It’s been a rough year for comedy films. I mean rough. Last Friday, a movie came out in which Kevin Spacey finds himself trapped inside the body of a cat. And U.S. audiences have needed the respite more than ever, what with the neverending deluge of terrorist attacks, police shootings, the rise of a hate-filled tweet-mad Cheeto dipped in cotton candy, and the realization that, perhaps, David Bowie was the magical glue holding this crazy universe together.
Fortunately for those seeking comedy sustenance, you’ll find it in this week’s Sausage Party, an extremely R-rated animated odyssey from the creative duo of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg—you know, the fellas who wrote Superbad together at 16, co-directed This Is the End and The Interview, and shepherded the hit AMC series Preacher.
Sausage Party tells the story of the grocery items in Shopwell’s who all dream of being chosen (a la the aliens in Toy Story’s claw machine) by customers so that they’ll be carted off into the sweet, sex-filled afterlife. Frank (voiced by Seth Rogen), one of a package of sausages, is particularly excited to get inside the hot dog bun of Brenda (Kristen Wiig). But when he discovers that there is no afterlife, and that food is in fact brutally slaughtered and consumed by people, he tries to warn his fellow anthropomorphic brethren of the ugly truth.
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According to Rogen, every studio except Sony passed on the “fuck”-filled project, co-directed by Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan—and featuring music by Beauty and the Beast’s Alan Menken (!)—because nobody had seen anything like it before.
“What’s funny is every meeting ended with me thinking they were going to make it,” Rogen tells The Daily Beast. “It’s a response we’ve had before of, ‘This is amazing, this is great. We can’t make this.’ It happened with Superbad, Pineapple Express, and everyone rejected This Is the End except Sony. What we consistently underestimate is how hard it is to get movies made where there isn’t something to point to that’s analogous to it.”Rogen, Goldberg, and pal Jonah Hill—who voices Carl, the most dickish sausage—came up with the film’s title at Hill’s house back in 2006, and worked backward from there. Then, it took three years to develop the concept of “an R-rated Pixar-style movie” and in 2010, after a year of work, they finished the first draft of the script. They penned it while making the dramedy 50/50, based on their pal Will Reiser’s real-life battle with cancer. “It was a good way to blow off steam and take our minds off what we were doing,” remembers Rogen. “Then it took another three years from that point to get Megan Ellison to come onboard and finance it.”
Annapurna Pictures’ Ellison came on in 2013, ponying up the dough for the $30 million project, and the film was a go. In addition to Ellison, one of the biggest early supporters of the movie was Edward Norton, who voices the nebbishy bagel Sammy Bagel Jr.
“[Norton’s] been a friend of ours for around 10 years—and when we first came up with the idea we told it to him and he said, ‘I want to be in it, and I want to play a bagel that sounds exactly like Woody Allen.’ And then he did the impression for us and we were like wow, that’s fucking incredible,” says Rogen. “He then helped us get Salma Hayek, who we didn’t know at all, and did most of the convincing to get Kristen Wiig onboard. He was really the silent champion of this movie.”
Norton was so enthusiastic about the movie he’d bring it up to everyone he came across, including his Oscar-winning Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
“Jonah [Hill] said he was at a dinner party with Edward Norton and Iñárritu, and the whole time it was Edward Norton trying to explain Sausage Party to Iñárritu, who didn’t quite get it but kind of did,” says Rogen, with a laugh. “Jonah was like, man, this is one of the most surreal conversations I’ve ever witnessed taking place in my entire life!”
One sequence that everyone will be talking about in Sausage Party, perhaps for years to come, is its climactic orgy, where all of the groceries have sex with each other in every position imaginable.
“It’s about two-and-a-half minutes long. There are a lot of panels,” chuckles Rogen. “There was a version that was eight minutes long at one point. We told the animators go fuckin’ bonkers, and then we had to scale it back a lot to a place where it was consumable. It took months and months and months! I think the first version we watched of that orgy was while we were filming The Interview, so about three years ago, and we didn’t get to the final version of it until around the middle of May. So that’s a long time!”
