Jon Favreau & Cast Interview, Wild West Comedy Show

MoviesOnline sat down with Ari Sandel, Keir O’Donnell, Peter Billingsley, and Jon Favreau at the Los Angeles press day to talk about their new movie, "Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights -- Hollywood to the Heartland. The documentary film is directed by Ari Sandel and produced by Vince Vaughn. Executive producers on the project are Peter Billingsley, Victoria Vaughn and John Isbell.

In the spirit of the old west variety shows, Vince Vaughn ("The Break-Up," "Wedding Crashers," "Swingers," "Fred Claus") began an unprecedented comedy tour featuring stand-up comedians Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, and Sebastian Maniscalco. Vaughn played host to the ensemble of comedians and performed improvisational sketches with surprise celebrity guests that included Jon Favreau, Justin Long, and Keir O’Donnell.

The documentary chronicles Vaughn and the comedians’ journey as they travel more than 6,000 miles and perform 30 shows in 30 consecutive nights in cities across the U.S., and it gives audiences a rare opportunity to experience Vaughn and his team as they bring their unique styles and perspectives to regional audiences throughout Western, Southern and Midwestern states.

Through rousing onstage performances and behind-the-scenes interviews, this engaging film breaks down the true essence of each comedian’s life-altering experiences and the personal and professional challenges that will unit four comics, one movie star and legions of fans from Hollywood to the Heartland.

Here’s what these guys had to tell us about their cross country comedy adventure. Favreau also talks about his upcoming "Iron Man," helming the first "Avengers," and maybe doing something based on the fantasy/comedy comic book series, "Groo the Wanderer":

Ari Sandel: My name is Ari Sandel. I am the director of the "Vince Vaughn Wild West Comedy Show."

Keir O’Donnell: I’m Keir O’Donnell. I was one of the special guest stars.

Peter Billingsley: Peter Billingsley, I was a special guest star and executive producer of the movie.

Jon Favreau: And I’m Jon Favreau; I was a special guest star as well.

Peter Billingsley: No funny? [someone’s cell phone rings with a Brass Monkey ring tone] And that’s Brass Monkey. {Laughter]

Jon Favreau: I’ll save the funny.

Peter Billingsley: All right, who’s left? He’s going to save the funnies for the real questions.

Ari Sandel: Well, he was the center point of the film from the beginning. This really was his big idea to do this, to put the tour together, to take comedy to different towns, to bring live acts and this variety show to people who don’t normally get it. And when we put the documentary together, we knew that look, people are going to come to see Vince, and they’ll stay for the comics. But Vince really is kind of the center of how it came together.

Peter Billingsley: But with that said, I think the fun part of the movie is it sort of gets handed over to these comics who you don’t know much about, and they’re pretty engaging, and their stories are pretty great. So there really wasn’t a choice to try to balance or put Vince in. It was more sort of what the movie was asking for.

Peter Billingsley: Because we’re crazy, I guess. I think it had a nice ring to it, and none of us had ever been on tour at all. In fact, only one person really involved in the production, John Isbell, our executive producer had a music background and knew, had enough sense to say before we started, ‘This is nuts. You guys cannot do 30 days in 30 nights.’ But we were kind of naïve, and it sounded good, and we sort of just threw caution to the wind, took off, and did it.

Ari Sandel: But we ran into musicians on the road that were like, ‘The most we’ve ever done is like five days and then take a day off.’ And we looked at each other and we went, ‘Oh.’ It was like 15 days in. We had no idea what to expect.

Jon Favreau: I knew what to expect, and that’s why I did one show.

Peter Billingsley: He wisely did not come. We would call Jon from the road and say, ‘We’re here. Come out.’ He’s like, ‘Nope.’

