Macon Blair’s “Idiots,” an outrageous, R-rated comedy that is now available on digital, really does feel like a movie from a different era.
It stars Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr. as severe screw-ups who are hired to chaperone a teenage delinquent (Mason Thames from “How to Train Your Dragon”) to a rehab facility. Of course, he gives them much more trouble than they were expecting, and along the way, all hell breaks loose. Kiernan Shipka shows up as a hooker with a heart of gold, while Peter Dinklage and Nicholas Braun play hillbilly hoods looking to break the kid out of custody. Rarely these days do you see a comedy so gloriously unhinged.
So it’s not surprising that Blair wrote the movie more than 10 years ago. Blair came up with the idea for “Idiots” (which premiered at Sundance earlier this year under the more raunchy title “The Shitheads”) while he was working on Jeremy Saulnier’s movie “Blue Ruin.” Blair starred, and Alex Orr was on the crew. Orr asked to see some of Blair’s spec scripts, and together they started talking about what they could do. Orr knew some guys who did this type of job and “was struck by how unsupervised and dangerously disorganized their version of it was,” Blair explained. He talked to Orr’s friends and grabbed anecdotes (“none of which are in the movie”). Blair wrote the script, which Orr was then meant to direct.
Then Blair made his directorial debut with “I Don’t Feel at Home in the World Anymore” (it’s on Netflix and is superb), and so he shifted into the director’s chair. He attempted to sell the movie at Sundance at the same time “I Don’t…” premiered. It was 2017, and while the film got into preproduction, one of the actors who was interested in the project was Franco.
“I was a little too old to play Mason’s role, and a little too young to play the role I ultimately played. And so I walked away at the time,” Franco explained.
But this version of the movie ended up not getting made. There was, as Blair said, “a kerfuffle over money and it fell apart and it just went away.”
Eight years passed and Franco reached back out to Blair. “I said, ‘Whatever happened with that project? I’m old now. Let’s go. Let’s do it,’” said Franco. “I basically told him, ‘Hey, no pressure, but I would love to come on and help any way that I can.’”
“After enough time had passed, Alex and I still really liked the script, and we at a certain point were like, ‘Let’s try again to refinance it.’ And we started from scratch. The script changed a little bit, I rewrote it a little bit. And the second time around the track was the one that actually stuck,” said Blair.
What helped, as the film was getting back on its feet, was that Franco had been installed as a producer on the film. “He was really instrumental in a lot of the casting and helped steer the financing process. It was not like, I’m an actor and I’ve got a producer credit. He was a producer,” said Blair.
Franco said that his first two calls as a producer were to Jackson and Thames. “I knew that I needed two guys that I felt very comfortable with, that I would have great chemistry with and I love both of them as people,” Franco said. He said that he had made a conscious effort in the last decade of his career “to surround myself with close friends and my wife and these people who I can really be myself with, these people who I feel comfortable taking risks in front of.” He said that he can take “huge swings and fall on my face” without the fear of judgment. And that these same people are the ones also pushing him to go further. “It’s the most fun when you’re in a scenario like that,” Franco said.
It was the package of actors, Franco said, that got financier Gramercy Park involved. “They understood the vision – that old school comedy – and they really let us loose,” said Franco. Franco’s reference points were things like the “Harold and Kumar” movies, “Superbad” and “The Hangover,” while Blair was looking towards stuff like “Midnight Run” and “The Last Detail.”
Although there were, of course, parameters on letting loose. The movie only shot for 25 days, which Franco called “relentless.”
“This is not a one location film. We are on the road. We are moving pretty much every day, and so it was hard. But because I had O’Shea and Mason with me, we could fly through these scenes,” said Franco.
Occasionally, Blair would come up to the actors and say, “Hey guys, we only have one or two takes at this.” Not that the actors were ever worried. “We understood each other’s rhythms. We know how to play off each other. We know how to build each other up and we just made it happen every time,” said Franco. “And I don’t know if that would be possible with other actors that I didn’t feel as comfortable with.”
“It’s not a micro budget movie but on the big spectrum of movies, it’s fairly small. And I think everybody punched way above their weight class in terms of how much time we had to do the movie and what we were able to do,” said Blair. “I’m just thrilled with that and really proud of them and excited for people to be able to see that.”
And for production, Blair found the budget constraints to be a feature, not a bug. “I like the scrambling, teamwork, problem-solving thing that comes from having these limitations put on you. It is kind of thrilling,” Blair said. If he’s in the editing room and he sees that things don’t quite align, “it’s a bummer.” But when you’re on set and “the sun is going down in 55 minutes and we’ve got to do this, what can we do?” he enjoys the challenge. “That held together with a shoestring quality, I really love that,” he said.
After shooting last fall, the film was already ready for Sundance earlier this year, where it was promptly picked up by IFC and released in late summer. Considering he tried to make the movie more than ten years ago, the quick turnaround was unexpected and very welcome. (Blair’s last film, a remake of “The Toxic Avenger” for Legendary, opened in theaters nearly two years after it premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2023.)
Blair said that the Sundance screening was really special, especially considering that it was the last year for the festival to be in Park City, Utah, and that so many people “had a personal connection to Park City.” The screening played really well in Park City, but then they had one of those satellite screenings in nearby Salt Lake City, where it was also warmly received.
“It felt good and just having had this total up-and-down of we wrote the movie we’re going make it dude, oh no dude we’re not making the movie, it’s dead. And you’re like then eight years later to have it come back to life and get to make it get to make it with the cast that we were lucky enough to get this time, and then to have it go to Sundance was bewildering,” said Blair. “It was wonderful, but it was also very surreal because I had already grieved for that movie. I’d already gone through that process and then so to come back to it was it was a little surreal, but in a in a lovely way.”
For Franco, he hopes that this will be the beginning of a longstanding partnership between himself and Blair.
“I think he is a truly unique talent and he’s one of those directors where I just trust him inherently. He’s got amazing sensibilities and I’ll follow him anywhere,” said Franco.
Not that Blair knows where he’s headed – yet.
“I just stay busy writing, and so just as soon as I finish something, I try to get them in circulation. The honest answer is I don’t know, but I’ve got some things that I’m trying to get set up in order to be the next thing,” said Blair.
And the last few years have taught Blair that he can handle any size production, from a higher budget project like “The Toxic Avenger” to something like “Idiots,” which is much smaller.
“For me, something that’s like $18 to $20 million is gigantic. Something that’s five is familiar. Something that’s like this one… we could do that too. It’s like all kind of in that world,” Blair said.
You can buy or rent “Idiots” on your digital provider of choice right now.
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