Amy Poehler and Tina Fey Talk Improv, Female-Led Films, and Taking On STAR WARS With SISTERS

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to see the new Amy Poehler/Tina Fey comedy Sisters, which hits theaters this Friday as counter-programming to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. (They've already released a funny video that parodies Star Wars' Comic-Con featurette.) I'm not allowed to tell you my thoughts about the film until Wednesday, but I did get to speak with some of the cast and crew at the film's press conference during the junket, and I can tell you all about that.

Poehler and Fey were joined by co-stars Maya Rudolph and Ike Barinholtz in one panel, and then we were also able to speak with writer Paula Pell (Saturday Night Live) and director Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect) about everything from why you should see Sisters and Star Wars to the improv on the set and much more.

On why audiences should see this movie:

Ike: There’s like seven Star Wars — there’s only one Sisters.

Tina: That’s a good point.

Amy: Well, we have a hashtag.

Tina: Our social media campaign is #YouCanSeeThemBoth. It’s a holiday weekend time.

On Tina and Amy sort of playing against type in these roles:

Tina: I think when Paula started writing the script, she may have pictured us in the opposite roles, and I tried to put my producer hat on — which is a beautiful hat, the front is like a baseball hat and the back is all feathers (Everyone laughs) — and I thought, ‘When you have a part for someone who’s supposed to be tightly wound in the beginning and then go crazy, you cast the person who’s better at going crazy.’ And I just knew that Amy would play the back half of that better, and so what I tried to do is play it like, ‘I was once the greatest ice skater in the world, but now I’m in this wheelchair.’ The hottest girl who used to party really hard, but you will never see me do any of it.

Amy: Somebody asked me today if it was my real legs that burst through the ceiling, and it was such a party, I don’t even fuckin’ remember. (Everyone laughs)

On Tina and Amy's origin story:

Ike: Are you familiar with Inside Vladimir?

Amy: That was an improv team we were on in Chicago.

Tina: The only two women on an improv team together, and I think that’s where [we realized our comedy together] started to work, actually.

Amy: Yeah, I do. I think we learned pretty quickly that we liked the same things, we liked speaking the same way. So much of comedy in the beginning is finding your tribe because no one is very experienced, no one feels funny. But you end up searching out people who like the same things as you or that get you, so I think that was a pretty quick first dating period, and today we’re getting married.

Was there a sense of SNL camaraderie on a set like this, that included alums and current members like the three female leads, Rachel Dratch, Bobby Moynihan, Kate McKinnon, and Chris Parnell?

Amy: There’s a bit of a shared vocabulary and I would go even farther than just SNL. I would say that in the improv community, it’s like a well-run emergency room. If you see a well-run emergency room, there’s not a lot of freaking out because you just don’t have the time. You’re not taking up a lot of time talking about how something isn’t going to work, or you can’t do it. You just kind of do the best you can in the moment and wish for the best, and you’re hopefully around people who are more skilled and better than you at what they do. So I think that is just a tonal thing that we’re all used to. Also, we like working and feeding off of each other. There’s not a lot of ball hogs on our team. That was really fun. We all took great pleasure in other people’s joke. There wasn’t a lot of feeling like we were competing. We were always feeding each other ideas and thoughts and I think that always makes for, certainly, a better experience, but oftentimes a funnier film.

I know Ike Barinholtz from his role as the crazy (and crazily funny) Morgan Tookers on The Mindy Project, but I wondered what it was like for him to play a regular guy/love interest this time around:

Ike: It was nice to not play an indigent, perverted loser. To play a nice man that you would be proud to bring home to your family was a real change for me, and it’s something that I would like to do more.

Amy: We just can’t find the roles. (Everyone laughs) There’s nothin’ out there.

Ike: I’m waiting for Sisters 2. When is Sisters 2 happening?

Amy: It’s already in the can.

Tina (at the same time as Amy): We shot it already. (Everyone laughs)

Ike: It’s in the can?! Who’s playing James?

Tina: Ki Hong Lee.

Ike: Keanu Reeves?

Tina: Ki Hong Lee. From The Maze Runner. (Everyone laughs)

Maya: That bleep-blorp guy from the new Star Wars.

A few years ago, it seemed like there was a bunch of ridiculous talk that women couldn’t lead a comedy, but it seems like that mentality has shifted in recent years. What’s it been like to see that change?

Tina: I think a lot of people who were saying that died. (Everyone laughs)

Amy: It’s really exciting always when new voices become commercial, because it means that there’s an audience for them. I still think that stories told through a female perspective are really interesting because there just haven’t been as many so we aren’t treading the same stuff. There’s still a spectrum of stories told through the lens of female characters that are still really interesting because frankly they’re just newer and untapped. So we’re excited to tap dat. (Everyone laughs) To tap dat ass…pect of cinema.

On Maya's working relationship with Tina and Amy:

Maya: Truthfully, to answer your question, I feel and have always felt very spoiled in that I work with the funniest people I could have ever met in my life. I am so lucky to have been part of this little weird family that we have. I think also because we’re ladies — and we’re not just ladies, we’re fuckin’ smart and shit, and take care of each other, and have decent lives, and have our heads screwed on straight. We were all going through kind of similar things together and looking out for each other. So we have this bond that is insanely unbreakable. I like to say that we were in the shit together, the comedy war together. I feel like that’s for me, the end-all be-all is being with your family like that. I love other jobs and they’re great, but when you get to do it with people who’s voices that you know, you have a shorthand, that’s just delicious cake.

