David Wain

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of maximumfun.org and is distributed by NPR.

**Jesse Thorn** (0:21)
Now, a while back, maybe 10 years ago, David and his buddy, Ken, got together and did that same thing, 10 hours a day, about a week, just like they did with movies like Wanderlust and The Tent. They came out of the garage with a screenplay, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which is now not just a screenplay, but an actual movie that is in movie theaters. Here's the premise. Gail Daughtry is engaged, happily engaged, when kind of out of the blue, her fiance uses his celebrity sex pass. I mean, you've heard of this idea, right? That there is one celebrity that your partner would allow you to spend the night with and not call it cheating. Anyway, Gail Daughtry and her fiance talk about it kind of jokingly, and it's just a joke until later that day, he has sex with Jennifer Aniston.
Now, obviously Gail never thought this would happen. I mean, who would? And so, her relationship is ruined and then it dawns on her. The only way she can make things right with her and her fiance is if she does the same thing with her celebrity sex past. So she heads to Hollywood and tracks down her man, John Hamm. What could possibly go wrong? So glad to welcome David Wain back on the show. Let's get right into it.
David Wain, welcome back to Bullseye. It's always nice to see you and congratulations on the movie.

**David Wain** (1:51)
Thank you so much and always wonderful to be here.

**Jesse Thorn** (1:53)
When you are making a movie at this scale.

**David Wain** (1:55)
Yes.

**Jesse Thorn** (1:56)
This is a small to modest scale.

**David Wain** (1:58)
Correct.

**Jesse Thorn** (2:00)
What is the difference between a movie like this that gets made and a movie like this that doesn't get made?

**David Wain** (2:05)
I don't know.
This one took a really long time for anyone to say yes. And I guess partly was we had some celebrities attached to it and that was what allowed us to at least get interest on a producer that was able to put together some investors. But this was a real old school group of a large group of investors all putting in a relatively small amount of money and making it completely on our own and then taking it to Sundance and having a distributor pick it up.

**Jesse Thorn** (2:39)
Was it a matter of you and Ken Marino who co-wrote the movie with you, just classic sitting in a room with Post-It notes and a typewriter, and we've got a great idea for a movie?

**David Wain** (2:52)
Yeah. Well, Ken and I have a thing that we've done three times and three times we've made a movie out of it, which is we lock ourselves up for 12 hours a day for seven days in a row, starting with nothing, no idea even, and we force ourselves to emerge with a first draft of a movie at the end of that period.

**Jesse Thorn** (3:10)
And the two of you have been working together in some capacity or other basically your entire adult lives.

**David Wain** (3:15)
Yeah. Well, we met the first day of college. So since then. But this little thing we've figured out because life is distracting and there's always other things. And we thought we would take a inspiration from the way production shoots go, which is you show up and you're there for 12 hours on the clock and there's no wiggle room.
Why not apply that to writing for a week? And so that gets us from zero to a first draft.

**Jesse Thorn** (3:40)
What was the first time you did that?

**David Wain** (3:42)
We did it first in the mid 2005 or something, and that emerged with the script for our movie The Ten. And then the second time we did it, it was for the movie Wanderlust that came out of that. And the third time was this one.

**Jesse Thorn** (3:56)
What's the experience like? How is it different now the third time than it was the first time?

**David Wain** (4:01)
Not that different. It's really fun. You know, because you say to your people in your life, okay, I'm off the clock right now, I'm doing this thing, as if you're going to like a court trial or a shoot. And, you know, we'd take a lunch break, we'd go for a walk. We, you know, as part of the writing process, you're talking about random things, whatever. But it's, the truth is that the seven-day session to write this current movie was 10 years ago.