Enter the Funnyman

Three years ago, Danny McBride was just another unknown filmmaker living in Los Angeles struggling to make a name for himself. The closest the aspiring writer/director had come to cinema glory up to that point was playing the role of Bust-Ass in All the Real Girls, the second feature by arthouse director (and McBride's former film-school classmate) David Gordon Green (George Washington, Snow Angels).

Then came The Foot Fist Way, a no-budget comedy McBride made with two of his friends about a tae kwon do instructor named Fred Simmons (played by McBride), who lords over his small strip-mall dojo with the self-righteous, delusional bluster of the true bully, unmanning his students with his imposing girth, military crew cut, sleazy mustache, and casual verbal assaults ("If you were in prison," Simmons tells one diffident soul, "you'd be raped because you exude feminine qualities"). One rough cut and a successful Sundance Film Festival run later, and now suddenly McBride has all of Hollywood dialing his number, looking to capture some of that absurd comic swagger for themselves. Judd Apatow, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell: All the big names in comedy are putting McBride in their new movies – Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, even next year's Land of the Lost update.

The Chronicle recently sat down with McBride on the back patio of the Four Seasons Hotel, to find out how a man who never wanted to be an actor goes from anonymity to being the darling of the comedy world seemingly overnight.

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Austin Chronicle: You were in school to become a director, right? How did you end up an actor?

Danny McBride: I had studied directing and writing at the North Carolina School of the Arts with David Green, and he had an actor drop out on him right before he started production on All the Real Girls in 2002. I had written a lot with David, so he knew I knew his sensibilities and what he was going for with the Bust-Ass character. I was a cameraman out in Los Angeles at the time, and he called and asked if I'd come down and do All the Real Girls. I had never acted in anything before, except for our student films at school, but it turned out pretty good. Then one of my other school buddies, Jody Hill, he had seen All the Real Girls, and he wanted to put me in something he wanted to direct, so we started working on the script for The Foot Fist Way while working our day jobs in L.A. Next thing I know, Jody tells me: "I'm going down to North Carolina; I wanna shoot in the summer. Let's do it." I had sold two screenplays by then, so I was able to quit my day job and go down to North Carolina and just hole up there to make the movie.

AC: What was the writing process like? Did the character of Fred Simmons come before the storyline?

DM: Jody had taken an initial pass at his idea, which was initially on a much larger scale. The main character of Jody's first pass, I'd say, was the karate school. He had all these side stories for all these different students. When we actually looked at the budget, we decided we would have been crazy to bite off that much. We only had 17 days to shoot, so we decided to cut it down and just do one thing. So then me and [co-writer and fellow North Carolina School of the Arts classmate] Ben Best jumped on, and we went through it and did sort of a page-one rewrite, just focusing the whole thing on the instructor.

I think a lot of times when people think of comedies set in the martial-arts world, there are the typical gags you go for, where you're just making fun of karate with goofy moves and goofy "Kyaahs." But we just wanted to have a guy have a meltdown in this world, not to necessarily use tae kwon do as the comedy; tae kwon do is just the world [in which] this guy's meltdown takes place.

AC: What strikes me about the movie is that the protagonist is not a very likable guy, which is rare in comedies.

DM: That's one of the things we wanted to do with it. With the two scripts that I had sold earlier, it really left a bad taste in my mouth what these executives were saying, about how a main character has to be likable in order for people to follow his story. All these notions that there has to be this "likability factor": We didn't subscribe to that. If you can get the people into what this guy is trying to achieve, then people will want to follow his story. They're not gonna have to love him. It seems like a more interesting way to go, as opposed to your regular leading man. We didn't want to do something like Swingers, where you're just dealing with a slug who's lonely and heartbroken – the character you've seen a million times. We wanted to start off with somebody who, at first appearance, you're probably not gonna like, who doesn't seem like a good guy, but somehow you still find a way to identify with by the end.

AC: You didn't try to take this script to studios; you just decided to make it on your own?

DM: No, we really didn't want to have anyone trying to tell us what was gonna work and what wasn't. We really just wanted to experiment with it on our own. If we were gonna fail, we would do it on our own terms. If we had taken it to a studio, I don't think it would have ever gotten through the development process.

AC: So you funded it yourselves?

DM: We did. It was all funded on credit cards.

AC: What happened after the movie premiered at Sundance in 2006?

DM: At Sundance, we ended up getting UK distribution but no U.S. distribution. Then [talent agency] CAA came on board, and they really believed in the movie, so they started passing it around and setting up screenings. And it started getting a kind of cult following in Los Angeles. I think it was just one of those things where it started getting passed around, and it became an underground mixtape kind of thing. We had no idea, though. I was living in Virginia, so I didn't realize it. And then next thing we knew we got a call from Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, saying they wanted to meet with us. And we couldn't believe they had even seen the movie, much less that they actually wanted to do something with it. We were blown away.

They had their production company, Gary Sanchez [Productions], which was just getting started through Paramount Vantage, and they wanted to not only do their own projects but also break new talent and find smaller projects that they could use their name to try [to] add some legitimacy to, so those projects could find an audience. And they wanted this to be the first film they did.

AC: Is the understanding with Ferrell and McKay that it's your movie and you do it as you want?

DM: Will was telling me the first time he met with Paramount about Foot Fist, they said, "Yeah, we think this movie would be great ... to redo with you [Ferrell] in it." And Ferrell and McKay refused. They wanted the movie to go out as is. And Paramount stuck to that; they didn't make us change anything.

AC: So, once you hooked up with those guys and they liked your movie, for you, as an actor, has it just been falling dominoes ever since? You're doing Pineapple Express with Seth Rogen and Tropic Thunder with Ben Stiller and Jack Black ...

DM: Yeah, it was all from Foot Fist. It's weird because I wasn't trying to do anything with acting; I don't have a head shot or anything (laughs). And then all of a sudden, I was getting all these calls to go do these different roles. I met Ben Stiller on the set of The Heartbreak Kid, and it turned out he was a big fan of the movie, so when we were shooting, he asked if I was interested in doing Tropic Thunder, which was going to be shooting the next summer. So you just find yourself in this really weird position with all these people that you've admired since you were a kid, and they're suddenly talking to you about the stuff you're doing and how much they love it. It's pretty wild. Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, when they were on the set of Knocked Up, they had gotten a hold of Foot Fist, and they were always watching it and quoting it and doing scenes from it. So we met all those guys, and we became good friends. It's crazy.

AC: There are a million actors out there who are going to hate you for your success. I mean, you don't even have a head shot.

DM: (Laughs) Yeah, all my friends from L.A. who are actors, they won't hang with me anymore.

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The Foot Fist Way opens in Austin this Friday. See Film Listings for review and showtimes.