INDIE SPOTLIGHT: Interview with Comedy Film ‘Operation Taco Gary’s’ Writer-Director Mikey K

A taco joint. An alien invasion. One very wrong road trip. When two brothers stumble onto a cosmic conspiracy hiding inside Taco Gary’s, they’re forced to save Earth in this absurd sci-fi comedy starring Simon Rex, Dustin Milligan, Brenda Song, Jason Biggs, and more.

Rally your couch potato friends that can appreciate a good knee slap comedy and be prepared to be pleasantly entertained with filmmaker Mikey K’s directorial comedy feature debut Operation Taco Gary’s. Reminiscent of parody and slapstick comedy films of yesteryear (think Hot Shots, American Pie, Scary Movie), the film chugs along with characters Danny (Simon Rex) your friendly must save-the-world conspiracy nut (or is he?) and his brother Luke (Dustin Milligan) the straight laced do-good paleontologist, as they stumble and rumble on this quirky journey.

Writer-director Mikey K discusses being inspired by conspiracy theories during the pandemic, which led him to writing the script, how the characters represent his internal struggle between chaos and order, how his Funny or Die background informed the comedy and the challenges of low-budget filmmaking.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: What a fun film. Very reminiscent of the crazy comedy films I grew up on in the 90s and early aughts. There’s a line of dialogue that stood out to me from the character Danny, “Nobody wants to believe the truth anymore,” and it's such a sad reality we live in right now. I'm curious how you leaned into that treasure trove of conspiracy theories, and how that has been affecting the world at large unfortunately, but how that kind of laid the foundation for this film and world building?

Mikey K: I wrote the script during lockdown and the pandemic, so I didn't have Wi-Fi at the time, so originally, I was just trying to entertain myself, and it was a time when there was so many conspiracy theories being thrown out, and I couldn't keep up. And I was like, 'I'm just going to start writing my own, just making up my own conspiracy theories.' Because if you think about it, it's just trying to make sense of nonsense, right? Like something terrible happens or something you can't believe happened, and then you to try to create a story around it, to make it make sense, to understand it.

Rather than what I had to learn to do, which is just be like, 'I don't get it. I just don't get why anything happens.' And that conspiracy... it's that struggle to connect the dots, right? They're trying to make the stories out of it. It's fun to write your own conspiracy theories. Everyone should try it. It's a fun little exercise. Try to connect this with this, logically - and you can connect anything together.

Sadie: You have two great distinct opposing characters – the straight man and the conspiracy nut – and their goals ultimately converge, no spoilers of course, but how were you able to stay true to them as characters?

Mikey: I've been writing long enough now that I've realized that I usually have a version of these two characters in everything I write. It's almost like two sides of my brain. It's almost like the chaos and the order.

The struggle that they have is they actually both think they know what's right for each other. They both are like, 'This is how you should live your life. No, this is how you should live your life.' With a sense of they do care about each other. But they both are trying to push what they believe the other person should do because that's what they think will make them a better person.

That's just, I guess, an internal struggle I have - this chaotic side and this orderly side that are constantly like, 'This is how you should live your life. You should be more of a romanticist,' it's like a Zen in The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There's part of me that just wants to throw caution to the wind and be a romanticist… Long story short, I've always had these two characters, and either they come and become side characters in other scripts, but they're always there. They always come around.

Sadie: The power of the montage and a Dutch angle. It doesn’t detract from the film at all – it fits perfectly within the tone of the film. With your background at Funny or Die, and your experience creating short form content, did that at all help you lean into those moments to carry those comedy beats?

Mikey: It helped the comedy, understanding what the shots I needed. But doing short form, the stakes are lower, there's more comfort... on a low budget movie like this, where people have been flown in and if it rains in 10 hours, you'll never finish the movie, you'll be out of money. So, it didn't set me up at all to prepare for actually doing a whole feature. [laughs]

After you do a sketch, you got maybe two days of filming, and you're like, 'Ah, let's go to David and Busters and celebrate,' with this, there's no David and Busters, there's just crying into the pillow every night. [laughs]

It's tough. Low budget filmmaking is... you grow a tough skin afterwards. I feel like if you asked me if I would do it again the day after we stopped filming, I would say, 'No, never again. I'm never watching a movie again.' But then now a little more time has passed, I feel I'm ready to jump back in. It's almost like having a kid, I guess. When you're in the newborn stage, you're like, 'This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me.' And then you're like, 'Nah, let's have another one.'

Sadie: Assuming there was also a time crunch in post, was there a scene that maybe took on a new life that you were surprised by during the editing phase?

Mikey: I think the one thing in the in the editing room that really surprised me was there's this ankle breaking sequence that's one sentence in the script. And I was like, ‘I'm just gonna try and extend this as much as I can.’ So, I basically grabbed the camera, and my actors and was like, 'Let's just try and film as much as possible,' thinking that this might not ever come across in the edit, but our editor, Josh [Crockett], he nailed it, he cracked it. So that's some magic, right there.

Sadie: Writing to star power, Jason Biggs, and writing his character, was that originally in the script, or was that just lucky casting?

Mikey: He was always on the dream list, yeah. I wanted him, because like you said, one of my motivations making this was to make something reminiscent of when I was a kid watching these comedies. And Jason Biggs was always around those comedies, so he actually fit in so nicely to this role, and I don't think he detracted or took you out of it. So yeah, the stars aligned. He read it, and he was like, 'All right, let's do it.' And a week later, he was on set.

Operation Taco Gary's is now in Theaters.