“Over Your Dead Body,” now in theaters, might sound a little familiar, especially if you have a Netflix subscription and a healthy interest in international genre cinema.
The set-up is fairly simple – a couple at the end of their rope (played by Jason Segel and Samara Weaving), go on a last-ditch weekend getaway at their holiday lakehouse. But while there they discover that, independently, they have made plans to kill the other. Quite a hiccup! Things only get more complicated when two escaped lunatics (Timothy Olyphant and Keith Jardine) and their inside woman prison guard (Juliette Lewis) drop in on them, turning an already intense scenario into an edge-of-your seat ride that liberally mixes laughs with some truly shocking set pieces.
The movie was based on an earlier film, “The Trip,” from Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola, which is very entertaining and pretty similar to “Over Your Dead Body” (you can watch “The Trip” on Netflix right now). It led to something of a predicament for Jorma Taccone, the director of the remake.
“It’s absolutely the same movie. For me, it’s scary, obviously, especially if you like the original, and we wanted to remain true to the original. It was not something I wanted to do. And then I couldn’t get past liking the original so much. The original, I will say, is probably a darker film, emotionally,” Taccone said. “You’re trying to find ways that you want to … I don’t even want to say improve … but, put your voice into it. I was trying to always remain cognizant of not changing things for the sake of changing them.”
As much as Taccone loved the original, he wanted the characters “to feel a little bit more redeemable,” even though redeemable “feels like a judgment word.”
“I really wanted at the end you to feel like you wanted to see them together and earn that in a different way, and it really is just a tonal thing,” Taccone said.
That slight tonal shift isn’t softer, exactly, but is “emotionally a tiny bit less dark while keeping the teeth of it.”
“I’ve seen American remakes where it’s like, Oh, they lost the thing,” Taccone said. He would argue that his version of the story was even more violent, and was drawn to the fact that it was “almost like three movies in one – a suspense thriller into a home invasion thing into an action movie.” This was the challenge.
Taccone said that he wanted to do all of those genres “as effectively as possible,” give the scenes between the actors a real weight and emotional heft and “to thread it all and make it feel like a cohesive thing.” The glue, Taccone found, was the humor, something he pushed to the limit without breaking the rules of the world he had so thoughtfully constructed.
Perhaps best of all was Wirkola’s sign-off on the movie, which meant the world to Taccone. “He’s super proud of this movie. It really feels like it’s its own thing while still being very true to the original,” Taccone said.
One of the biggest surprises in “Over Your Dead Body” is just how funny Weaving is. If you know Weaving, it’s probably from her role in “Ready or Not” (and its sequel, released earlier this spring) or in things like “The Babysitter” or “Scream VI.” (She proudly wears the title of scream queen.) But in “Over Your Dead Body” she is so sharp and acidic, with really impeccable timing in her scenes with Segel. She makes you care even when your allegiance is drawn in his direction.
“I will tell you, I was a little worried about how good looking she is. She’s such a striking human being, both on and off camera, but she puts you so at ease. She’s just a very relatable person,” Taccone said.
Weaving, the niece of actor Hugo Weaving, was recommended to Taccone by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, a former member of the Lonely Island and current member of filmmaking troupe Radio Silence, who made both of the “Ready or Not” movies and “Scream VI.” Bettinelli-Olpin told Taccone, “She’s a star.” But she’s also a human being. Taccone said that she was playing so much “Prince of Persia” that she and her husband, screenwriter Jimmy Warden, couldn’t share so they had to buy two videogames. “I’m like, This is pretty relatable,” Taccone said.
One of the keys to unlocking her performance was actually allowing her to play an Australian character. She told Taccone that she didn’t realize how much an American accent makes her have to think a little bit harder – “it pulls her back from being able to improv immediately.”
“She’s so great on camera. And part of that is her being able to banter. There’s a lot of Australian s–t she comes up with,” said Taccone.
