Interview With Luke Del Tredici, Writer Of ARIZONA And BROOKLYN NINE-NINE

Luke Del Tredici has been an eminent comedy writer and producer for nearly two decades. He’s written for HBO’s Bored To Death, 30 Rock, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, all of which he also served as producer for. It would be an understatement to say that Del Tredici has worked with talented comedians and comedic actors.

Andy Samberg, Terry Crews, Sarah Silverman, Tracy Morgan, Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Jason Sudeikis, Hannibal Buress, Will Forte, Jim Gaffigan, Parker Posey, Samantha Bee, Jimmy Fallon, Donald Glover, Kristen Wiig, Patton Oswalt, Mary Steenburgen, Zoe Kazan, Jenny Slate, Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis, and Jason Schwartzman, are merely several of the names that come to mind when associated with him.

Now, Del Tredici can add Danny McBride and Seth Rogen to his growing list of funny people that he has had the opportunity to write for. The two star in Arizona, Del Tredici‘s third screenwriting endeavor in the area of feature film, and his first to be released theatrically.

Arizona tells the tale of an average Joe who falls victim to the housing crisis of 2008. McBride plays Sonny, a man who can’t afford his mortgage after it goes underwater. Instead of filing for bankruptcy, he takes his anger out on his real estate agents (Rogen and Rosemarie DeWitt) in a series of increasingly frightening encounters. Set in an eerie, brand-new, exurban ghost town community against the backdrop of the Great Recession, this horror-comedy is full of surprises, twists, and turns.

On the cusp of Arizona‘s release, I had the chance to chat with Del Tredici about the ten-year process of getting the film into production, the fragility and elusiveness of the American Dream, McBride‘s raw talent and collaborative nature, Del Tredici‘s style and preference of comedy, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and much more!

Alex Arabian of Film Inquiry: Congrats on your new film, Arizona. I really enjoyed it.

Luke Del Tredici: Oh, great. I’m glad you did. Thank you. It’s so crazy that it’s coming out. I wrote it a decade ago.

Yeah [laughter]. I figured. I was going to ask you, what were you doing during the thick of the housing crisis?

Luke Del Tredici: It didn’t touch me, personally. I was too young and poor to have any property [laughter]. But obviously it felt like a real shift, to me, in terms of this country. At the time, it felt like a little ding to the American Dream, and that’s sort of what the movie was about, a little bit. And I wrote it in whatever, 2009, 2010, and then it sat around forever, and I just kept thinking, like, “Oh, it’s becoming less and less important and relevant and no one will want to see this anymore,” because we sort of climbed out of that hole a little bit, and I kept thinking, “At some point, this is not going to be relevant anymore.”

And then, I sort of feel like in the post-Trump era, it’s actually weirdly [relevant]. So, some things are a little different about the movie, but it feels very relevant to me; it captures the way that the seeds of the time and moment were sowed in that decline, and that sort of collapse of a certain group of peoples’ expectations for their lives and for what being an American meant.

What drew you to revisit the subject matter in the genre of horror/comedy?

Luke Del Tredici: Honestly, I remember just the first time I read an article about these sort of new-built ghost towns, these exurban ghost towns out way in the desert outside Phoenix in Maricopa County. They had built these brand-new developments way out in the desert surrounded by nothing but harsh nature. And just as they finished up, the bottom fell out of everything and they couldn’t sell them.

Only a few people had moved in, and then those people were immediately so underwater on their homes and couldn’t get out, and people [were] just living in ghost towns. But brand-spanking-new ghost towns. And it was so evocative, the isolation felt so right for horror to me that it was hard not to write it. And then, I’m just a comedy writer by nature, so I always want things to be a little bit funny, so it ended up kind of funny.

How did this project find its director in Jonathan Watson?

Luke Del Tredici: Well, when I wrote it initially, I didn’t know Danny McBride at all, but I sort of wrote it with him in mind. But I think I had just begun watching Eastbound and Down, which was on the air still back then and I loved it so much. And that’s another show that I think works as sort of a great, broad comedy and also a grand, American tragedy. And I loved it so much and I kind of wrote this part with Danny in mind just to have his voice in my head.

