Director BenDavid Grabinski on the retro sensibility of ‘Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice’

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:13Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. My guest, Ben David Grabinski, has a penchant, we should say, for making movies, action comedies about trust and the lack thereof. We can look at that certainly and happily. Also, he likes to work with really tall guys. His newest film, his filmmaker is, and I love saying this title, Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice. First of all, Ben Deer, thanks so much for being here. Hey, it's great being here. I'm super excited about this. Well, I'll fix that. But it's interesting that so much of what you do is really about trust and lack thereof and how trust is kind of constantly shifting in these stories, isn't it?

0:50Well, I like making something that kind of from a tonal level can feel a little juvenile, but then is about really complicated, messy adult things. It's like I like channeling the love of everything that meant something to me when I was 14, but then also combining it with like life experience and just kind of the, you know, the older you get, the more you're surrounded by kind of these complicated things emotionally and in terms of relationships of friendships and romantic relationships. And I mean, trust definitely weighs in. But that also just is like paranoia is like one of the best things to put in a movie because it there's like a level of engagement you get of like if you're worried about characters and don't know if you can trust them.

1:39There's this added level of tension that you can just sort of bake into everything. So I think I think that just the idea of trust itself is just cinematic, I guess. Certainly is the way you do it. You said things that you dug since you was 14. Does that explain why you opened the movie with a song from Oliver and Company? You know... I never thought I would hear in the movie again. Well, I love a big musical opening, whether it's like Tony Scott's The Hunger or Streets of Fire or Stop Making Sense, which is just already a concert movie. But I like having kind of a declarative statement where you just get to sort of make a musical but not make a musical.

2:20And I also felt like I haven't seen the cliche mad scientist time machine guy done in that way. You know? No, I mean, it's the way that the movie opens the bench. Not only is he singing the song, but he's basically doing a duet with himself as he's rapping during the breaks and the lyrics. Well, I hired a George Miller storyboard artist to design with me every shot of that. and then kind of went through the lyrics and broke everything up into segments and then spent a whole night shooting that because I just felt like people get really obsessed with grabbing people in the opening of the movies and worrying about algorithms and all this bulls**t.

3:03And I'm just like, what if I just open in a way you are not expecting? And, you know, I love a good opening credit scene. And I have to imagine the majority of people who watch the movie are not expecting it to open in that way. And I think that it's helpful. You sort of tell an audience how to watch your movie in the first reel. And I think you want to let them know if you always if you think you know, it's going to zig, it's going to zag. And to not get too complacent in the rhythms of it. Because if I'm going to open with a guy singing an Oliver and Company song, I might, you know, have some other surprising elements later.

3:37Now, we talked around the movie a little bit. I'm going to ask you to tell people what the movie is. so the movie is Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice and it is my uh entry into the buddy action comedy genre but in a way that you probably haven't seen before uh I just really wanted to do a my version of that that gave you everything you like about those movies but in a package that was very new and specific and I also wanted to make a time travel movie where uh none of the characters were scientists, where you don't have the scene with charts and graphs or someone explaining it, where there's no one around who can really walk you through the science of the thing.

4:22They're not like the smartest people. They have moments of it. And it's really, to me, a movie about people who get some clarity and some wisdom who didn't have it before, within the context of, you know, we all love crime comedies where people are a little out of their depth and you know they're professional in some ways and they're competent in some ways and in others they're it's a bunch of people who are kind of missing information i would say that both this and happily about people sort of basically grow up or forced to grow up and then sort of realize what the world is uh in action comedy sequences which is really kind of interesting yeah i just think that if people don't have anything to learn and they have everything figured out, you know, movies would be like, you know, 10 minutes long.

5:11Like, I mean, the thing that dictates a feature length to me in the best way is making it about people who haven't figured everything out, because that is kind of the fun is finding a time in their life when they maybe get it together or they try and fail. But you're, I think some of the best movies are you just, you kind of lock in on the, on a shifting point in someone's emotional life where they kind of get some perspective they didn't have before. Whether it's just purely a character movie or a drama or a comedy or an action comedy or in this case, a buddy action comedy, time travel, gangster, romantic comedy, thriller.

