‘Over Your Dead Body’ Writers Ran Wild For Jorma Taccone Dark Comedy

Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney are on one hell of a hot streak.

Mere weeks after the streaming release of their directorial debut, Pizza Movie, the BriTANicK comedy duo are now basking in the glow of Over Your Dead Body (click here for tickets). When I caught up with the two over Zoom late last month, they were coming off the high of premiering both movies at SXSW.

“It’s a big hangover,” joked Kocher. “Emotional and also the liver one.”

But you won’t find them complaining. After all, it’s not often you get to realize a long-imagined passion project (a.k.a. Pizza Movie) and team up with one of your professional idols, Jorma Taccone, in the same year.

“We know his style of comedy,” Kocher said of The Lonely Island co-founder, “because he was a massive influence on us.”

In other words, BriTANicK was the perfect choice to pen the screenplay for Taccone’s third outing as director—Over Your Dead Body.

“With Jorma, directing, we put tons of jokes into the script,” Kocher added. “That’s just what we love to do. We’ll be like, ‘Here’s every single option of joke,’ and assume he’s not going to keep half of this stuff. Jorma not only kept all of it, but then added even more, which was thrilling to see.”

An American remake of Tommy Wirkola’s 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, the dark comedy stars Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and Samara Weaving (Ready or Not) as Dan and Lisa, a married couple planning to spend a quiet weekend at a remote cabin in the middle of nowhere.

Here’s the kicker: each spouse plans to kill the other one.

While the premise takes the idea of a rocky marriage to its blood-soaked extreme, the human element is still relatable to the viewer.

“The core is just a human drama, which should be accessible to anyone, anywhere,” McElhaney explained. “There’s nothing different about how relationships work [all over the world]. “When it’s written well, a movie is about something ingrained in us that can resonate with anyone. You shouldn’t have to fully change it from culture to culture—and that was very true about this.”

Uxoricide and matricide will have to wait, however, because the cabin is also playing host to three violent intruders (Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, and Keith Jardine), which forces Dan and Lisa to work together if they want to get out alive.

“The original is great as it is,” McElhaney continued. “The structure is there, which is really the hardest part of writing. Our job was really to keep what was working well, but then add our sensibilities to it … There’s something really freeing about going from a movie where you’re in control of everything, to something where a lot of it’s taken care of. You can kind of just relax into it, let the story tell itself, and have fun sprinkling on these little details.”

Agreed Kocher: “I think in a dream world, we’re doing an original feature, we’re adapting a movie, and even hopping into a writers’ room every once in a while—just because writing is so lonely and isolating. I love other writers. I’m so inspired by them and you learn so much each time.”

What really excited the dyad about Over Your Dead Body was the opportunity to basically write two movies in one, starting out with Mr. & Mrs. Smith and ending with Panic Room.

“I love movies that have a mixture of tones,” shared Kocher. “I love when a drama makes me laugh. I love when a horror movie makes me laugh. I love when a comedy movie makes me scared. You get an added element of surprise when people don’t expect it.”

The script also revels in satisfying setups and payoffs that allows the audience to “feel like they’re in on a joke,” said McElhaney. “I think movies often try to beat it into people’s heads what’s happening, [but] your brain likes putting puzzle pieces together. So, hopefully we can just lay in these little moments, your brain will connect them, and it will feel really good.”

Hopefully we can lay in these little moments, your brain will connect them, and then it will feel really good that it got to connect these pieces and that the movie didn’t do it for you.

And with David Leitch’s stunt-focused 87North banner on board as producer, BriTANicK knew any action scenes they wrote were in good hands.

“We were like, ‘Yeah, let’s throw some curve balls into this script, because we know they can really knock it out of the park,’” shared Kocher. “We wrote out a lot of the fight scenes, but then they took that as a jumping-off point and went even further.”

Finished McElhaney: “We just knew we could do anything and they wouldn’t be like, ‘We can’t have a head explode from a shotgun blast. We can’t do that.’ No, they were like, ‘Let’s go! Let’s be crazy!’ And it’s true for both of our films [Pizza Movie and Over Your Dead Body]. Everyone was like, ‘You guys are given permission to make this as R-rated and wild as you want,’ which, I mean, God bless those people.”

Over Your Dead Body is now playing in theaters.