Written Interview: Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg (“Harold & Kumar”)

For all you Harold and Kumar fans, here’s an LAT interview with Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg who have written Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, and A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas along with the upcoming American Reunion. Here are some excerpts of their interview with Emily Rose:

E.R.: It’s not that often you see a Korean American and an Indian American leading a mainstream movie. When you wrote the script for the first movie, was there a fear that the studio would want to change the race of the characters?

H.S.: When we wrote the first script for “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” there hadn’t been a movie starring Asian Americans before unless it was a low budget movie specifically targeted for Asian Americans. It was going through our mind, “Oh, are they going to say, ‘This is really funny, but we can’t make it because they’re Asian’? If you just make one of them black or one of them white, then we can do it.’” I think for us, what we loved most about it was that they were characters that you hadn’t seen on the big screen before but exactly like you and totally relatable.

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E.R.: You worked on “American Reunion” while production for “Harold & Kumar Christmas” was going on. What’s the biggest difference between the two when it comes to writing for you?

J.H.: The difference between “Harold & Kumar” and “American Pie” is tone in a lot of ways. Both franchises are trying to be crowd-pleasers and get the big laughs, but in “American Pie,” you’re not going to go to the surreal places, you’re not going to ride the cheetah, you’re not going to have a baby doing drugs.

H.S.: It’s just grounded, and all the comedy in it comes from character, whereas in “Harold & Kumar,” the characters Harold and Kumar are grounded, but everything else around them gets more and more surreal as the movie goes on, and the comedy can come from anywhere. There’s no rules. So there’s a certain freedom and an awesomeness to writing a “Harold & Kumar” movie, but with “American Reunion,” you get this relatability that you probably wouldn’t get in the wild, crazy “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.”

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E.R.: Is there anything you feel is off-limits in your writing, or is everything fair game in a “nothing is sacred” approach?

H.S.: I think our goal is to make a big, broad audience really happy, and so something like getting a baby high -– I know that there’s some people that won’t like that, but we feel confident that enough people will like it. Sometimes I’ll say something, or Jon will say something, and I’ll be, “That crosses the line in terms of I just think people would be offended more than they’ll think it’s funny.”

J.H.: Believe it or not, we’ll be like, “Oh, that’s too low class.”

H.S.: There’s an art to stupid comedy. There’s an art to offensive comedy, and I think the key is it’s just gotta make you laugh. It can be a fart joke, or it can be some sort of racial joke or a religious joke. In the right context, they can be great. In the wrong context, they can be horrible. You have to be the arbiter.

For more of the interview, go here.

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