If this orgy involved real people, it’d never get released on Netflix—let alone in theaters. But it’s still pretty damn shocking, and really fucking hilarious, nonetheless. Rogen claims that only about “one second” of the orgy sequence was cut and that they were “pleasantly, pleasantly shocked” by the lack of censorship on the part of the studio and MPAA.
“We made it dirtier than we’d originally planned because we were expecting some sort of negotiation, so when we first heard it was getting kickback we felt, OK, let’s change as little as possible,” Rogen recalls. “Then we sent that in and approved it, and we were like, ‘What?!’ We thought that would be the first of fifty back-and-forths that would happen.”
Rogen and Goldberg are, of course, no strangers to controversy. Their last film, the Kim Jong Un satire The Interview, allegedly triggered the hacking of Sony Pictures by a group claiming ties to North Korea (the FBI believed it was North Korea, while many cybersecurity experts thought otherwise). Threats followed, the movie was pulled from theaters, and Obama even addressed the controversy in his last presser of 2014, calling out “Seth Rogen and James Flacco [sic]” by name.
Looking back on that “eye-opening” experience, Rogen says he still doesn’t have a theory as to who perpetrated the hack, and was most “shocked and disappointed with how the media dealt with people’s stolen personal information.” He also thinks that it’s patently absurd when comedians complain about how “PC culture” is ruining comedy and can’t handle the backlash that their jokes provoke.
“As someone who was involved in, like, an actual controversy, I’m really confused by people who tell an edgy joke, piss people off, and then consider themselves the victim of some backlash,” say Rogen. “So they’re mad? It’s your right to tell the joke and it’s their right to get mad at it. That’s why you tell the joke in the first place—some people will get mad, and some people will laugh. I personally am confused by the ‘PC culture’ thing. I hear people talking about it a lot, and to me, it’s equally whiny on the person saying that’s behalf.”
That’s not the only strange thing to happen to Rogen. Of late, a Twitter user who goes by the handle @SamePhotoOfSeth tweets out the same exact picture of the actor every day: a still of him glaring mock-seductively at the camera in his parody music video to Kanye West’s “Bound 2,” wherein a shirtless Rogen plays the Kim Kardashian to James Franco’s Kanye West as they gyrate on top of a motorcycle.
“Someone just tweets the same photo of Seth every single day. The same photo,” he says. “I take it as a compliment. No one would dedicate that much time to me out of hate… I think. And I started following them and they follow me, so they’ve started direct-messaging me the photo as well. Every few days I get a photo and it’s… it’s very weird!”
Another surreal thing to happen to Rogen was the time he and Franco were almost invited by Kanye West to perform their “Bound 2” parody at the rapper’s star-studded wedding to Kim Kardashian in Florence, Italy.
“Kanye kind of decided in the course of the call where he was asking us to do it that it was a bad idea. I’m sure you’ve had an idea that in your head sounds good, and then when you start to say it out loud you realize it’s not,” says Rogen. “But he called us up and me and Franco are both on, and I’ve met him a bunch of times so it wasn’t this epic formal conversation, it was just this casual chat of, Do you think that would be funny? Maybe it would be weird… or would it be funny? It’s actually the exact conversation I’d have with a comedian where you ask, ‘Would it be funny? How long would it be funny for? Would it be funny for long enough? Maybe not. And if it’s a big schlep for you guys for two seconds of comedy, maybe not.’” “I would love to work with Kanye West in some capacity,” he adds. “The right opportunity has not arisen yet, but I’m a huge fan of his.”
In the meantime, Rogen recently shot a pilot with Goldberg for Hulu called Future Man, which stars Josh Hutcherson as a “janitor at a sexual disease research laboratory who becomes the first person to beat a very obscure video game, and then is told he is the savior of humanity because he beat that game.” Rogen calls it “a cross between Terminator 2, The Last Starfighter, and Back to the Future,” and basically an “R-rated sci-fi TV comedy.” He’s also keen to develop sequels to Sausage Party as well as other R-rated animated films, hinting at a few more original ideas up his sleeve.
“Sausage Party is one of the only movies we’ve ever made where, as we were making it, we thought we’d like to do more of these,” he says. “I do really hope it does well not just to make another Sausage Party, but so it will open up the doors for anyone who has an idea for an animated movie that isn’t strictly for children.”
