FILM INTERVIEW: JOHNNY KNOXVILLE & BAM MARGERA

Two Worldclass Jackasses Talk 3D Insanity

Johnny Knoxville & Bam Margera discuss their muse with Buzzine. They detail how to maintain standards as artful ambition is developed from conception and carried to a 3D cinema screen.  They describe the all-embracing Jackass audience, in its myriad forms, whilst expressing opinion on the methods a man should develop if he has any interest in self-preservation.

 

Izumi Hasegawa: Isn't it getting harder and harder to lower the bar?

 

Johnny Knoxville: No, it was easier to write bits for this idea than any of the others. We have a stack of bits this high that we wouldn't even get to. Everyone just got real excited.

 

IH: Was "Dildo Archery" something that would only work in 3D?

 

JK: No, it's funny in 2D as well. 

 

IH: But did that come about because you thought, "What's something that could fly out at the camera?"

 

JK: No, it came about because we had Bam against a wall bent over with his pants down and we're shooting him in the ass with the dildo bazooka, and I wanted a shot of just the dildo flying through the air, and I saw it; it was hilarious, and then I was like, "I want it to fly through cities!" And then it's like, "I want it to break glasses of milk!"

 

Bam Margera: Break the Eiffel Tower. Go through the pyramids of Egypt...

 

IH: Johnny, you went through some torturous stuff yourself, and that one scene with you looking like you're breaking your neck there, we all felt it in the audience. What keeps you motivated to continue doing these things?

 

JK: It's just so fun. I know that I almost bought it on that, but it's fun. It's me and my friends -- something we created together and been doing for ten years – the cast and crew. You do something, it may be scary, but the footage you're watching afterwards and everyone's laughing...

 

BM: The way I look at it is, when we film for eight months straight for a new Jackass movie, I know I'm going to wind up with at least two broken bones. I don't know when it's going to happen, but you can't contemplate how you're going to fall and what's going to happen. It's easier to just get up there and do it.

 

IH: You're almost 40 now. Do you ever get to the point where you think you should try something else, or are you happy to keep doing it?

 

JK: No, I'm more willing to do stunts now than when I first started the TV show.

 

BM: He actually had to have an intervention from [Jeff] Tremaine [director] and Spike Jonze to stop doing stunts because they have too many already.

 

JK: They lured me to the office for one reason, and then they all got me in a big room, like, "We're out of time. The editors are bottlenecked with footage. You have to stop."

 

IH: Is it like an addiction?

 

JK: It's just fun. I do get obsessed with constantly, all day long thinking of ideas, but that's just how it is.

 

IH: Do you think it's become more of an artistic endeavor than just pee and poo?

 

JK: We don't intellectualize it that way. We just think of ideas and make ourselves laugh.

 

BM: I'm on a lot of airplanes, so I just sip on red wine thinking of stupid ideas, and when I think of it, I wanna make it happen. I'll be like, "Okay, Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield's ear in a boxing match; maybe I can get Mike Tyson to bite off my ear..."

 

JK: We asked.

 

BM: Then Paramount has to come and like, "You really willing to do that?" I'm like, "Hell yeah, you know the street creds I'll have from a missing ear? And they say, 'How did that happen?' And I say, 'Mike Tyson.'"

 

IH: Because that was such a good PR move for him the first time...

 

JK: Well, we did consider that.

 

IH: Are you disappointed when stunts work as planned?

 

JK: Then you just do them again. If you do it right, you're doing it again.

 

IH: When you started this ten years ago, there wasn't a YouTube or anything like that, but now there's all this stuff you can see on the Internet. Do you feel like you have to one-up those guys or be ahead of what's going on?

 

JK: It doesn't enter our minds. We just do things to make ourselves laugh. There's some funny stuff out there, but we're not in competition with anybody. We just love doing what we do, and we end up one-upping ourselves. It takes a little more to make us laugh than it did maybe five, six years ago because, okay, we've been there, done that, so what's next? We don't think, going into this movie, we have to top this. We just have to be funny. It's such a competition to get footage, like if Bam gets something great, it's like we all have to get something great.

 

IH: You've had some pretty harsh criticism. I found a great quote: "It's a disgusting, repulsive spectacle."

