Focus on Tone and Emotion: A Conversation with ‘Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice’ Writer-Director BenDavid Grabinski

The film is a hilarious, stylized, R-rated action-comedy about two gangsters and the woman they love trying to survive the most dangerous night of their lives. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s one wild ingredient added to the mix: a time machine.

There’s a sheer delight I get as a viewer when I learn more about characters and plot within the second, and third and so on viewing of a film. And yet the jokes and performances never feel stale. If anything, it emphasizes how solid and cohesive the writing and direction is. And filmmaker BenDavid Grabinski is one of those filmmakers that delivers every time.

His latest action-comedy film Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is clever, painstakingly funny and a visual joy – and revolves around doubles and time traveling. Not an easy task on paper, but once again, Grabinski dialed it all in. Grabinski returned to speak with Script about focusing on the complex narrative involving time travel, character doubles and emotional depth. Plus, using the after-party as a structural device to guide the audience, balancing humor and violence, and the importance of character development, particularly Nick’s transformation.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: A lot of moving pieces here from story and characters, and time travel. How were you able to map everything out so that it logically made sense?

BenDavid Grabinski: The helpful thing is you have to be a little bit smarter than your characters. And I wanted to make a science fiction movie that didn't have any of the normal sci-fi characters, so there's no scientists alive after the first few minutes of the movie, and the machine has blown up, and the lead character hadn't planned on coming back, and it's far enough back in time that he doesn't have a perfect memory of the whole evening.

So, this isn't like some super complicated story where the guy remembers that at exactly 11:12pm this door opened and I'm gonna have to hide behind the other thing. I wanted to boil everything down into something much simpler, because it could easily be incredibly complicated, and I would rather have people focus on tone and emotion, and the kind of the more just the betrayal stuff more than the science stuff.

In that sense, making a movie that takes place in one night that is not constant loops that has pretty clear goals made it digestible for me as a writer. And also, I think that also correlates to the viewer as well. The fun of the movie to me is not in it being overly dense. I love some movies that are like that, but this isn't like a mind fuck time travel movie.

I'm using time travel as an excuse for an emotional context, like in Back to the Future is what if you could hang out with a 16 year old version of your dad, and this is using time travel to see what if you could go back to your pre-enlightened self, this person who you really regret being, and how do you talk some sense into that person. Using it for character conflict, as opposed to really plotting stuff.

Sadie: There’s something else really fun that you’re doing as a writer, which is using the “after-party” joke as a structural act break device. Was that something that was originally on the page or something that came to life in post?

BenDavid: It was at the very, very earliest stages of everything. The movie is functionally two plots that are parallel that smash into each other for the finale. When you're cutting away to the lead guys, you need it to be fun, and also you need to sort of guide the audience through kind of structurally where you're heading. So, when you establish really early there's X amount of parties and you know they're trying to keep Mike alive, you sort of unconsciously buy into, OK the ticking clock of this movie really is how many parties are left.

Even if it's not overt, it's designed to make you feel like this story is all building to the last party. Because there's so much stuff for people to track, I think having something that clean is amusing to me, but also, it's helpful for the viewer, because it just kind of pulls you through it, and it helps you kind of understand where you're at.

The movie starts with the first party; the movie is going to end at the last party. The further you go through the A plot, the more you're realizing you're getting near the end of that, because there's not many parties left, so it feels like those things are just kind of like two trains heading to the same destination.

Sadie: Another standout in this film is the dialogue. It’s whimsical, sometimes childlike – it reminded me of when you’re a kid and you’re playing outside with your friends making up weird adventures and saying that craziest things to each other.  How’d you land on that tone, where it’s both whimsical but you’re also delivering important information, and emotional context?

BenDavid: The fun challenge to me was balancing three disparate elements: one, it's a very violent, R-rated movie; two, I wanted it to be filled with lovable goofballs; and three, I also really wanted it to be emotional at the end, in a way that was relatable and sad - and all those things can seemingly contradict each other.

So, the challenge of it is just figuring out that balance, because there's a line of how silly Jimmy Boy and Roid Rage Ryan and Dumbass Tony can be that I have my own internal barometer for. There's some improv that Jimmy [Tatro] did, which I found unbelievably funny, but was like one notch too far.

For example, there's a scene when he's presented with a golden shotgun that has JB initials on it, and what I wrote was he asked his dad, 'What does the JB stand for?' And we did another take, and I said, you can try whatever you want, and what he said made me laugh even harder, but as you'll understand, as I presented to you, it's just a little too stupid, was he had the gun, looked up at his dad, and says, 'Is this a gun?' [laughs]

And it's so funny, and in context it is so funny, but it feels just like one notch too stupid, where he still needs to be an imposing threat, and you just kind of have to find your own rules that you create or fall in your gut about when something is just too much.

That's mostly a post issue of the construction of the movie, is just figuring out where your north star is on that stuff, and sticking to it, you can never get too silly that there are no stakes, but you also don't want the characters to be so serious that it feels self-important. And there's jokes that for me would absolutely work in Scott Pilgrim, that in the world of this movie would just turn it into a cartoon, and this movie verges on being one at times, but there are lines you can cross dramatically or comedically that you need to be careful with, is just my feeling.

Sadie: This is probably one of my favorite roles that Vince Vaughan has played. And I’m very curious about the creative conversations you two had in terms of him balancing the two characters, the emotional highs and lows, and really just sculpting the two Nicks.

BenDavid: It just required a lot of conversations, because the interesting thing is you go to an actor's trailer at the beginning of the day and you're discussing which person you're going to be playing first, and it's like you're talking to someone about two different characters. He would prefer, once we figured out the order to focus on the first one and not really discuss the other guy until he was coming back in the afternoon and the other costume to do the thing, so he could just sort of stay in one emotional head space for him.

There's a learning curve you have, we're trying to figure out how to thread that needle of the needs of an actor, but also the technical requirements of the thing, where you want to say, ‘I know we want to focus on future Nick right now, but we should make sure we're on the same page of present Nick in this scene that we're gonna be shooting this afternoon, because that'll affect what we're doing here.’ And trying to figure out the balance of it, because he's kind of a moment-to-moment actor in that sense. I also think this is probably the most narratively complicated movie that he's been in.

The emotional stuff, in terms of who they are and their differences, felt pretty clear cut. I always argue it's Scrooge at the end of the story interacting with Scrooge at the beginning of the story - so it's pre-enlightened, post-enlightened.

And what makes it complicated is that most actors don't view their characters in terms of morality or right or wrong, they try to understand where the person's coming from, and so then in that case he's juggling these two things in one day, where it's like, ‘I actually think that they're jerks, and they shouldn't have blah blah blah’ when he's playing Present Nick. And Future Nick is more humbled and wise about it, so you're trying to juggle these things, where I like that Present Nick sucks, but I think when Vince is playing Present Nick, he feels very defensive [laughs] of that guy, and that's what leads to a good performance.

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is streaming on Hulu.