ComingSoon’s Tyler Treese spoke with Little Brother director Matt Spicer about the hilarious Netflix comedy movie starring John Cena and Eric André. Spicer discussed showing André’s tender side, some of the film’s funniest moments, and its use of Hoobastank. Little Brother is now streaming on Netflix.
“A famous real estate agent’s carefully curated world is upended when his eccentric ‘little brother’ unexpectedly reappears,” says the official logline.
Tyler Treese: What really interested me about Little Brother was that I really liked how you got this really tender side from Eric Andre. In between all the wildness, there’s very much a sweetness to his character. How was it working with Eric to get these kinds of therapist moments out of them? They’re a real fun change of pace.
Matt Spicer: I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but Eric is genuinely a really sweet, soulful guy in real life. And so I think a lot of that is just really like who he really is, you know? He’s multifaceted. He has that silly, fun, crazy side, but he’s also like, he’s really sweet.
My dog actually passed away while we were making this movie. And like Eric would send me like the nicest text, and he sent me flowers, and he was just really like there for me and emotionally supportive in a way that I was like, “Man, this guy’s like a really sweet guy and a good friend.”
So, I’m excited. It’s always great as a director when you can sort of show another side of an actor that people maybe aren’t familiar with. So it makes me happy when people say that. I think it’s a great compliment. And he’s such a talented actor. I hope that you know, people watch this movie, and he gets to show his range and gets maybe more opportunities off of it.
There’s an incredible description about eating “the Flavor Cave”, which is a quote that’s gonna live rent-free in my head forever. Was that always in the script? Was it improvised? Talk me through that terrible description because it’s also great.
That scene, believe it or not, was scripted. There were some jokes at the end, which I think you see a little bit of that in the outtakes. I mean, that’s the thing with Eric, there’s always gonna be improvs and stuff, so we used as much as we could in the outtakes.
But like, there’s so much, there’s hours of stuff that just we just can’t, there’s no place for it. Unfortunately, the days of DVD, you know, special features or deleted scenes are long gone, but he’s always got 10 alternate versions of things.
That scene, specifically, was actually pretty tightly scripted, and not everyone can deliver lines like that. It takes a really skilled actor to talk about getting your flavor cave tongued in that special way. So he just has a talent, what can I say?
Speaking of Little Brother outtakes, Eric Andre peeing in the car was so funny, just seeing you guys ask him to aim it. Talk me through just the apparatus in the filming of that scene.
Well, that scene was interesting because it was really like, how much of this can we show in a Netflix movie? I like to feel like we push them slightly beyond their comfort zone, which is kind of where you want to be, but we didn’t show maybe as much as there was a lot of conversation about how much of the pissing can we show. Where does it sort of lose people? People really have a strong reaction to that moment, one way or another.
But I think we found the right balance. It’s actually funny. I mean, it’s literally we had a fake penis for Eric that had like a tube with like a hose kind of running through it that he could manipulate.
So, just out of frame, there is like a sort of rubber penis that he sort of aimed to be able to spray everywhere. And it’s the same penis that you see for a split second in the catheter scene. They called it, they had a name for it, and I can’t remember, it was like “The General” or something, I can’t remember what it was [laughs]. They had a nickname for it so that we didn’t have to constantly say, “Where’s the penis?” We could just say, “Where’s the general?” But anyway… You asked, so that’s the answer [laughs.
I had that Hoobastank album growing up, and I knew every line of that song that’s referenced in the movie. How did you land on Hoobastank? Is that your choice?
That was like a happy accident because we were trying to figure out how to wrap up that storyline. And I think there was this magical moment, I don’t honestly remember where it came from, but it was that the lyrics really line up with what Sherry wants to say in that moment to Eric.
So it was just kind of this happy thing that we were like, “What if she just sings the song?” You think it’s just gonna be this heartfelt thing. And then hopefully that you, you know, as you’re watching it, you realize, oh my God, she’s quoting Hoobastank. It just sort of just felt like the right ending to their love story, that it would end with a Hoobastank kinda of karaoke moment. After all these kinds of really, actually emotional scenes, it felt like the right kind of humorous, but also emotionally satisfying ending for them.
Thanks to Matt Spicer for taking the time to talk about Little Brother.