 

JK: Right. We'll probably put that in the trailer.

 

IH: I see you're laughing all the way to the bank.

 

JK: We always bet on ourselves. If the movie doesn't do good, we don't do good.

 

IH: Do you pay any attention to people who get very upset with what you do?

 

JK: No, I don't care.

 

BM: It's kind of respected sometimes.

 

JK: We don't want people that don't like it. People have their opinions. We're psyched that we have a lot of people that do like it, and we understand that people don't like it, but if you don't like it, that's fine!

 

BM: We showed the movie to an old folks' home. Seventy-year-old ladies loved it! And then we showed it to a bunch of gay bikers -- they loved it.

 

JK: The old ladies, we're like, "Is there anything you'd like to change?" They were like, "We'd like to see more penis in the movie." They were awesome! It was really fun.

 

IH: Who were the gang of gay bikers?

 

JK: We went to a bar in Silver Lake, and it was the Bears. We showed it to them and we had a ball.

 

IH: Do you guys get that feeling of paranoia when you're on set because you're always pranking each other?

 

BM: Constantly. That's the worst part about it because you're never safe on set. Even when they're changing angles with the 3D Phantom cameras, it's like, alright, so we have two hours to kill. That's when it's like, "Alright, I have to take a leak." "Well, I'm gonna tape a camera to my..." you know...

 

JK: Might as well take a leak on my bro!

 

BM: And hopefully I'll get beat up by him! So you're just always turning around... We even have a masseuse on set. If you hurt your neck, they give you a massage, whatever. You can't do it because you'll get stun-gunned or punched in the face or peed on. You're doomed all around.

 

IH: The Japanese have a lot of game shows similar to your movie, and they love you...

 

JK: And we love Japan! My wife is half-Japanese, my son is a quarter-Japanese.

 

IH: Is that why your baby's middle name is Akira?

 

JK: Yes.

 

IH: Who comes up with most of the ideas, and how do you select them? Do you have any meetings about the ideas?

 

BM: Sometimes it's a mixture of everybody. If they come up with an idea, they submit it to Paramount, then we have a stack of ideas this high and people look at them and figure out what they would like to do. Sometimes, if it's involving a bull, it'll be him because it definitely won't be me. Most of the ideas are two pages long, really descriptive, and then it'll be one page that is one sentence that says, "Shit shoe. Find a shoe, and then shit in it."

 

JK: The cast and crew -- we just all come up with ideas. Sometimes they're just crude pictures drawn on a napkin, and sometimes we'll get together and pitch ideas... Bam likes to fax hilarious pictures. That's how he submits most of his ideas, through pictures, and they're really funny.

 

BM: It's just easier to draw what I want to happen, rather than explain it.

 

JK: So all the ideas come to the office and we compile them, and then we'll send them to Paramount just to go through all the legal stuff. They leave us alone, so we decide what to shoot or not.

 

IH: The jet sequence is one of the best bits, and it seemed like everyone got something in that. Did you try anything with the jet that didn't work and didn't make it?

 

JK: Yeah, there were a lot of things.

 

BM: Steve-O did the bike, and it didn't work out so well.

 

JK: He rode past the bike, naked. We shot a ton of stuff behind the jet, and you got so much time...

 

BM: But at the very end, I didn't even think they were filming, and I just decided to piss against the wind and it ended up...

 

JK: It was funny.

 

BM: And that's pretty much the story of jacking.

 

JK: I saw it and I'm like, that's the closer to this bit. You do all these things, like "Oh, I wanna do this, this, and this," and then Bam runs out there, just simply pees into the wind, which was the funniest thing, in my eyes.

 

IH: Do you make it a point to have a snake skit just so you can make Bam cry?

 

JK: Yes. He loudly proclaimed one day, "You know what I hate? I really hate snakes." And we're like, "Got it."

 

BM: That was the worst decision, on my part. I realized that the hard way is you don't tell people from Jackass what you're terrified of because that's just a new skit for them to film.

 

IH: I remember seeing it in the second film, and your eyes were watering...

 

JK: By watering, you mean crying?