Jon Favreau: ‘Not tonight.’ They’re like, ‘Okay, tomorrow we’ll be in Phoenix.’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Tomorrow we’ll be in Notre Dame.’ I’m like, ‘Where are you guys going?’ They didn’t sleep. And I don’t know if you get the sense from the movie, but they would do a show and then they would go to sleep on the bus. And they’d wake up; they’d be in another city. Vince would do all his press. He would do sort of the phone-in morning zoo radio shows, which are very challenging even when you’re well-rested to do, especially when you’ve got, like Vince, when they’re asking you all the questions you don’t want to answer. And they’re honking horns and shit. And then they would do a sound check and then do the show that night. And there was a lot of improv in the show. I mean, I just had one night. And Vince is very comfortable being spontaneous. So depending on who was going to show up that night in addition to the comics, he would just say, ‘Okay, Justin Long is going to be there and you, so why do something like a dinner for five thing? And we’ll have Justin come on, no, have Justin come on first. Then you come on, and I’ll introduce you, and then we’ll do like a scene from "Swingers" and then you can do a thing where he does his impersonation of me.’ I’m like, ‘Okay,’ [laughs] and you would throw it together. It was kind of stressful. It worked out well because we all bounced off each other, and I think the energy of the show supported it. But it wasn’t like there was -- at least the stand-ups had material to fall back on.

Peter Billingsley: And we honed in on some act, but as we continued on the road, like we’d touch on it. In Phoenix, we did "Grease." We did "Summer Lovin." There was only a taste of it, but Justin Long was in a blond wig, and I was one of his girls in a blond wig, and we would try stuff like that. And it was fun, and then we threw dodge balls at Justin. We did a "Mama Mia" thing in Vegas. So that was part of the spirit of the show was to kind of come up with stuff quickly. And Vince sang karaoke. He would close each show with "Sweet Caroline."

Ari Sandel: One of the things that set this tour apart and I think the film apart from other comedy films or comedy tours is that this show is a variety act. You never know what you’re going to get from town to town. Every town is different. We might have local celebrities, local athletes come up on stage. We had Troy Glaus in Phoenix come up and throw dodge balls at Justin. When we were in Chicago, we had other athletes come up on stage. Sometimes we would pull people out on the stage that are just regular people, fans. So you really never know what you’re going to get, and that’s kind of, I think, what lends this tremendous energy to the show.

Peter Billingsley: Well, Vince really wanted to bring this variety comedy show to places that don’t traditionally get acts like this. The larger cities, obviously, and throughout the Northeast traditionally get these shows. And so we went through, if you look at kind of the 30 city list, it was like through Lubbock and El Paso and places that don’t get them. And in fact, at times it almost worked against us, because we’d get to town, and people really didn’t think that Vince Vaughn was going to show up there. They thought it was like the Puffy Bad Boys Tour, like he puts his name on it, but he’s not there. So he’d get on the radio in the morning and say, ‘No, I’m here. Come out and see the show, and then we’d sell out that show.’ So that was a lot of how we built in the tour, and it was fun. We knew we were going to hit 30 cities, but it was a lot more fun to hit the ones that traditionally don’t get those types of shows.

Ari Sandel: We shot 18 hours a day for 30 days. It was about 600 hours of footage, so just to watch that much footage takes over a month, just to watch it. So the editing process was really a long process, because you’ve got to watch it. You’ve got to reassess what you have. You have to determine what story lines are working and what you want to follow. Each city had its own story unto itself, and we knew at the beginning we wanted to make it a chronological thing. So that gave us kind of a gift at the beginning. We knew how we were going to tell the story. The question is what are we going to throw in there. And when we shot it, each venue is a challenge by itself, because each venue is different. When we were in Indianapolis, it was a huge, huge room that was tables. When we were in Phoenix, it was a theater in the round, so the comics had to learn to address everybody around them to the sides. So shooting that became an interesting thing. Each venue had its own characteristics that made it unique.

Peter Billingsley: Then we even had the comic cam, remember that? We gave the comics a camera and would have them do some filming too. So we really tried to cover as much as we could of 24 hours in a day. There’s some shots that Ari will be filming, and you just get so little sleep that he actually would fall asleep shooting, and you’d just see this [demonstrates how the hand held camera would slowly fall to one side as the cameraman fell asleep in the middle of shooting].

