Comedy troupe Broken Lizard turns to Victor Hugo's 'Hunchback' for its latest laugh-fest, 'QUASI'

Apr. 14—Look, you get around to things when you get around to them.

The five men who comprise the Broken Lizard comedy troupe — Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske — have been kicking around the idea for their new movie, "QUASI," for about a quarter of a century.

At some point, this down-on-his-luck character Lemme used to do became Quasimodo from Victor Hugo's 1830s novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." In the R-rated "QUASI," the titular character — portrayed by Lemme — must go from "zero to hero," as director Heffernan puts it in the film's production notes, when a French king (Chandrasekhar) and the Pope (Soter) each commands him to kill the other.

Like the group's earlier affairs, including 2001's "Super Troopers," 2004's "Club Dread," 2006's "Beerfest" and 2018's "Super Troopers 2," the group prioritizes silly-but-memorable gags. In this one, there are repeated chants of "Oysters! Oysters! Oysters!," for example. (And because this movie is set in medieval France, we get A LOT of exaggerated French accents.)

During a recent joint video interview, the five funny gentlemen describe a writing process that begins with an idea that gets them excited and leads to fleshing out a story and creating an outline and then each going too to work on a section for which he is responsible, before one person then turns it into a cohesive script.

"And then when we're about [expletive] — we might be drinking, we might be out to dinner — that's when you get the kind of 'Oysters!' of it all. That's when the random [expletive] comes in. But I think that's our sort of secret sauce — there's always going to be the dumb [expletive] you say to your friends."

In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Broken Lizard — which, by the way, is planning to make a third "Super Troopers" movie — talks about the motivations for "QUASI," working with co-star Adrianne Palicki and more:

Q How much was making this movie about telling a zero-to-hero story and how much was it about making fun of the French?

Soter: Why not both?

Heffernan: Yeah, there's no reason not to do both, right?

I think when we put it in ye olde France, we knew that would generate a lot of comedy and allow you to do things like Monty Python or Mel Brooks and have license to do certain funny things. And what was the other thing?

Q The zero-to-hero story.

Heffernan: That was another great thing because we hadn't really done that before. We hadn't really focused on one character and watched their arc, watched their journey, and I think that's really a way that you draw people into the story — or into any story — so they root for the guy. We've never kind of done that with one character before, so that was an exercise for us that was new. We really love how it worked out because it allowed other guys to be bad guys and two-dimensional characters. I think that zero-to-hero thing opened up a whole lot of doors for us.

Soter: It always felt to us like the idea of any kind of hero's journey was incompatible with ensemble movies because it's, "Ok, the five of us have to do this." Or "the five of us have to go drink beer" or whatever. It was cool to be like, "No, you can tell a guy's story and have a lead, but that doesn't mean that that makes the other four guys less essential to the movie."

Lemme: I've heard this so many times now from people who've screened the movie: "Oh, you guys finally made a real movie."

Stolhanske: 'Bout time. It's only our eighth movie together.

Q You mention Monty Python. How much were you guys trying to pay homage to 1975's "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" with "QUASI"?

Lemme: I consider that period of film comedy to be the golden era. You had Monty Python, Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin, the John Landis movies, Belushi, Caddyshack — all those movies. So I think all of our minds were shaped by Monty Python — certainly "Holy Grail," "Life of Brian." And then (you have) five guys being in a comedy group and Jay named it Broken Lizard after Monty Python. We're just following — not that we're ever going to be like Monty Python or measure up to those guys, but that model is something we were definitely influenced by.

Stolhanske: Yeah, you get nervous when you're compared to them too much because they are the holy grail. (Turns to Lemme) There's our nod. Did you like that?

Lemme: Yeah, I liked that.

Q Like 2018's "Super Troopers 2," this movie is being released on 4-20. Should we read anything into that?

Heffernan: (Laughs)

Soter: If you're into numerology, yeah ... .

Heffernan: I'm not sure what it is.

Chandrasekhar: I mean, we smoked some joints while we wrote it, so, you know, watching it with those similar kinds of joints might be a good way to unlock its secrets.

Q You hadn't worked with Adrianne Palicki before, correct? Why was she cast for the role of the king's new queen?

Heffernan: No, we never worked with her. We were fans of hers from "Friday Night Lights," and she's in "The Orville." And we knew that she could do comedy and she could do drama and she can do action. And she looks like a queen — she's so statuesque and stately looking.

It's always a challenge for someone to come into this world because we've known each other for so long, but she fit right in. She came in and was very comfortable — very comfortable contributing and improvising, all that kind of stuff. I think when you watch the movie, you can see that she's a part of it. She's a comedy generator as well as anybody else is.

Q Watching the movie, it's fair to wonder where it was shot. Why instead of some historic location did you choose to convert a set in Santa Clarita, California, into medieval France?

Soter: I may have been the most dubious. because I maybe just assumed, OK, if we ever maybe make this movie, we're going to Europe, we're going to Canada. We're going to someplace where they have castles and it looks like that.

Heffernan: Lemme and I were in the middle of shooting our season of (truTV series) "Tacoma FD," and we just kind of rolled our crew over and said we can do this really fast if we do it locally, and we found this ranch where they shoot films, and we turned it into a medieval village. And then with a little CGI help, we added some castles and boom — we made Santa Clarita into medieval France.

Stolhanske: And that set originally had (stood in) for Afghanistan, if I'm not mistaken.

Heffernan: They had used that set for (something like "SEAL Team").

Stolhanske: "American Sniper."

Heffernan: It was a Middle East village we built into a medieval village.

Q Is it a bummer this movie isn't going to theaters?

Heffernan; I don't think it's a bummer. We made the deal during the pandemic, and there was no theatrical (opportunity) when the deal was made and we were preparing to shoot. That was just the way of the world at that point in time. And I think comedy films have not quite come back to the theater yet, so this probably is a better avenue for us right now. I'm sure we'll go back into the theater, but for us, we tell stories and the best way to get them to the most people is what's important to us.

Lemme: The hurdle we always had to overcome is a lot of our audience are stoners, and so on an opening weekend of our movies, we'd have great awareness — and then you realize a lot of the stoners just stayed at home. And you'd hear from them (in stoner voice), "We're just waiting for it to come out on home video, man."

(Everybody laughs)

Lemme: And you're like, "[Expletive] stoners." So this is great: We'll have an opening weekend where we'll just drop it right into their living rooms.