And then I got it to Danny, magically, and he really responded to it. And when we initially were going to do it, it seemed like Danny might direct it himself. He had gone to school to be a director. And we worked on the script a little, and then – it happens with every movie – it just fell apart. Danny had a billion other projects, and we could never get the timing right and the cast quite right, and it sort of just fell apart.

And then, oh, whatever, eight years later, I got a call from those guys at Rough House, at Danny’s company, to come in for a meeting, and I kept in contact with them. And they said that Danny had a window between his various big-budget projects to shoot a movie. And he really wanted to do Arizona and to be in it. And as we talked about directors, they had Jonathan, who was the guy who has worked with them as an AD and I think he’d been directing a lot on Vice Principals, and was a guy they really loved and trusted and he’d worked a lot.

He not only worked with them on their specific TV shows, he’d worked a lot with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, I think, doing some similar genre-bending comedy stuff. And I met with Jonathan and he seemed great, and really, I thought, understood the script and the material, and he had Danny’s trust, and that was really important. And so we made a movie with him.

Fantastic. And I assume that’s where Seth Rogen came into play?

Luke Del Tredici: Yeah. He obviously knows Danny and Jonathan, and he came down, it might have even been the first day of shooting, to Albuquerque as a favor, I’m sure, to do it for much less money than he’s normally used to getting just to come and hang out with those guys.

And how were Rosemarie DeWitt and Luke Wilson cast in Arizona?

Luke Del Tredici: I think just through the normal casting. I’m the writer, so I wasn’t a big part of a lot of these conversations. They would keep me updated on casting, but at one point they called to tell me. I was so excited. I love Rosemarie. I think she’s so good. I’ve always been a huge fan, and I thought she was terrific in the movie and really does a great job of grounding it and counterbalancing some of the broader comedy elements with just such a strong, real, honest performance.

And Luke Wilson is just terrific in it. And I think a lot of actors are a big fan of Danny. I think everyone’s excited to come work with Danny, because he’s such a great presence and such a fun person to be in scenes with.

You balance out the macabre with gut-busting laughs in Arizona. At which point did you say “I’m gonna draw the line here not take it even further?”

Luke Del Tredici: It’s not really pushing the boundaries. There’s a smugness to a lot of dark comedies; it feels like a teenage smugness to me. Like, “Can you believe how naughty we’re being?” To me, I really like it, personally, when I watch movies and I’m surprised, when I don’t know what’s going to happen moment-to-moment, scene-to-scene; I don’t know how the story’s going to end.

And I love comedy, but one thing about comedy is obviously, you’re into the pure, pure silly comedy and it looks like a comedy and it feels like a comedy, and every scene has jokes, but the jokes become a little less surprising because you’re kind of waiting for them. And in the same way, if you’re watching a scary movie, the scares, the thrills are a little less surprising because you’re constantly primed for them. And what I really like is the idea of just keeping an audience on its toes.

They’re sort of settling in to a broad comedy [where] you have something really upsetting and dark happen and they’re like, “Okay, is this movie really dark? Is this upsetting?” Something really, really funny happens, then. That was just the goal, is to make something where people just wouldn’t know, wouldn’t feel comfortable. And that’s probably such a terrible thing to do to an audience, to make them feel uncomfortable. But it’s what I like, myself, so that was the goal.

It certainly keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat.

Luke Del Tredici: I don’t think we pulled any punches. I think, at some point, there were drafts that ended in a much darker way, in a much more upsetting way. And I think we all sort of settled on the idea that if the ride is dark enough, you can earn a happy ending, or somewhat happy ending, by having enough bad stuff happen throughout, and we didn’t need to prove how cynical we were by also having it end in a monstrously terrible way.

You’ve had the opportunity to write for some of the most gifted comedians in the industry. Does Danny McBride rank among the best to work with as a creator?

Luke Del Tredici: I don’t want to rank, obviously, people. But I think Danny is just incredible. I mean, he is such a unique performer. And, I think the biggest thing that Danny does that’s so incredible, and it’s clear every time you watch him onscreen, is you can write the most unlikable things for him. He could be such a dick, such a bad person, but you always understand that there’s this sadness underneath, this insecurity. And there’s just something human, always, no matter how badly he is behaving.