Ari Sandel: I would be sitting in the editing room. You’d be watching, and you’d see they’re doing something, and all of the sudden the camera would dip for a second. I was like, ‘What is going on?’ And then I’d realize, ‘Oh, I feel asleep right there.’ We were really exhausted.

Peter Billingsley: It’s tough.

Ari Sandel: Myself and Jani [Zandovskis] and Chris [Henkel], the other cameramen, we were the first to get up and the last to go to bed, because we had to film everything. I mean, even if it was mundane. I remember going to bed at 5:00 because we’d been out shooting stuff; 5:00 in the morning and having to get up at 7:00 a.m. just to watch the bus driver gas the bus, just so we’d have a gas shot.

Peter Billingsley: Just in case something happened. You never know.

Ari Sandel: Yeah, who knows what’s going to happen. You never want to put the camera down, because you don’t want to be the guy who missed the moment. So anywhere I went, I always had to have a camera. From a crew perspective, it was really grueling, but that’s the only way you can get --

Keir O’Donnell: You don’t want to miss Peter yelling at people or something.

Peter Billingsley: Yeah exactly, Justin Long trying to take my pillow.

Ari Sandel: We did two things. We shot all the behind scenes and most of the shows with Sony P150s. And we chose those cameras because they’re kind of consumer cameras.

Peter Billingsley: It’s a miniDV format.

Ari Sandel: It’s a miniDV format; we really wanted to have a regular person’s feel, almost like a home video feel to it. It feels more accessible. We didn’t want it to have a slick polished look. Then we shot a couple of the shows with Betacams, just to have like the nice jibs and everything going on just to give it nice coverage. But the vast majority of the film was shot with small cameras, DV cameras.

Peter Billingsley: We just missed the HD boom. Now you can get these little cameras for like $3500 that are HD. We were just prior to that.

Jon Favreau: During "Wedding Crashers," Vince pulled together many of the same comics to do a benefit for the families of the troops, I think. And I flew out to Maryland for that and knew even less of what we were going to do. And we just tried backstage to remember some bit. We’re not stand-ups. We’re not an act, so for the first five minutes, they’re hooting and hollering and yelling lines at us from our movies. And then, after the next five minutes they’re like, ‘Well, where’s your routine? Tell us some jokes.’ And that’s when you got to get off stage really quickly, because you sort of run out of good will, and the novelty’s over. So we tried to remember stuff from the -- we’d go backstage during the comics and have to go back out there, and it was a very unforgiving crowd, because it was just a beer swilling college crowd. And we would just go back stage and figure out stuff to do. And I think that’s when we brought out Peter Billingsley. I don’t think you were scheduled to come out in that show.

Peter Billingsley: No, and that good will wore off quickly, too. It’s like, ‘All right, Ralphie, okay. Get off.’ ‘I need to leave. I don’t know what to do.’

Jon Favreau: But me and him did a scene; it was just awful. We did a scene from "Swingers" where it was like, ‘Hey,’ and of course we don’t remember it, because we don’t watch the movie. And they know the movie better than we do. So it’s like, ‘Hey, come to Vegas.’ But instead of Vegas, it was ‘Come to Dewey Beach,’ because that’s where we were playing. And every time you say the name of the town they’re in, ‘Yea.’ So we did that, and I tried to remember the phone call I had done, and so that was our only experience. Then when I came to Hollywood to do the thing a year later or so, right? It was about a year later or two years later.

Peter Billingsley: Uh-huh, two years later.

Jon Favreau: They came up with a bit, and they pulled that. They actually transcribed the scene, and that was the bit to do it with Justin. But yeah, I don’t actually carry a scene from ‘Swingers’ around with me as they say in the movie, but you’d think I would.

Peter Billingsley: Occasionally.

