‘What Have We Made?’ Daniel Radcliffe and Eric Appel Break Down the Best of ‘WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story’
Welcome to My Favorite Scene! In this series, IndieWire speaks to actors behind a few of our favorite television performances about their personal-best onscreen moment and how it came together.
Daniel Radcliffe is no stranger to stunt work.
The “Harry Potter” star has racked up a fascinating filmography since graduating from the Wizarding World in 2011, from multiple Broadway musicals to TBS’s “Miracle Workers” to the Daniels’ infamous “Swiss Army Man” — all of which demand comedic versatility but have only sporadically called upon his extensive experience in blockbuster franchise action. The same was true of Eric Appel’s “WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story” — until one major fight scene filmed in just over four hours.
“If we were on ‘Potter,’ we might have spent a week doing that scene,” the actor told IndieWire via Zoom — to immediate laughter from Appel.
“I wish I had a week!” the director chimed in. “I wish I had a day actually, not even a week, a full day.”
Radcliffe’s favorite scene from “WEIRD” fulfilled his love of stunt work and stunt teams, while Appel’s speaks to his position as writer, director, and co-architect of the entire “WEIRD” odyssey (along with Yankovic himself) ever since a “Funny or Die” video in 2010.
“I was trained very well in working fast,” Appel said, citing his experience on Adult Swim’s “”NTSF:SD:SUV::,” MTV’s “Death Valley,” and more. “All that experience that I got from from these low-budget action comedy things that I worked on, I brought to this experience.”
The duo sat down with IndieWire to discuss some of the most stressful, gratifying, and laugh-out-loud funny parts of filming their favorite scenes while racing against the clock.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
IndieWire: Dan, if I can start with you: What is your favorite scene from this movie?
Daniel Radcliffe: I think my favorite scene from this movie is probably the fight scene in the diner. Al sort of pouring his heart out and saying that Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood) is the greatest thing in his life and if anything ever happened to her, he wouldn’t know what he would do — immediately after he says that a bag going over her head and her being kidnapped, is a joke that was just so insane. That’s one of the moments where you think the film has made its crazy turn and it can’t turn any harder, and then it just does. What comes next is me as Weird Al trying to fight off this entire diner full of villains because suddenly like everybody who’s in there is working for Pablo Escobar (Arturo Castro).
We shot that scene in I think four, four-and-a-half hours — that’s not an exaggeration, really. That wasn’t even the majority of our day. So to do it in that kind of time was incredibly fulfilling, and it’s a really insane stunt action scene. I love working with stunt departments; they’re always kind of insane or like on the edge of insane, and just a group of wonderful people… As an actor you often get the chance to be in the middle of an immensely talented group of people all just like excelling at what they’re doing — in every department, from makeup and hair to camera, and obviously that night stunts. Everybody had to work so fast and it was awesome to watch, getting that whole thing done in that kind of period. The ADs, my stunt double Andrew (Franklin), and our stunt coordinator Jake (Huang), they were they were incredible.
EA: One of them was was in “Mortal Kombat,” like the original Mortal Kombat arcade games 1 and 2. It was the guy that was Liu Kang in the Mortal Kombat, the guy that was actually in the video game that they took the photos of an animation to put in the game.
DR: Wasn’t that the guy who accidentally —
EA: Fell under the table?
DR: Yeah, the table flip. I was supposed to grab him and do the beginning of the move, and then they would cut to him doing the table flip properly. But it was all moving very quickly and I did that and he just jumped and totaled the table and — great! I think the shot’s in the film unless I’m very much mistaken.
EA: It is. The table actually was not supposed to break. He was supposed to land on the top of the table, but the table broke and the ketchup and mustard went flying up into the air. It was a little hard to edit around because immediately when it happened, everyone’s face goes “OHHH,” like — this wasn’t supposed to happen! So it was kind of hard to cut around that moment but it was a great — I mean, it was a realistic hit.
That’s such an interesting choice too because I was going to ask about costars depending on the scene you chose, but this was mostly day players or stunt people.
DR: Yeah, but we also had a lot of rehearsal time. This film was shot in 18 days and one of the reasons we were able to do that is because we also got some rehearsal time before that. One of the scenes we rehearsed was that, so I got to work with the stunt coordinator and he could see what I could do, which bits I would be able to do and which bits I obviously wouldn’t be able to do. The guy who I hit with the frying pan — oh no, the guy who hits me with the frying pan at the end, the massive dude who comes in, is a guy called Thomas Forbes Johnson who I had worked with on a movie I did prior to that. I knew him actually quite well, so it was nice at like midnight at the very end of the scene, when we were filming, the last guy I got to work with… it’s just easier to slam someone around when A) they’re a friend and B) there built like Thomas is built and you’re just like, “I couldn’t hurt you if I tried.” And as I said, from working on “Potter,” I always had a very close working relationship with the stunt team, so it was nice to kind of get back into that.