5:48You know, I think that that's always kind of a good approach. Because like if everyone in this movie was a genius, there'd be no story. No, it's the truth. We should be talking about a movie called Handgun Time Machine. But in fact, it's called Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice. My guess is it's director, writer, Ben-Derek Grubinski. Nick and Nick actually kind of makes sense because not only is it a Nick from two different periods, both played by Vince Vaughn, but also there is one who reads itself from the way they're dressed, that they're actually from two different sort of emotional points in their life, can't we?

6:23The most generic cliche way to explain it is I just always thought that Scrooge at the end of the story and Scrooge at the beginning of the story, it'd be really great to just see them buttheads in a scene. Because there is something about the clarity you get if you're lucky enough to change and realize like the error of your ways, that how much you would hate your earlier self, but how you'd also have empathy for the person. but then how the present day person who has not had any enlightenment yet would be so sure of themselves and just so annoyed with the other person. I just sort of feel like there's a lot of comedy and drama inherently in just the contrast of that.

7:04And I think that we all, you know, every once in a while, look at who we were, whether you're looking at a photo or you're just remembering something you went through and you're like, that feels like lifetimes ago. And sometimes it doesn't really have to be that long of a time to feel that way. I mean, there's, you know, and I also just think, too, everyone has had a friendship or a relationship that went awry. And we just there's not a way that we would fix it. And but if you had a time machine, you literally could. But in the current state, kind of conflict can be uncalcified and these things can get up.

7:42And I like the idea of a guy just trying to get a redo on a friendship gone wrong that he only has the perspective on because it went as wrong as possible. It's also to use the action sequences. I think both of us and Happily just sort of say fights are messy. And there's the first fight that sort of takes place in the movie. There actually could have been talking about Jackie Chan before we started. It could be a Sammo Hung, a Jackie Chan fight. Well, I sent my fight guys two things. I sent them Jackie Chan stuff. And I think some of the ones clips I'd sent were from one Samo Hung. And then also the fight scene from Zemeckis used cars where there's a scene where in the trailer.

8:27Yeah, there's a very messy fight where like someone goes swing a chair, but then the chair hits the ceiling or they go to kick, but they fall down. And I wanted to sort of combine those two things where I didn't want it to be like, you know, John Hughes slapstick, but I did want to have that Jackie Chan thing that's messy and using the environment, but also the messiness of the used cars one. and then each of the fight scenes to me kind of were a different combination in a lot of ways they're just sort of different combinations of different like hong kong action movies i like but there's also those reference points of like the used cars thing and stuff like that where there's the messier the better i've heard something actually of the um the fight in the trailer in raising arizona oh absolutely i mean that movie has some of the best really some of the best action filmmaking.

9:16There's like really, the foot chase scene in that one, you know, it's like, goes toe to toe with the one from Point Break for me. Sort of the visual style of it, like the super wide angle, Barry Sonnenfeld thing, is something I would just never try to ape because you would just know immediately it was that. Even though a lot of that stuff also does feel like it owes a debt to the Raimi Evil Dead 2 stuff. Oh, Vibble very much does. Yeah, because there's a very big, there's a weird, a bit of an overlap of the kind of visual anarchy, especially before the Coen started working with Roger Deakins. But weirdly, they're great action directors.

9:52I think that the Danny Boy's sequence in Miller's Crossing is one of the great kind of gun scenes. And it is very, it's very meat and potatoes. It's sort of just like, it's like simple shot choices, but it has just such an incredible progression to it. And it's like, all these guys, it's two things I always say is I wish that my favorite artful filmmakers would make a full on action movie. And I wish my favorite filmmakers like that would also make a horror movie because there's something about people who are gifted in doing, you know, violence or these surprising moments where I kind of want to see, like, I just would love to have the Coen brothers just make like they, you know, no country is kind of a chase movie.

10:31Like it's got big action set pieces, but I would just like to see them maybe slum it a little and do their version of like a Tony Scott thing. Although now Now I'm going like in such an insane tangent because I think they were calling Burn after reading their Tony Scott movie. Because Vince Vaughn has also kind of interestingly become kind of an action star in the past decade. You know, with stuff like drag across concrete and that kind of thing. And we're aware of the way he uses his size in this. And the two Nicks being so, so different. One being much more impulsive and the other being much more deliberate.

