Rainn Wilson Interview, The Rocker

MoviesOnline had the pleasure of sitting down with Rainn Wilson at the Los Angeles press day for his new film, “The Rocker,” directed by Peter Cattaneo. In this rockin’ mix of physical comedy, heart, and garage band/power rock/heavy metal music, “The Office’s” Rainn Wilson trades his paper company desk job for rock ‘n roll fame, taking on the role of a big, sweaty, out-of-control – and sometimes naked – drummer who gets a second chance at rock superstardom thanks to YouTube. He’s joined by Christina Applegate (“Anchorman: The Legend of Ron  Burgundy”), Jeff Garlin (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”), Josh Gad (“21”), pop star Teddy Geiger and Emma Stone (“Superbad”).

Rainn Wilson is a fabulous guy and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us:

MoviesOnline: What was your rock star fantasy?

RAINN WILSON: My rock star fantasy was…you know, one thing I love about metal is just the sheer showmanship. When I grew up, when I was a kid, I discovered Queen when I was like 12 years old and I just loved Freddie Mercury and just that kind of balls out show performance of rock and roll. In every coming decade, rock and roll starts to get very serious and navel gazing and kind of self serious and every once and a while it kind of needs a kick in the pants. And then it goes too far and it needs to kind of get serious again. I mean, seriously, the hair metal things was a little bit much.

MoviesOnline: Are you into any of those bands now?

RAINN WILSON: I wasn’t. You know I skipped that. I loved classic metal and I grew up listening to a lot of classic rock and I loved AC/DC and Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, but as soon as it started to get girly, as soon as they were wearing women’s blouses and eye liner and mascara, guy liner I call it, as soon as it went there, then it kind of lost me and I was kind of more going for The Clash and Elvis Costello and some other more punk stuff.

MoviesOnline: Was your performance more inspired when you were drumming in the nude?

RAINN WILSON: [laughs] Well, anytime I can show my body to comedic effect. My body has been making women laugh for the last 20 years and I’m happy to continue to oblige.

MoviesOnline: Like you did last night on the MTV Movie Awards?

RAINN WILSON: Yes, anytime I can.

MoviesOnline: How tough was it to learn drumming?

RAINN WILSON: How tough was it to learn drumming? I took drum lessons with this guy named Stuart Johnson who’s been in a lot of bands and we got to work for a couple of weeks before I went up to Toronto and really, he was just playing me like Zeppelin and White Stripes and a lot of real basic drum beats. So we worked on a lot of basic drumming, but then he also really coached me on the specifics of heavy metal drumming which is a whole art form to itself.

MoviesOnline: Did you also watch any old videos?

RAINN WILSON: There was a lot of YouTube videos. Yeah, we had the computer out there in the garage where the drum set was and we would check out Poison or Rat or Cinderella or any of the bands and look at what the drummers are doing. So it was a lot of stick tricks, a lot of that. The metal drummers are all about getting the audience involved and kicking ass with the audience, you know, getting them involved and into the music and pumping them up and stuff like that.

MoviesOnline: Did you play Guitar Hero at all or anything like that or any of the video games?

RAINN WILSON: You know, that’s kind of passing by although we played it in the movie a little bit – Rock Band – but I haven’t really done so much of that. It’s hard.

MoviesOnline: Did you go to any live concerts for inspiration?

RAINN WILSON: Yeah, we went to see Rush. There weren’t any really metal bands playing at the time when we were shooting in Toronto. We certainly didn’t have time. We were shooting 6 days a week, but we went to play with Rush and got to hang out with Neil Pierce and got to actually play his drum set. That was a pretty rare privilege.

MoviesOnline: Did you base it on any rock star or story?

RAINN WILSON: No, you know it’s just his own character. It’s not so much about the rock star. The movie is really a coming-of-age story. The way I thought of it, it’s a coming-of-age story for this guy who’s 40 years old when he finally gets to grow up, so it was really about the character of Fish. But, you know, all that drumming really informed the character because there’s something about a drummer that they just pound on something first and ask questions later. There’s a kind of an idiocy to the rock drummer and there kind of has to be. They’re just a big baboon in the corner pounding on things. So, that and the wig really informed who this guy was.

MoviesOnline: Did you have any input into how you looked? You must have had something to do with that?

RAINN WILSON: Yeah, absolutely. We talked about it a lot. For a while I was fighting to have a moustache and we talked about whether he should have short hair and how long he should wear the ponytail. We really wanted that one thing which is when he starts to rock out, he takes the ponytail and lets the hair come down literally. And that’s kind of when the movie starts, when he get to play prom and he literally lets his hair down and shakes it out in the hallway. That’s when the movie kind of kicks into gear and that’s kind of the metaphor.

MoviesOnline: How many of the stunts did you do on your own?

RAINN WILSON: I think I did most all of them.

MoviesOnline: You got hit in the head a lot.

RAINN WILSON: Yeah, I did. In the knee, in the crouch, a lot.

MoviesOnline: Any injuries?

RAINN WILSON: I think the tumbling into the drum set backwards was a stunt guy. I think that was about it.

MoviesOnline: Wasn’t that you on top of the car?

RAINN WILSON: Oh yeah, that was me. That was me. I was strapped to the top of a van driving around, swerving around downtown Toronto at 4 in the morning for hours -- it was cold -- and sticking the drum sticks in and climbing up swerving, but I was strapped on. It was pretty crazy.

MoviesOnline: Did Peter give you a lot of latitude to find your character?

RAINN WILSON: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Peter is very collaborative. He’s really an ‘on story’ director. He’s very much like ‘we have to make sure that we’re telling the story here and making it clear about who Fish is and what he wants here and where he’s going.’ But within that he gave a lot of latitude. I could always improvise and go off script and have fun with it.

MoviesOnline: Is there going to be a sequel?

RAINN WILSON: Definitely. [joking] This is going to be called Transformers 2.

MoviesOnline: Speaking of which, you’re playing a professor in that?

RAINN WILSON: I am. Yes.

MoviesOnline: What’s the character like?

RAINN WILSON: I’m going to be playing a robot who doesn’t turn into a car. He turns into a college professor. He decides to live a life in quiet academia.

MoviesOnline: Being serious for a second, did you…

[Laughter]

RAINN WILSON: [laughs] How did you know? This coming from a guy with two unicorns humping on his T shirt… [Note: Rainn is teasing one of the journalists at our press table who’s wearing a very funny T-shirt]

“The Rocker” opens in theaters on August 1st.