Nicholas Stoller has no deep-seated prejudice against comedy sequels. It was always something he’d consider doing if one of his prior films — Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek, or The Five-Year Engagement — had warranted such a thing. With the overwhelming success of 2014’s Neighbors, it’s not a huge surprise that we now have a sequel, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising. And Stoller was game! And then he found out just how hard it was to make a comedy sequel.
As Seth Rogen echoed, the brain trust behind Neighbors 2 wasn’t entirely sure they could make a funnier movie, but they knew they could at least put more thought into it. And the result is a (somewhat surprisingly) socially conscious movie that addresses gay marriage, sexism and even Black Lives Matter.
In this sequel, Mac (Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne) are trying to sell their house when a noisy sorority movies in next door. The difference from the first is, as Stoller explains ahead, the fraternity’s goal from the first movie is stupid, this sorority – formed in an effort to escape sexist fraternities, with Teddy (Zac Efron), who is now kind of a sad sack, caught in the middle – is noble. Which makes it a lot harder to do comedy. Ahead, Stoller explains why Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is the most difficult movie he’s ever made.
One of my favorite things is, in 2012, at a party for The Five-Year Engagement, your parents thought my friend was Jason Segel.
[Laughs] That’s so funny. My parents really meet everyone at those things. It’s a little bit of a nightmare.
But that’s nice, right?
For them! Not for me. All the actors after are like, “I talked to your parents.”
When I saw Neighbors 2, I was ready for some laughs. I was not ready for social consciousness.
Oh, good! Yeah, it’s got a message.
With the people involved, I was expecting it to be smart, but not the type of movie to cover feminism, gay marriage and Black Lives Matter.
Yeah, it’s kind of totally hidden, because you can’t market that aspect of it. So I’m fascinated to see how it’s going to unroll as it’s released into the world. I mean, we wanted to make sure this movie had a reason to exist, not just because the first one did well. And we worked really hard on making sure it had a point. I have an eight-year-old daughter and a three-year-old daughter, and this is a movie, when they are a little older, I’m proud to show them. It’s something that’s very empowering and, I think, accurate.
Were you hesitant to do a comedy sequel?
I always thought to myself, if I ever have a movie that’s successful enough to have a sequel, I’m going to do the sequel. I’m not someone who is precious. And I need to find my emotional way in and make sure it’s great, but it’s such a rarity to make one movie that does well enough that people want to see another one.
Right, but you also want to avoid the Hangover 2-type backlash.
Yeah, exactly.
It’s very different than Gremlins 2, but it is also a statement on the first movie, like Gremlins 2.
I love Gremlins 2. Have you seen the Key and Peele sketch about Gremlins 2?
I have.
It’s an amazing sketch.
I now have to link to it when I write this up.
Oh, you have to. To me, the sequels I looked at and tried to emulate were the Toy Story movies. Those movies have the same characters and have the same themes, but each one is a different story and is the next evolution of those characters’ emotional lives. Oh, I’ll also say, my theory about “I’ll do a sequel if one of my movies is successful enough” was done before I had done a sequel. This is the hardest movie I’ve ever done.
I’m not shocked by that.
It was really, really hard creatively. There’s no “gossip,” it was just the creative aspect because both Seth and I wanted it to be awesome. I’m proud of all the movies I’ve made and I wanted this to not suck.
What was difficult?
Having not done a sequel, I thought it was like the second episode of a television show. It’s not. It’s a completely different genre in a way I didn’t really understand. And none of us had done a sequel before, so we were all learning as we went along.
There are jokes about how you can’t make jokes anymore that the first movie made only two years ago.
We also had so many jokes in the movie that referred to the first movie. Not like self-aware, but were callbacks of the first movie. And the audience could not give a shit, so we cut those out.
What’s an example?
In our reshoots, Seth had a thing where he went, “Delta Psi!,” after he hugs Zac. And Zac says, “You can’t say that, you’re not my brother. I mean, you’re my brother, but you’re not my brother.” It really made us laugh. The audience was like, “We don’t remember that, we don’t know what Delta Psi is, we don’t care, we are in this movie.” And we knew we couldn’t repeat jokes, but I think we found a new twist on the airbag thing. And we shot a lot more pranks, but the audience was just done with that sequence.
And the rivalry with the sorority is a very different dynamic.
In the first movie, the guys’ goal is stupid, which makes it easier to make it funny. In this one, the women’s goal is an honorable goal, which makes it a little bit harder to make it funny – because as an audience member, you’re rooting for them to succeed.
And we find out Dave Franco’s character, Pete, is gay. There are no gay panic jokes.
On the first movie, during the junket, a reporter asked me why I’ve never had a gay character in any of my movies, and I said, “I don’t know. That’s bad. I should have.” And there’s so much homoerotic stuff in the first one, it literally makes sense that Pete would be gay. It doesn’t feel like a joke.
Something like that can easily be handled poorly.
I have a friend of mine who’s gay who is a comedy writer and I sent him the script, “Is any of this bad? Is any of this accidentally homophobic?” He said, “It totally works,” and he sent me a bunch of jokes, some of which we shot and put in there.
And it’s a plot point, it’s not just thrown in…
Oh, yeah. That’s the other thing, he’s moving on. It’s not just a joke. He’s moving on, getting married, and he’s leaving Zac behind. My friend had a good point, he summed it up best, “You want to make sure that none of the jokes in the movie is that it’s funny because he’s gay.”
And you have Jerrod Carmichael and Hannibal Buress playing cops and addressing Black Lives Matter.
Yeah, that was just, I don’t know – you might as well say something. We’re given a lot of money to make these movies, we might as well try to say something. And the audience embraces it. They like it when a movie is smart, I’ve found.
We are going to see “Cosby” used as a verb a lot in movies from now on, aren’t we?
That was one, too, where we put it in and I was like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” And the audience loved it.
Mike Ryan lives in New York City and has written for The Huffington Post, Wired, Vanity Fair and New York magazine. He is senior entertainment writer at Uproxx. You can contact him directly on Twitter.