11:04And we can see that in the way he moves physically. I want you to talk about that because that's really interesting sort of character being realized through through action. Yeah, my point of view on the two things was that Nick, Vince's character, is sort of a brawler. He's a guy who is like improvising as he goes along. And then Mike's character to me is like a precise former. Yeah, James Marsden is more like a precise, focused, former mercenary military guy who is very, like, trained and deliberate. And then the other guy just sort of, like, jumps in the deep end and starts swinging. I knew that Vince could do it because of, like, the brawl in Cell Block 99 and dragged across concrete, but especially in brawl.

11:49And then I wanted to sort of push that more into, like, my tone. I knew James could do it because of Hairspray and which is I think that choreography is choreography And I think that if someone can do really good Dancing choreography they can do action. So it's like and that when I first met with him He's like well, I've never done like a John Wick style thing and I'm like, well, this isn't exactly that per se But it's just choreography and I literally just watched Hairspray on a plane and it was where I had like a weird epiphany about it which is if you learn the choreography and you know went to a shooting range and learn how to like hold a gun and I view those as kind of like musical sequences where you know in his stuff like if you go back and watch it his stuff feels very very designed and then Vince's feels a little bit more loony tunes but there's like the intensity comes from his size you know it's like you don't want to get in a fight with that guy but he's also the guy who's using his environment and kind of just he's making it up as he goes along.

12:51It should feel like Mike goes in our room and has Terminator vision and is just like lasering in on his plan and just is executing A, B, C, D. Wow. It's a pleasure to finally talk to you about your film, my guest. It's been David Kubiski. His new film on who is Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice. It's the treatment. There's more to come. Stay with us. Hey y 'all, each week on the Sam Sanders Show from KCRW, we ask big questions and share hot takes about the pop culture we love. Now that we have YouTube, we don't need any more biopics. If they've been alive such that I can watch them on YouTube, I don't need it.

13:29I don't think that music is getting worse. I think y 'all just don't listen to artists who aren't in the mainstream. Taylor Swift, retire. It's time to retire. The Sam Sanders Show from KCRW, wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.

14:07who is time traveled from doing something. And Alice is sort of the linchpin of a kind of a love triangle. Yeah, Alice is in an unhappy marriage. And, you know, if a normal person realizes they want out, that's easy. But if you are married to someone who's dangerous and kind of a criminal and a gangster, there is a kind of added level of fear. and so she's kind of caught between a rock and a hard place and then you know I wanted to do my favorite one of my favorite subgenres which is like a one night gone wrong movie where it feels like if they just live until the sun comes up everything will be okay and the structure of the movie is predicated on it starts after the sun is set you kind of understand what you're getting into and it's just these people need to get to the end of the night in one piece because this is you find out the second time someone has gone through this and last time things went very poorly so they're kind of operating um with that knowledge and the sense of danger comes from knowing that this is their only shot this isn't a time travel movie where people are just going to keep doing something as a loop it's like they did they used it this one time and that's it i think a lot of stuff you do also has kind of roots in noir oh absolutely that's why i was talking about betrayal in the in the first half because that really is sort of something that kind of keeps things moving But what we get in your movies is a real sensation of people having their feelings hurt, rather than it being about a mission, or not just about a mission.

15:42But, you know, there's a lot of wounded feelings in this movie. Well, you know, it's both those things at once. There's a lot of wounded feelings. It's also why the title is an homage to Mikey and Nikki and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, because I'm saying it's a gangster friendship movie, but it's also like a complicated marriage movie. But the noir thing, I literally do the exact like car mount from Kiss Me Deadly for like a driving scene with Jimmy Boy later. And everything to me is going to have some shades of noir. And there's like an alley scene in this movie where like James is being followed by Vince and he's worried he's like going to his death.

