5 Questions with Fernando Andrés & Tyler Rugh
The Friday night of Katelyn and Halie turns creepy with the arrival of a Papa John’s delivery guy in “Me & My Friend Just Want Our Pizza,” a low-key stoner comedy by directors Fernando Andrés & Tyler Rugh. We asked them how the project started and developed, and what was the most difficult part of the process…
1) Can you talk briefly about your backgrounds, and how you first got interested in movies?
We met in eighth grade, at a Christian private school in Texas, no less. We had separately become obsessed with watching and dreaming up movies by that point, but it was our friendship in that low-key oppressive but mostly relaxed environment that got us to double down on our love of films and making them as our way out of there. We would go to chapel every Friday then go home and watch Picnic at Hanging Rock or drive an hour to go see Mistress America or something. We made over a dozen terrible shorts with our friends by the time we graduated high school.
2) What’s the origin story with this project? What was the first thing that came to you, and how did you start building off that?
Ordering food while high is a funny thing because usually the person delivering it is well aware of the state you’re in, but there’s this unspoken contract there where they don’t care or don’t say anything about it. So we wondered, what if that contract was broken and they got all weird about it? It seemed like a premise that was ripe with humor and plenty of cringe relating to “stoner logic”, especially thinking back on our high school nights where dumb jokes about Ratatouille and nail-biting paranoia went hand in hand. Once we started writing for our two lead actresses, the gender aspect started to play in and it turned into this story of a warm, sacred female friendship that gets disrupted by a guy with no sense of boundaries.
3) Can you talk a bit about your process on set, and what’s the vibe like when you’re filming? Also, your leads are great. How did you find them? Did you do any rehearsals with them beforehand?
As a production, this was a brand new approach for us. We had just finished a couple bigger shorts with budgets and a full crew and C-stands and cables everywhere and we just weren’t happy with the results. We had been watching a lot of great, stripped-down shorts, like the Safdie brothers’ John’s Gone or Solid Gold, and we decided to make something where the two of us would act as our own crew (plus a close friend as our boom op) in order to really focus on the actors and location. It made us appreciate the importance of a crew having your back but it was a great learning experience for working with actors, and it was definitely the most we’ve ever laughed on set.
Katelyn and Halie are our friends from high school who had never acted before, but we knew their senses of humor well and that their real-life chemistry as best friends would translate on screen. We had a couple nights of rehearsal prior to shooting where they got used to repeating takes and moving with the camera. Tyler took his first shot at acting here after we shot a couple practice scenes and couldn’t stop laughing at him in the Papa John’s outfit.
4) What was the most difficult thing about this project, either in the writing stage, the production, or editing?
We had both not enough time and plenty of it. We shot a nearly 30 page script over three nights, but we’ve been editing what we shot for over a year in between other projects. While everyone was able to improvise and retool lines and moments, we had to make sure we had enough versions of each interaction or glance for the jokes and emotional beats to really land. Luckily, we had the comfort of shooting this at Tyler’s family home. We even cast his dog Maggie in her small screen debut.
5) What’s the funniest film, new or old, you’ve seen recently?
Two major first-time viewings we had just last month were Lost In America by Albert Brooks and I Wanna Hold Your Hand by Robert Zemeckis, two very funny and very cinematic comedies. The pace of those movies is absolutely insane and the way they are cut feel very modern to us, where each scene ends on a visual or spoken gag with a sharp cut away to something else, the same kind of thing you’d see in an episode of Broad City, and something we also tried to do here throughout.
Bonus: What’s next for you guys?
We’re finishing editing God’s Plan, our third and final comedy short about Texas teens dealing with hyperreal situations over one tense night (after Pizza and Igloo). It’s the biggest of the three and we think the most emotional and we’re excited to get it out there later this year. But our biggest project is a TV series we’ve been developing for the last couple years, a really funny and strange and, hopefully, painfully relatable series about high school in the age of school shootings and Snapchat. The episodes are written and we’re excited for what comes next.
Contact Info:
IG: Fernando Andrés: @fernandofromtx
Tyler Rugh: @trugh25