Just over 20 years ago, Tim Matheson ("Eric Stratton, Rush Chairman, damn glad to meetya") turned to his fellow Deltas in a moment of crisis and uttered the immortal line: "Road trip." The film was "National Lampoon's Animal House," and those two words led to one of the movie's funniest and most memorable sequences.
Ivan Reitman, the producer of "Animal House" and now an executive producer on "Road Trip," knew what was true then is still true today: that this collegiate "rite of passage" is rife with comedic possibilities. "Ever since 'Animal House' I have thought there was a funny movie to be found in expanding the idea of the college road trip," Reitman attests.
However, it was not until the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, when Reitman saw Todd Phillips' award-winning documentary "Frat House," that he found whom he thought was the right filmmaker to take a new generation on a no-holds-barred road trip where anything can happen.. .and usually does.
For Phillips, the connection could not have been more perfect. "I always saw 'Frat House' as documentary's answer to 'Animal House,"' the director reveals. "When I met Ivan at Sundance, he talked to me about a new film idea he had, which eventually became 'Road Trip.' It's been really exciting for me because I grew up on Ivan's comedies, and they're still among my favorites."
"Meeting with Todd, I just had a sense that he knew where the joke was," Reitman recalls. "It's not something you can teach; it's something innate—some people have it and some don't. I felt Todd had it, and as we developed the script, I was even more sure.
Producer Dan Goldberg concurs, "Ivan had a sense about Todd, and it really paid off because he turned out to be a terrific director. Every day he came up with new ideas and original approaches to things that were just great. When you talk to Todd, you realize immediately that he has a comedic edge and a genuine point of view, and he brought both to the film, beginning with the script."
In writing the screenplay, Phillips collaborated with fellow writer Scot Armstrong, who notes, "We wanted to create some funny college characters and put them on the road. Once we had a good reason for them to go, we could do virtually anything... put them in different situations and see how they react. The universe of what can happen on a road trip is wide open, so it's a great comedy structure, and anyone who's ever stopped at a restaurant or rest stop in the middle of nowhere can tell you there's a bunch of weird, interesting people to mix it up with. There's always that one guy eating pie who you're thinking, 'What's his deal?"'
Phillips adds, "When you write a comedy, I think the key is, of course, to make it as funny as you can, but then to cast actors who make every scene funnier onscreen than it reads in the script. Having seen our cast work, I can definitely say they made every scene funnier than what was written on the page.
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