Peter Billingsley: Yeah, I met Vince on the ‘After School Special’ in 1989 about steroids, and actually I met Ahmed Ahmed then as well, who was an extra in that, and we all became friends. And at the time, Vince was one of the smartest, certainly funniest guys that I had met, and it was a question of when with him, not if. And Vince would go up for a lot of stuff like a lot of actors do, and he would get really down to the wire, down to the wire and just wouldn’t get it. And that’s when they met on "Rudy," and made a decision to sort of control their own destiny and said, ‘Hey, let’s make a film.’ I think it was you that wrote "Swingers" in what, three weeks?

Jon Favreau: Yeah, a pretty short time, and Vince, there was a lot of hard luck stories with him like the Buffalo Bills. He’d get there. He’d get to the Super Bowl, and it’s tough when you’re a good looking guy. And he wasn’t really playing off his comedy, he was a funny guy but he never was doing funny stuff. He was never sent out on that kind of role. I’d be sent out on all the funny stuff. He’d be sent out on all the good looking, and then you can’t be the lead, because the lead’s going to be a star. So you’re going to be the unlikable competitor to the lead, like he was in "Rudy." And then that’s the part that’s not that important usually, and he got trimmed down. It certainly didn’t showcase his skills, but he was always very, very funny behind the scenes. And so when I wrote "Swingers," it was very much in the voice of what he was, an exaggerated version of that. And then, we tried to get the movie set up, and somebody wanted to buy it. And we did readings trying to keep everybody in the cast. Then when I finally did the deal with Doug [Liman], I was like, ‘It has to be me and Vince,’ and that was part of the deal. And then we did it very inexpensively because we didn’t have a lot of star power to draw funds, and that became a calling card. And as far as Vince’s career goes, I remember the first thing was off of the dailies of "Swingers" he got a holding deal with the television network, the Warner Brothers network, "The Frog," remember?

Peter Billingsley: "77 Sunset Strip."

Jon Favreau: Right, it turned into "77 Sunset Strip," which never went. It was a pilot that he shot.

Peter Billingsley: And "The Lost World."

Jon Favreau: And he had some sort of holding money, and it was like we hit lotto. It was like when Joe Pesci gets made in "Goodfellas." We were all celebrating, and he was taking us all out to dinner because he had whatever it was, $50,000 or a $100,000. It was more than we’d ever seen. So we were all really enjoying life, and then "Swingers" hadn’t even come out yet. Then he did a pilot and then all of a sudden [Steven] Spielberg offered him "Jurassic Park 2," and that’s when he almost couldn’t do it because of his holding deal. And I think Spielberg got on the phone. He did that, and then so there was a big, big thing with him at that point. Then there was sort of a lull. He was doing a lot of roles that he was getting a lot of recognition for critically, but nothing really popped until he started doing the comedies again. I think it was probably, not "Wedding Crashers," the one before it.

Peter Billingsley: "Old School."

Jon Favreau: "Old School," he did that [snaps his fingers], and then he caught a lot of heat off that and then…

Peter Billingsley: I think for a lot of us it was nice to see, because Vince is so funny. And if you’ve met him or if you’ve interviewed him, he is so smart and he is just so naturally funny in life that it was just a matter of time for when he’d start doing these comedies. And I think this movie is more of a return to the spirit of "Swingers." This is not a studio financed movie. This is really based on an idea that he had. Everyone in this movie who has worked on this movie is either family or friends, have all known each other for years, and pooled together our energies and our resources to do something different and to do something special that we really thought we could achieve kind of a different special movie with this. Because a lot of people said to him, ‘You know, Vince, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to go on the road and live in a bus for a month.’

Jon Favreau: I was confused, yeah.

Peter Billingsley: Like, ‘You make a lot of money. You’re a big star. Your career is in a great place.’ But I think he really genuinely wanted to and wanted to challenge himself to do something different.

Jon Favreau: Peter is working with him as well as other people who are involved with this movie with Wild West Pictures. It’s a production company, and he’s been producing a lot, and they’re setting up a lot of things. And it’s nice that he’s getting an opportunity not to just be involved with other people’s stuff, but if something catches his fancy, he could do it. And this is the first example of that.

