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“This guy really does need to be contained, because he’s got such potential for danger and violence and mayhem.”
Macon Blair is describing the antagonist of his latest movie. He’s no stranger to menacing genre fare, as evidenced by the two other films he wrote and directed: 2017’s “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore” and 2023’s “Toxic Avenger” reimagining.
But despite pitch-black elements, “Idiots,” in theaters Friday via Independent Film Company, is a rollicking comedy. In it, two knuckleheads — the well-intentioned and religious Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and sleazy bro Mark (Dave Franco) — get a job chauffeuring troubled teens to rehab. While their first ward, Sheridan Kimberley (Mason Thames), appears to be just another troubled rich kid, he turns out to be way too dangerous for his clueless caretakers.
Having Sheridan actually be a cruel person was one of the key audience expectations the writer-director hoped to flip in the pursuit of laughs.
“It was about wanting to have the most formidable villain possible for these guys to go up against, and just play off the idea that audiences are smart and they’ve seen a lot of movies,” Blair says. “If you see a premise like this … ‘There’s two dumbbells that have a kid in the car.’ Your expectations are probably going to be that at some point along the way they will give him some advice or wisdom or a hug and he will be redeemed. He’ll get straightened out sooner or later. I really like the idea of taking the wheel in the complete opposite direction, where at a certain point you realize, ‘No, he’s actually a monster that has to be captured before more people get hurt,’ and playing off people’s expectations.”
Sheridan’s cruelty also fueled the film’s oft-shifting tone, which keeps audiences uncomfortably guessing what cringy situation comes next. Without giving away too much, the film’s grossest scatological joke happens right before Sheridan has a sinister scene with a sex worker (Kiernan Shipka).
“There’s this big, extremely over-the-top gross-out comedy punchline, and then about 10 seconds later, it goes 100 degrees in the opposite direction,” Blair says. “It’s meant to be whiplash that resets the tone of the movie. As soon as that happens, we’re back into the jokes, but in theory, that clenched feeling from that one moment remains, and that’s how you feel about Sheridan for the rest of the movie. When they’re running around the block trying to capture him, it’s not as cartoonish as it otherwise would be.”
“Idiots” takes the structure of a road trip movie, as Davis and Mark work desperately to keep Sheridan under control and bring him to rehab. But along the way they reckon with Mark’s busted car, a werewolf-obsessed rapper (Nicholas Braun, in an outrageous role), a militant kidnapper (Peter Dinklage), bad drug trips and more.
Beyond the plot, Blair and his DP Guillermo Garza hoped to give the comedy a dynamic visual style. Despite the tight indie schedule, Blair says all of this pressure helped make the movie stronger due to creative problem solving.
“Because the schedule was so short, there were a lot of times where we had a very detailed shot listed/storyboarded plan going in. But we would get in the day, and there wasn’t going to be enough time to get all of it,” Blair says. “So a lot of times on the fly, Guillermo and I would redistill the scene and say, ‘OK, if we thought we were going to do this moment in three shots, what’s the version of it where it’s one shot and we just do it with a move?’ It was one of those things where the limitations of time or light or whatever forced us to … I don’t mean ‘not be precious about it.’ It’s kind of the opposite of that. To really drill down on: ‘gun to my head, what can we afford to lose?’ So the scenes become as specific as possible, because it’s really just the bare bones of what you very essentially need. I’m not saying, ‘I would go into another movie asking for fewer days.’ I wouldn’t. But I loved how that happened, because if we had the luxury of ‘you can shoot as much as you want,’ I don’t think we would have come up with the same solutions, and it would have felt different. It would have felt a little less sharp.”
The one comedic element Blair didn’t want to stick his neck out for? The much-discussed original title. The film premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival as “The Shitheads,” but was renamed “Idiots” once Independent Film Company acquired and dated the film. It wasn’t a war Blair felt like waging.
“That was part of the conversation we had internally about changing the title: It wasn’t so much a full ‘You’re not allowed to do this.’ It was just a list of limitations,” he says. “It was a lot of things that had to do with where posters could be displayed in public, and how you could obscure the names. It started to feel like it was going to be an uphill battle promotion-wise with this movie. Given that it’s a smaller movie and it’s coming out in the summertime, and there are a ton of movies to compete with, we didn’t want to hamstring ourselves with, yes, it’s a funny title, but to cross your arms and say, ‘By God, I’ll have fewer people see the movie to hold on to this title.’ It seemed like cutting off your nose to spite your face. So we said, ‘Let’s just pivot to something that’s not going to give us that hassle.’”
Watch the trailer for “Idiots” below.
English (US) ·