 

BM: I kind of deserved it because, out of the course of the whole movie, I definitely peed and punched the entire cast and crew at one point, so I knew that I had something terrible coming my way.

 

JK: You were right.

 

IH: Was the final sequence meant to be a big F-U to Michael Bay?

 

JK: No, we didn't even consider...

 

BM: Who's Michael Bay?

 

JK: He's a director. No, we were just trying to think of something. Our opening and closing sequences -- we make them like big productions. We were just trying to think of visual and funny stuff to do in 3D.

 

IH: Was this whole movie conceived in 3D from the beginning?

 

JK: No. We decided to do another movie, and the studio said we should do it in 3D, and we resisted because we thought it would change the way we shot. We can't run and gun. You got these big cameras, and we can't worry about getting too close to the camera – we just need to be able to turn the chimpanzees loose and follow them with the camera. We did some tests and they had some handheld rigs, and they made it where we didn't have to think about it, and we're like, "This could be fun." Even in writing bits, the bits had to be funny in 2D first before we would shoot them. With that said, there were a couple of bits that were like, "That'd probably be funny in 3D."

 

BM: Even without the 3D cameras, there were always nine cameras...

 

JK: Hi-def cameras.

 

BM: ...always filming something else at all times, so some things had to get converted into 3D.

 

JK: But the film was shot in camera 3D, and that's the largest part you see. Very few things we had to convert...

 

IH: The Blind Side was the real phenomenon of last year's movie season. Did you get inspiration from The Blind Side?

 

JK: No, we actually had Jared Allen, and I wanted to get hit going over the middle. We were doing that, then Jared Allen was like, "You know I'm a defensive end -- my best thing is the blind side." I'm like, "Okay." That's what kind of just happened on the day. He hits really hard. He was great. He had such a fun spirit about it.

 

BM: You told him to not hit him with your purse this time, so that made him even more agro.

 

JK: That worked for footage. But we were walking to the set, and he's like, "Man, I got second thoughts about it. I think I was raised better than this." But then, of course, when we were shooting, he was just having a ball of murdering my face.

 

IH: Did you actually get badly hurt with the buffalo?

 

JK: It badly hurt, but I didn't get injured. The bull, I got a pretty bad concussion on, which I got lucky on that one because I landed on the back of my neck. But thank God the bull kicked me in the head at the last second and altered my course just a little, and I'm sitting here today, talking.

 

IH: Johnny, you're a newlywed and you've got a newborn. Has it given you another perspective in life in terms of being a grownup or perhaps thinking about the next phase of what you're going to do?

 

JK: We shot when my daughter was like two or three, when Jackass started, and my son was a month old when we went into production. That's what Daddy does.

 

IH: But they're not allowed to do that kind of stuff...

 

JK: They can do pranks but no stunts.

 

IH: I noticed you guys often cover your privates during stunts and pranks.

 

JK: Just walking around the hall today, yeah.

 

IH: Do you have to live in fear of pranks or getting hit?

 

JK: Constantly. I've built up a lot of bad will over the years with the fellas.

 

IH: When did you learn to have that habit?

 

JK: Actually, I had two older sisters, eight and ten years older, so they loved to put me up to mean stuff, and my father would put me up...when I was like three, he'd have me hit all his friends in the ding-ding. Even as a little kid, I would walk in a room and grown men would immediately put their hands over their... I was like a little Tasmanian devil. I was a really bad kid. Then I got sweet as I got older.

 

IH: You've done old man stuff a lot. Is incest the last frontier of exploring that old man shtick?

 

JK: No... I had so many old man ideas, I didn't even get to do because we ran out of time. The old man's still got a lot of badness left in him. He's a dirty old man, but he keeps getting dirtier and dirtier!

 

IH: Is there a feature bit for him down the road?

 

JK: I don't know. We kicked that idea around.

 

IH: Is it easy to get Spike Jonze?

 

JK: Luckily, Spike wasn't directing a movie while we were doing this one. The first two, he was always directing a movie, but on this one he was around more than ever. He loves it! It's like a vacation for him because he's a great filmmaker, and then he works with us.

 

'Jackass 3D' is exploding from screens in theaters right now. Please remember to duck. Thank you.