Jon Favreau: I think when you share a common experience, whether it’s a good or bad one like we both did with the experience of "Swingers" and our lives changing at the same time, there’s not a lot of people who could relate to that. And you share that, and you sort of mature at the same rate. We’re very different people, but we share a very similar perspective on life and certainly on comedy and on movies. And as we’ve had the opportunities to do all the things that we always dreamed we could, like have other people want us in their projects or to be involved, you start to see that that’s a mixed blessing because, especially with comedies, everybody thinks they understand what’s funny. And a lot of people do know what’s funny, but there’s a lot of different styles of what’s funny. And you can’t argue balls and strikes on comedy, as [Jerry] Seinfeld used to say on his show. He would say to the studio or the network, ‘I don’t want to argue balls and strikes with you. There’s a way we do things, and there’s a way other people do things,’ and it gets frustrating. Sometimes you collaborate well, and it works out well like on "Elf," where I was working with Will [Ferrell] in his camp, and we have very similar styles and different styles in some ways. But there’s always a learning curve with those collaborations. I know that when Vince comes into the editing room on "Elf," what he likes I’m going to like. And he helps keep me true to what I do, and I like to do the same with him as I collaborate with him on projects. Like, I’m working on "Four Christmases" with him or "The Break-Up." So I think we help steer each other a little bit and help sort of recalibrate the other person as you sort of get lost in going out to that big world with a lot of different voices.

Peter Billingsley: And I think in all of our cases, there was a friendship first, really. Before I met Vince on a set of a movie, or not a movie, it was an After School Special about steroids, [laughs] but we’ve really formed a friendship, and that was what was first and foremost. And I was trying to transition at that point in my career and producing it into stuff, and we just really became great friends and then had an opportunity to work again later. And these guys met on "Rudy," and we were just telling stories about it, calling up the bell hop and having fun, and just stuff that young guys do to have a good time. There was really a genuine friendship, and that’s what really started it, and then I think the work has gone from there.

Keir O’Donnell: I mean, just going off of Peter’s thing too, like the first time I met Vince was just booking "Wedding Crashers," which was like my first big film role. And from day one, Vince kind of took me under his wing, and this is the third film I’ve done with him. But as far as the tour goes, I just showed up to see it, and Vince was talking about it while we were shooting "The Break-Up." And I just went to go see it.

Peter Billingsley: Then you came the first night in Hollywood.

Keir O’Donnell: Yeah, the first night in Hollywood. After the show, I was just hanging out. And he said, ‘Hey, if you want to do one of these shows, it would be really fun.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ So I grabbed my backpack and hit the road, and I didn’t come back for 26 days later.

Peter Billingsley: He’s modest. We were more like, ‘We kind of need you. Can you come help us out in a variety act here?’

Keir O’Donnell: I was sort of like held at gunpoint. It was great, though. It was amazing.

Peter Billingsley: He just wouldn’t leave, and he was like, ‘I’m having fun.’ We’re like, ‘Honestly, you can go if you want. We can get someone else to do a bit.’ He’s like, ‘No, I love it.’

Ari Sandel: Certainly, I mean, we were there for hours, and it’s a good question. I mean, it’s a comedy, so you’ve got to ask yourself how serious do you want to make this, and how serious are we really taking ourselves? I mean, we don’t purport for a second that we came to this evacuee camp and delivered happiness to everybody, and God bless us. It was really we wanted to show that because it was a genuine learning experience for all of us who were there. The four comics, Keir, myself, when we went there, these guys really genuinely -- we’d been on tour for 23 days. We were exhausted and tired and all about ourselves. We’d been living in our own little world. It was about what we hadn’t had to eat and how tired we were and all this stuff, and it was really self absorbed. And then, you get this moment of clarity, and it was like, wow. It was like water splashed in your face, and you realize there’s so much more important things in life, about family and what matters and staying together. And here are people who can show it to you. And then, you see how just this little thing of saying, ‘Hey, you want to come to a comedy show?’ And they’d starting laughing; it really did lift their spirits to a degree. I think somewhat they felt that the local town had helped them so much, but I think in general a lot of people in New Orleans felt like they were forgotten. So the fact that we were visiting them and paying attention I think also lifted their spirits. I felt very emotionally attached to that experience. I know the comics did. The shot when they’re driving back and they’re just kind of quiet was real, 100 percent real. We just were like, ‘Jesus, what just happened?’ And it was a total turnaround in their attitude. So when we came back to the editing room, I knew exactly how to make this story, this one part of that story. It was a total arc in it. It was a great aspect. I was very happy with how it turned out. I think it brings a lot of heart to the thing and makes the movie not just about being on stage. The tour was important because we got to experience the people, and that was one of the most genuine parts of it.