EA: The first part of that scene was so fun to shoot as well, the conversation with you and Evan. It just got to be so heightened, like Al at his absolute crushing lowest — and the whole goal with this movie was to play everything as earnestly as possible, to feel like this awards-bait biopic. So Dan getting to play Al as a shell of his former self and Evan getting to play this really heightened — she clearly does not care what his emotional state is at this point and is just using him to reach the top of stardom and fame and power.
DR: And his complete inability to see that and utter, utter faith in her still.
Eric, I’d love to hear more about the specifics of directing the scene — because it’s not an action movie, but then there’s this and the scene towards the end in Mexico. I imagine that within that 18-day shoot that’s going to be on your mind the whole time.
EA: [“NTSF:SD:SUV::”] had a lot of action elements. Every episode had a big fight scene like this, so all the experience I got from that and on cable TV shows that sort of walked that line between comedy and action. The stunt coordinator on [“Death Valley”] gave me this tip: always shoot the actors’ feet. He was like “Do a take where you’re just on feet,” and then if you get into a pinch in editing you can always just cut to like feet scuffling around and it’ll be able to jump somewhere else in the action sequence. Because no one’s keeping track of where the feet are, you know?
Now, I did hope to have a little bit more time to shoot this action sequence, but the way that the schedule shook out and just the time of year and when it gets dark… we were shooting in Burbank where you have a hard out at 2am. So it got a little hairy there, it was kind of stressful shooting the scene. We had a couple of beats that we had to cut out of it, but the rehearsal time was really key to making that work. Daniel knew the choreography so well that at the end of the night — once he jumps over to the other side of the counter and fights the guy with the frying pan and puts the guy under the under the panini press, there was a bunch more shots that I wanted to get there. I planned on getting some close ups of the guy’s head going in and the bell getting dinged at the end and with 30 minutes left to shoot that whole chunk of the fight, it was like “Let’s just go, let’s just go go go.” We could just roll, we could do two takes of it. Daniel knows the choreography well enough that we get two great takes of him just giving it 100% Then we’ll get behind him, we’ll do one one with the stunt actor.
It was the scene I will say that I was the most worried about when we got into the editing room. I was like, “I don’t know if I have this fight,” just because in my head I knew all the things that I wanted to get that had to be dropped. I mean, that’s low budget filmmaking, and that’s directing. You have your plan of what you want to get and then the reality of what you can get, and you have to just in the moment make those choices to get the right things where you’ll be able to put it together and make it as impactful as you wanted to. I was so relieved when we started showing the movie to people and they said, “Man, that fight scene’s awesome. I love that fight scene, it feels like a big action movie,” and I’m like, “Oh my god, thank you. We shot it in four hours.”
Well then let’s get right into your favorite scene, especially coming at this as writer and director and having been with the project for over a decade.
EA: Yeah, a quarter of my life. My favorite scene is when “My Bologna” first gets written. We wanted to create this real lightning-in-a-bottle like movie moment of him writing the song. All these biopics tend to have this scene where the artist just comes up with their big hit song, seemingly out of the blue, and it’s fully formed. Al and I, our favorite example was in “Ray” when he writes “Hit The Road, Jack” and it’s like — I think someone tells him to hit the road and he’s like, “Wait a second. What do you say?” and then it goes to him in concert immediately playing it.
This is really the one sequence in the movie where I got every single shot that I wanted to get. It was such a fun scene to shoot on that day. I distinctly remember getting that up-angle shot when Daniel is staring down at the bologna on the counter, and that pushing in on his face that looks like it’s out of “Kill Bill” or something. We were cracking up on set — it was our first day of shooting so that was the first day that we saw like, “Oh man, Daniel is really bringing it,” and he’s playing this so serious and it just feels like such a moving meaningful moment.
My editor Jamie Kennedy… she put this big sweeping Spielberg-esque score, and just really stretched out the moment with cutting to the reactions of the roommates like hitting each other and noticing what’s happening. That’s what really made it for me. I remember when I first saw it, I had to pause it, and I just said “What have we made? This movie is so insane, people are gonna go nuts for this. It’s making me laugh so hard.” Zach Robinson and Leo Birenberg who wrote our amazing score figured out how to tie it into the main theme of the movie and it just really came together. Jack (Lancaster) and the rest of the rest of those guys, Spencer (Treat Clark) and Tommy (O’Brien), their reaction after you play the song, it’s really building off that big moment.
DR: One of my favorite moments in that scene is the way Jack Lancaster smashes plates. It’s one of my favorite shots in the film, because he’s destroying them but there’s something like — he’s got this kind of smooth, lackadaisical body language as he’s doing it and it’s great. When those boys just play — did Spencer jump out of the window? Was that something that was written?
EA: That was written. The button of the scene was him jumping through a plate-glass window, which obviously we could not do. So on set it was funny, but then when you see it all come together and it’s coming off of that really big, sweeping moving moment: “I don’t know if it was God or the devil, but you got something…” It’s one of those scenes that didn’t just come out exactly the way I wanted to, it came out better than I wanted it to. And it’s the scene that I point to where I’m like, “If you want to know what the movie is, watch this scene. This is what the movie is.”
“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” is now streaming on The Roku Channel.