16:21That to me feels very much like one of those things. because you know like the thing about noir to me that I love is it's just about people who are kind of doomed you know there's a way you could tell this story where these people are just f***ed and I'm going to a very nihilistic ending but the inherent premise of it it's almost like this is a sequel to the version of this story that had a very nihilistic ending that you know just ends with a guy staring off in this existential haze you know you play this 70s music and then it freezes and then credits start rolling and you're like oh that was so f***ed up I'm depressed for days but what if that guy got a time machine because i always just think about how i feel at the end of something like mikey and nicky where i just like if i see it in a theater i like walk to the train or my car and it's like it just it's such a bummer but in the best way where it's like i just wish these two guys could have figured it out they really at one time loved each other but it was too late and you know the mikey nicky relationship almost exists between the two nicks because the nick of six months ago again was much more impulsive was much more even presentation in the way he dressed.

17:25I mean, he really wanted to send a signal in the way he looked versus the Nick that when they encounter each other, even though they're still both fast talkers, we can sort of see the Nick who comes from the future is a bit more deliberate and ruminative and not so quick to react. Exactly. And that's why when Mike is talking to him in the car, he kind of almost doesn't know him because he's like, wait, I don't... We learn why later in the film. Yeah, and that was the exact intention was you should feel like, oh, no, can I trust this guy? But what you realize is the disconnect is just because this is not the same person that you're dealing with on a day to day basis.

18:00Not that there's some, you know, alarms going off in Mike's brain and James Marsden's character where he's like, this, I'm just something is fundamentally odd sitting across from this guy. I'm in trouble. This is not how I normally feel around him. I don't feel safe. And then it ends up being like a different thing. But the you know, your feeling you should have is that unease. It's like, we've all had people that we love or know really well who start acting odd and we're like, what's going on with them? And then you might find, oh, well, this thing happened or this is going on or, but using that for kind of tension in a movie to me is a fun way to kind of pull the audience through dynamics, you know?

18:43I feel like in these films you've done, you use like the opening scenes to sort of tell us signal you we're getting one thing but then that thing's going to be much more complicated than we expect and i wonder as a writer if that's what you always want to do in a weird way metaphorically you're laying out the entire movie in the first scene in terms of the emotional gems yeah it's you there's you want to like disorient the viewer and also kind of guide them along through the story you're trying to tell, which is that at the end of the day, these stories are actually kind of simple, but the way I'm telling them or kind of structurally how we're kind of floating from sequence to sequence, it keeps you a little off kilter because I just don't want it to feel like, I don't just don't want it to feel mechanical where it's like, obviously A must lead to B to C to D, you know, but I think on second viewing, it feels sort of like, well, this is just sort of how the story had to go.

19:43It does feel a little bit more obvious, but I do, I just love opening a movie. I just think that, you know, you get to kind of make a declarative statement of style and tone and energy. And also, you know, so far in both of these things, and also it was like the same, like the Scott Pilgrim show is like, They do get to be very music centric. And I think that doing that right off the bat kind of establishes that the movie is going to exist in that way. Because I don't think I would ever make anything that didn't have songs. Just for me, it's a big part of my process. and I like kind of something that feels like sort of an idiosyncratic jukebox thing because I personally kind of get frustrated that a lot of stuff feels generic or like let's just get everyone's favorite song from the 70s to show that we just cut to the 70s kind of thing where it's like you just want the energy to be unexpected whether it's earnest and it makes it seem more badass or there is like sometimes there's a sense of like it's funny that the song is happening.

20:53It's like, you know, Dave Matthews at a strip club is not something I've seen in a movie before. And right or wrong. But I committed to that decision because it's just, you know, whatever. My guest who clearly delights in his own perversity is the writer and director of Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice, Ben David Kravinsky, the movies on Hulu. Thanks so much for being here. Hey, this was great. I had a great time.

21:24Writer-director Ben David Grabinski makes action comedy noir about loyalty, and his newest in this narrow subgenre is Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice, starring Vince Vaughn, James Marsden, and Vince Vaughn. It's now streaming on ULU. All sorts of creators who reinvent genres. Hear those conversations at the archive, kcrw.com slash the treatment. We also drop installments on creators talking about inspiring moments every week at kcrw.com slash the treat. The newest is from New York Times style writer Guy Trave on being the only person I know, besides myself, to participate in a radical activity, walking in Los Angeles.

22:15This week's journey is accomplished by Rebecca Mooney, who produces and edits the show, and Katie Gilchrist, who mixes it. To better days, everyone, I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's The Treatment.