Ari Sandel: It hasn’t been a problem for me. I mean, we always knew it was going to come out; it was just a matter of when it was going to come out. I think we wanted to pick and choose the right time. We did a little bit more work after Toronto. When we showed at Toronto, it was the very first time we’d ever screened it in front of anybody. We didn’t do any testing, market testing. We only had seven people in the edit room. It was only amongst us, so we really were kind of in a box. We took it to Toronto and went, ‘I hope people like this.’ And then people really laughed, and we went, ‘Okay, we got a pretty good movie. This is good.’ And it was a bit longer than what we wanted to do. It was rough. So we took a little bit of time to cut it down a bit and make it a little leaner, a little faster. And then, it was just a matter of when’s it going to work best? And so we picked the date, and that was it. I don’t think any of us ever worried about the length of time, though.

Keir O’Donnell: I think the comics are itching for it to come out, though. It’s going to do presumably amazing things.

Peter Billingsley: It was always about the movie, and it was really also trying to find a time that Vince, who was shooting another movie at that time, could get back to the edit room and work on the movie to satisfy the vision that he had from the outside of this film. So it was sort of a whole combo of timing, but we’re really proud of the movie that we’ve made now, and I think we’ve got a great time coming out.

Jon Favreau: Thank you. That is very nice of you to say.

Jon Favreau: We just locked picture on "Iron Man," but blocking is different on this type of movie, because every day more shots come out of the oven, and you cut them in. And it’s a real treat for me, because I’m used to only having dialogue and story and comedy and characters to cut with. And then every day it’s like I open up; it’s like Christmas morning. A new shot comes in, and we cut it into the movie. And you realize that these movies could survive without good actors and without good stories because the shots are so fun and exciting and compelling if they’re done well. And the guys at ILM, they did "Pirates" and "Transformers" and stuff, so that stuff’s spectacular. And the stuff between Robert [Downey, Jr.] and Gwyneth [Paltrow] and Jeff Bridges is just really great stuff, just really great. There was so much freedom in storytelling, because they always knew that it was going to about ‘Iron Man’ and the flying, and I never got pressure on the scenes. And so I had a tremendous amount of freedom to tell a story in a tone that I’m very comfortable with. So in a way, it was really the most creative freedom that I could remember having on anything. And it works; it’s a very, very good movie, and I think that people’s expectations, although it’s changing now, but with super hero movies, they’re expecting an experience. They’re not expecting quality. They could have a good time without it being a great movie is what I’m trying to say. So if you could deliver a great movie on top of something that’s fun to watch, I think you exceed expectations. And because of the caliber of actor that Marvel allowed me to work with and hire, it’s just been really a lot of fun. It’s a very long process, though. It will be two years working on it by the time it comes out in May. So that’s the one thing, compared to doing a comedy where you can knock one or two out a year. This is a big, big effort.

Jon Favreau: I’d love to, if the experience is as good as this. They still have to make a few more movies, because "Avengers" has The Hulk in it and Thor and Captain America and Iron Man. So I think they want to, according to Kevin Feige over there, they want to get a chapter in each of the heroes before they start playing with the idea of combining them. But I think it’s very smart that they’re thinking of cross-pollinating between different characters like they have always done in the comic books. And now, because they control all of these different characters, there can be that sort of freewheeling interplay between the movies and characters that gives it that spontaneous feel in the books.