Amy: It’s interesting that this — I’m just making this really obvious connection — the film is about dealing with people who knew you when, and the good and bad of that because people have an idea of you, can you change the story about yourself or are you just stuck always being this kind of person? And we all worked with people that we’ve known for a really long time. It was really easy to play old friends, obviously, because we all are, but it was cool to watch all of us and hopefully in the future until the robots kill us, to see the different versions of us as we grow and change.

Maya: That’s coming in January, right? The robots?

Is there a litmus test for knowing when a joke is working really well?

Jason: If the crew starts to snicker, that’s good. Paula has a great laugh, actually. She’s my litmus test because she has an amazing laugh and my monitor is far from hers, so if we make her laugh…

Paula: We started the movie with one video village area [a grouping of monitors where producers and the director can watch footage that was just shot played back], but very quickly it was announced that he was moving to his own video village because we were tending to be a little obnoxious, goofing around and cracking each other up.

Jason: You have these twelve hilarious people in the movie in that house all the time, so there was a whole comedy club going on and I was not able to concentrate because it was too funny. So I went and sat by myself.

Paula: It was a parade of hams. And he had work to do that he was actually being paid for — as we were, but we were just going to make sure it was fun. A lot of cackling.

How much improv was done on set?

Jason: It starts with Paula’s amazing script. It’s her voice that’s the key to all of the humor. So we would always do a pass that was the script as written, but Paula has a process for alts, for alt jokes that she’s done on other movies. Do you want to talk about that?

Paula: Yeah, I started doing it on Bridesmaids and I’ve done it on a number of other movies when I’m on a set. Sometimes they’ll have an extra writer come in to just punch up jokes on the set and I started putting them on Post-It Notes because I was afraid to be too intrusive with the director in terms of the real estate of time and coming in and being in his space when he’s trying to talk to the actors. So I would write down little alternative lines or little alternative ideas and slip it to him as this little piece of candy and he could decide if he wanted to use it, there wasn’t a big pressure to it. And that worked so well that I started doing that on other movies. So when we did it with Jason, we had just a whole Post-It Note thing set up…

Jason: She would give me these incredible jokes and I’d try to figure out which ones to do, and then give them quietly, secretly, to each actor so the other actor didn’t know what was going to happen. Oftentimes a director might call out the joke, and then everyone’s already heard it. You want it to be fresh. And then, to answer your question, there was the Post-It Note alt process, and then because they’re all improv comedians, we would have certain runs where it was, ’These are the ones where you can hit the ball anywhere you want to hit it.’

Paula: Yeah, you’re just winding them up and watching them go, because they’re a masterclass in improv, those ladies and those guys.

Jason: It was always trying to keep the ball in the air.

Paula: The great thing about that later when Jason was editing, was he was able to try many different options with different jokes. It’s all about combinations, and some joke that is a certain flavor might not mix with another one. So he was like this amazing culinary genius putting it all together with the right combination.

Jason: The first cut was all of the jokes, and it was three hours and fifteen minutes long.

Was it tough working with Tina and Amy because they're so close?

Jason: Sometimes they’re just going and being so funny, you just have to find time to get a word in edgewise.

Paula: Yeah, they are such hard workers and so professional in terms of, they know when they’re supposed to be working and they know when it’s OK not to be working. Which I love, because sometimes you get comedy people and they’re doing a bit — including me — and you’ll be doing a bit on something and making people laugh, and time is money on a movie set, obviously, and the last couple of days of a movie shoot, you’re desperately trying to get every single last page in shot, so I learned to appreciate that and understand that you need to shut shit down when you’re using people’s time and money. They’re such pros. They find a way to seem like they’re completely goofing around and having fun all day, but they get everything done. They should really try to pursue it professionally because they’re good at it.

Jason: They also have worked on a TV schedule so many times that they know about keeping moving, so it actually makes it fun and easy.

Paula: The endless days of single camera shooting that just happens where it’s like, ‘We’re gonna use every bit of time we can, but still have fun.’

The premise of the movie involves two sisters returning to their childhood home before their parents sell it and throwing one last big party like they used to do in high school. Was there ever a discussion about whether or not that was actually more sad than funny?

Jason: We talked about that. At what point is it…is it sad that people feel like they need to revisit this? And that’s why we tried to earn each reason, which is really everybody who comes to the party, something about their current life was defined by what happened to them in high school. The person that they married, or the role it ended up playing in their family, or something. So we tried to make it as real and believable so that we could hopefully make it feel not sad, and I think we were able to accomplish that. There is a point at which maybe you go, ‘Should they be doing this?’ but hopefully we earn the fact that they want to revisit it. Also, sometimes when you’re in your forties, you need a good party. Leave the kids at home, have an extra drink, cut loose, you’ve gotta let some steam out. So this was just an extra step.

Paula: The thematic thing of your childhood home symbolizes where you were shaped. When you leave it, you’re a completed object. I remember my mom saying one day when she was in her sixties, ‘The weird thing about age is you don’t ever feel like the age you are.’ You don’t understand that you’re in your sixties, because in your body you don’t feel it — you might feel it physically, but emotionally, it’s like, ‘Oh, I have tons that I still want to do or I want to grow, or I didn’t do this or I didn’t do that.’ So we kind of tapped into that, I think. In terms of the party thing, I’m not saying I don’t drink, because I will drink and get a little good buzz on, but if I ever do like an old school — with my nieces or something — where I get old school hungover the next day, I will laugh because I hate it, I hate the feeling of being hungover, but I also had so much fun the night before. I’ll be like, ‘OK, now I remember why I used to do this all the time.’

Sisters opens in theaters on December 18th. Remember — #YouCanSeeThemBoth.