There’s this element of humanity that always shines through, and that’s an amazing thing, because as a comedy writer, you always want to write that behavior, but you also don’t want to turn an audience off. And Danny, you can give him anything and people will still kind of go on the journey with him because there’s always a little sympathy for Danny, I think. And it’s just amazing to watch. And he’s so funny. He’s so funny in person, he’s so funny on screen, he’s such a funny writer. It’s incredible.

I couldn’t agree more. I’m a big Brooklyn Nine-Nine fan. Congrats on NBC picking it up.

Luke Del Tredici: Oh, great. Thanks.

As an Executive Producer and Co-Executive producer on 110 episodes, a writer of seven episodes, and a director of one episode, “Chasing Amy,” how have you seen the show change over time?

Luke Del Tredici: Like most shows, we’ve gotten better. Shows are so interesting because you start writing them and you don’t know who the characters are, you don’t know who the actors are. I think it’s a thing that’s remarked on a lot about comedy, but it takes a little while to find the voice, exactly, and we’re just so much more confident as a staff, writing for these shows, writing for these characters. And we know them so much more.

They are such three-dimensional people now 100 episodes in. At the same time, the farther you get in, the more you know the characters, the more you just constantly bump up against the idea of, “We’ve done this story. We’ve done this story. We’ve done this story.” We’re a sitcom. We want to be a comfort food sitcom. You want to be a show that people tune in to every week, and enjoy spending time with the people they know. And that means not blowing up the world in a cableway, and killing off characters and changing it season to season.

There’s real value for the audience, and some degree of status quo, and so I think what we’ve tried to do as a staff is to find new ways to keep it fresh, which is try to take on some more serious issues, try to find episodes that are a little more formally inventive, try to find characters that we haven’t always told stories about, and really focus on them. But obviously, I think it’s still the same show, to some degree, we’re just a little better at it [laughter].

Adrian Pemento. You wrote that episode.

Luke Del Tredici: Yeah [laughter].

That character is one of my all-time favorites.

Luke Del Tredici: Oh, great.

Was he your creation?

Luke Del Tredici: No. Nothing’s my creation. We work as a group on everything. We all know Jason Mantzoukas from various things, and he was a fan of the show, and we knew we wanted to use him. And so we had the idea a season before, that if we used Jason, we would use him as a guy who had been deep undercover for decades and then was coming out, and lost his mind a little, it seemed like such a great role for him. And so when we finally got him for a block of episodes, I wrote the episode.

We knew Jason as a performer. We knew we were going to have him in that role. A lot of times, with television, you write a new role and you cast it two days before you’re shooting. Some of our biggest guest stars are people that we had no idea we were going to get until basically the week of filming began, too. It’s much easier to write when you know who the performers are going to be and you can hear their voices in your head. That’s one of the reasons that Pemento has always been so good, is we are able to craft it specifically for Jason.

It’s perfect casting.

Luke Del Tredici: Yeah, he’s so good.

What can you say about the upcoming season?

Luke Del Tredici: It’s not going to be a wild departure from what it’s been. I think it’s essentially what I said, which is, I think we’re trying to find new ways to keep it interesting while also keeping it the same. We’re just trying to, in small ways, find ways to take more risks and to be a little more daring, while also keeping the core of what the fans have loved about the show, and that people want to see, which is these characters they like spending time with.

And for you, personally, are there any exciting projects that you have on the horizon?

Luke Del Tredici: No. If I were to say there were something, it would never ever happen. Because they probably won’t happen anyway. So I don’t have anything set up right now. I’d say this season of Brooklyn is very exciting. It was very exciting to see the outpouring of fan love for the show when we got basically cancelled and saved. And that has really reinvigorated it; it’s real pathetic, but it’s great to know that people like what you do.

And I think everyone who works on the show over here is super excited about making this upcoming season because we’ve seen the impact that the show has on the people who like it.

I personally can’t wait. Luke, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to discuss Arizona and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I really appreciate it.

Luke Del Tredici: Sure. Thank you so much.

Film Inquiry would like to thank Luke Del Tredici for taking the time to speak with us.

Arizona opens theatrically and on VOD in the U.S. on August 24, 2018. For more information on its release, click here.