Written Interview: Nicholas Stoller (“The Muppets”)

Peter Sciretta at Slash Film has an interview with Nicholas Stoller who co-wrote the screenplay for the upcoming movie The Muppets with Jason Segel, one of the stars of the movie. Here are some excerpts with Stoller whose other writing credits include Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him To The Greek:

Question: You’ve been working on this with Jason for awhile. What’s it like for you… the fact that it is filming right now?

Nicholas: It’s awkward, because I have to be a little bit quiet, because I don’t want them to overhear…No, it’s incredible. We’ve worked on this for about two years. I always go into, especially writing stuff, assuming it’s not going to happen because it’s so hard to get projects going. We were both such huge fans, obviously, of the Muppets. They were like the first kind of…I call them the gateway drug to comedy, because it’s like the first thing that you see that you’re like, “I have to do comedy.” So the fact that the first time I wrote Kermit, I couldn’t believe I was getting to write his dialogue. And when they actually green-lit it, it was really a dream come true.

Question: Did any of your dialogue for that original script make it to the final draft?

Nicholas: I think so. We really very quickly…Jason called me…I’m sure he told you guys this story about he had a general meeting with Disney. They asked him what they had that he might be interested in. He said Muppets. Then he called me, and within a few days we kinda mapped out a huge chunk of the story. A lot of the script has changed; we’ve done a lot of drafts since then, but the very central idea of the movie has remained the same.

Question: Did you go back to the original films, the show? Did you get any ideas off of those? And also, the tone of the original films there’s a lot of them acknowledging that they are in a movie. Is that the tone you wanted to bring to this as well?

Nicholas: Yeah, we wanted to do a complete return to those first movies and to The Muppet Show. I mean it’s why I’m drinking a Tab; it’s of the era. So yeah, that was definitely our goal. From the beginning we wanted to have that tone. When you watch The Muppet Movie, it hasn’t aged at all. It could have been made yesterday. It feels like an episode of The Simpsons in a weird way, without any cynicism. I would say that’s the only difference. It’s pretty amazing. Most things from 1980 feel like they’re from 1980. [laughs] It just doesn’t. It feels really present. So we really wanted to do that and be really self-referential. But also have that heart and that sweetness that those original movies had.

For more of the interview, go here.