Peter Billingsley: [Laughs] Yeah, I am a boy who takes more after his mother than his father, who is more of an athlete, and Vince is my best friend. And so to impress my dad and get his love, I take steroids.

Ari Sandel: Also to win over the girl.

Peter Billingsley: And then of course, to win over Nicole Eggert, who was formerly on "Charles in Charge" who is in the school, who is a beautiful blond who I want her affection, so to win over her, I take steroids. For those of you who remember the show ‘American Gladiators.’

Ari Sandel: It’s on again.

Peter Billingsley: Malibu [Deron McBee], who was on "American Gladiators" sold me the steroids, so I bought them from him. The guy with the long hair, ‘You want steroids, yes?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I guess.’ And then I get fast, and then I become the fourth man of the track team. I get really fast overnight. Get the girl, get my dad’s approval, and then have a heart attack in the big race and then get the speech from the doctor about how I shouldn’t be doing it.

Ari Sandel: I would like to also point out the most genius shot in the movie is Peter lifting like a five pound dumbbell in front of a picture of Mozart.

Peter Billingsley: And of course, I’ve got the zits, too.

Peter Billingsley: I did. That was a bit of a call-back, yeah. It was a tough life on that bus. It was almost like a prison, like you start to get into that mindset.

Ari Sandel: So much pressure.

Peter Billingsley: You can only imagine.

Keir O’Donnell: Like ‘roid rage.

Peter Billingsley: It’s nuts. It smelled like a bus, yeah.

Jon Favreau: I was on it day one. It smelled great.

Peter Billingsley: Vince had a nice bus. Vince had like granite counters and shag carpet and like a queen-sized bed and doors that slide open and shut. We didn’t. Our bus really stunk. Our bus did not work out well.

Keir O’Donnell: Between [inaudible] and the four comics, we had nine people.

Jon Favreau: That’s what inspired it. Yeah, I look like a young whale in the movie, and now, over the course of shooting "Iron Man," I lost quite a bit of weight, I’m happy to say. But I didn’t feel fat then, but now I look back and I say, ‘Oh, I was heavier.’ That’s the wonderful thing about body image is you always feel the same. You just look at pictures of yourself. If you ever want to look better in pictures, gain weight. You’ll be like, ‘Boy, I looked great then.’ You go to the same picture because everything’s relative.

Jon Favreau: Wow, to make them. I like the Woody Allen stuff, like "Sleeper," that kind of thing when I was growing up. To make movies, yeah, he was fun. Well, I was little.

Ari Sandel: Marty too, right?

Jon Favreau: Marty?

Ari Sandel: Martin Scorsese.

Jon Favreau: Oh, yeah. I thought the movie "Marty." [Laughs]

Jon Favreau: Slated? It depends on what’s happening with the strike. I’m writing something for these guys, "Couples Retreat," a comedy, couple’s comedy. But with the writer’s strike, you can’t really develop it until the strike’s over, so we’ll see what happens with the strike. They already are talking to me about my availability and when another "Iron Man" might come out. So they’re feeling pretty good about it right now. So I’d love to do more of those.

Jon Favreau: Graphic novels? I don’t know. What’s good? The only one I like is "Groo" ("Groo the Wanderer" by Sergio Aragones). That’s one I would do. But no, graphic novels, no, I think I’ll stick to this one. It’s very hard to do a first one, then the sequels are easier, because you’ve already got your cast and you know the world and the tone.

Jon Favreau: Not that often. People say they want it, but they don’t want it. They don’t want it.

Jon Favreau: I do, sure, sure, yeah, I try.

Jon Favreau: I just listen to people speak about it. I like to expand myself and my understanding. The best myths and stories, as a movie maker, are biblical stories. Most stories and movies come from that common mythology, that sort of primordial mythology and the Old Testament is just chock full of that stuff.

"Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights -- Hollywood to the Heartland" opens in theaters on February 8th.