

Robert: Yeah, and it's like, "You feel the suffering of your country when you lose." It's so dumb yet so great.

Thomas: We love the idea that you would put on something that makes you feel the suffering of your ping pong ball. It's so really stupid.

Q: Thanks guys.

Robert: Thank you.

Thomas: Always a pleasure.

"Balls of Fury” opens in theaters on August 29^th.