Acid tablets, naked men, blackmail-minded midgets and dead bodies falling out of coffins might not be par for the course at your average funeral, but when you get a group featuring the likes of Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan, Danny Glover and Martin Lawrence together, things are bound to get exciting.
Death at a Funeral, a re-imagining of the 2007 British comedy of the same name, delivers all those shenanigans and more. On April 11, Rock and Morgan took the time to discuss their new movie on a conference call.
While comparisons will certainly be drawn between this film and the original, both Morgan and Rock say it’s only vaguely similar.
“The British are very mannered, they’re very polite with their comedy,” Rock said. “And this [movie], it’s not even a remake, it’s a remix. It’s a Timbaland remix.”
Rock described the film as more blunt than the British version.
“Maybe [it’s] a little bit more over-the-top in places, so it’s a funkier version,” he said. “It’s like Aretha Franklin singing a Beatles song.”
One theme from the original remains strongly present in the “remix,” however: acceptance.
“This movie is really about accepting your family for who they are, not to judge people,” Rock said. “This guy finds out his dad is gay and he’s all right with it. . . . “That’s my dad and I love him no matter what.'”
Rock said the film had an important message for the African American community.
“We all have gay relatives and we need to just get over [it],” he said. “We need to be more inclusive. People should be able to be out of the closet at least around their families.”
“Yes, everybody has something,” said Morgan. “If you have a cocaine habit, then you have a cocaine habit, deal with it.”
One other similarity between the two productions is actor Peter Dinklage, who reprises his role from the 2007 production. Morgan, who has worked with Dinklage before on 30 Rock, called the other actor “the coolest dude in the world, man. [Peter] is my bro, man. He’s my bro, bro.”
However, Rock said that the cast of the new film didn’t rely on Dinklage for too much advice.
“He knew where the mistakes [were],” said Rock. “He knew, [when] every now and then we’re trying to do new stuff and he goes, “we tried that. Why don’t you try this?’ so we wouldn’t repeat mistakes they did in the first.”
Morgan said the new cast didn’t use the original film as much of a guide, either. He said the movie was alike in plot, but said that the new cast “wanted to add our flavor to it.”
“I wanted to complement the role that I saw,” he said. “And when I saw the cast at Screen Gems that Chris and everybody had assembled, I was like, this is going to be the bomb, baby.”
However, despite the fact that the majority of the main characters in the new movie are African American, Rock said the movie was more for a mainstream audience, not necessarily just an African American audience.
“This is an American audience movie. This is not Soul Plane,” he said. “This is for everybody. Me and Tracy are two guys that have worked for mass audiences for more than a decade. So I think the audience for this movie is a pretty big audience.”
Death at a Funeral opens nationwide this Friday, April 16.
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