At one point she calls someone a gronk, which Urban Dictionary says is Australian slang for “a person that is totally lacking in fashion sense, motor skills and/or social skills. Usually a total moron, an extremely unpleasant person or an unwanted guest.”
“It just gives it this life and this texture,” Taccone said. And it really comes to fore in her scenes with Segel.
“One thing I really, really enjoyed doing in this movie was that there’s real scenes between the two of them, and leaving the camera on my actors, both on set and also in the edit, not interrupting, not doing the comedy thing, so you really get to see all the little facial things that both of them do, because there’s so much, even if you see the movie a second time, of like, oh, it’s not what you thought,” Taccone said.
It helped that they shot “Over Your Dead Body” in Finland, something that listeners to Taccone’s “Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast” know all too well. (He spent a lot of time in the Finnish saunas.)
“It’s sort of a destination wedding at that point – everyone’s trapped and everybody wants to rehearse. Everyone wants to be as good as it can be. But as a director, you’re stealing people’s talent and the fact that you either get all the blame or all the credit — it’s really nice when you’re proud of something and it’s good,” Taccone said.
Olyphant came up with a moment that gets a huge laugh in the movie that is too good to give away here and Lewis originated a line towards the end of the movie that’s too profane to print.
“How great to be able to hire a cast that is this good, that is always adding, doing their jobs, bringing their own backstory,” Taccone gushed.
Taccone was also lucky to have some real heavyweights in the world of action cinema on his team, with the movie produced by David Leitch, the director of “John Wick” and “The Fall Guy” and his producing partner and wife Kelly McCormick, who worked on “Nobody” and its sequel and “Violent Night.” The producing pair gave Taccone access to 87North, their production company and stunt firm that is widely considered one of the best in the business.
“Kelly and David being able to provide a resource, because, honestly, we didn’t have a crazy amount of money, and so to be able to even do rehearsals before Jason got over to Finland, getting them while I was in Finland, and being sent all these different action sequences that we were working on,” Taccone said. Taccone would send storyboards and notes “because I was always trying to make sure that the character is in those fight sequences. Because sometimes with action things, I’m always wanting it to pull back into something that feels like the character’s skill level. That’s where a lot of the humor comes in.”
There’s a moment Taccone points to, towards the end, where during a fight a character pauses to vomit profusely. It’s an incredibly funny moment but also one that is very rooted in character. The stunt performers and designers appreciated this approach and the flourishes of character-based humor that punctuate even the most serious action sequence.
“It was really fun and symbiotic with those guys, because I think that they bring so much of that skill and then they also appreciate that I have a different vantage point and don’t care about some of those things,” Taccone said.
One thing he resisted was sequences that rely too heavily on props. But towards the end of the movie there’s a sequence that is riddled with props. This was Taccone’s way of giving a spotlight to the performers and designers that helped make “Over Your Dead Body” so special.
“We do have a moment at the very end of the movie that is full-on ‘Atomic Blonde’ vibes. And it was by design. I wanted to give 87North that shine. I’m just like, Hey, go f–king nuts. It was really fun for me to use different colors that I don’t think a lot of people maybe expect from me, in particular,” said Taccone.
As for what’s next, he said that he and his wife, actress and filmmaker Marielle Heller, switch off on directing duties so at least one of them is home with their two kids. Heller last directed 2024’s underrated “Nightbitch.” She now has a movie in the works with Tom Hanks, set to shoot this fall. Taccone plans on tackling something once she’s done with the Hanks project, which recently sparked a bidding war.
We joked that whatever Taccone is going to do next will also have to generate a similar amount of interest.
“For this particular movie, there’s not going to be a bidding war,” Taccone said with a laugh.
But hey, stranger things have happened, like him directing a romantic comedy thriller action movie and it being one of the most entertaining movies of the year.
“Over Your Dead Body” is in theaters now.
The post ‘Over Your Dead Body’ Director Jorma Taccone on the Difficulty of Remaking a Movie He Already Really Liked appeared first on TheWrap.
