Jorma Taccone: ‘SNL’s’ Lonely Island Alum on ‘Over Your Dead Body’

Jorma Taccone’s newest film looks a bit different than the work he’s known for. 

Taccone, one-third of the aughts “Saturday Night Live” collective The Lonely Island, is known for comedy: In addition to the many, many digital shorts he and his friends have made for “SNL,” Taccone directed 2010’s “MacGruber” and, with Lonely Island costar Akiva Schaffer, co-directed 2014’s “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.” Now, with the new film “Over Your Dead Body” (out April 24 after a South by Southwest premiere), he ventures toward dark relationship drama.

That’s not to say that “Over Your Dead Body,” a remake of the Norwegian-language film “The Trip,” doesn’t have jokes. The movie stars Jason Segel and Samara Weaving as a married couple who have come to loathe one another so thoroughly that each one arrives at vacation planning to murder the other. The threat of intruders, though, forces the pair to team up and, eventually, rediscover the respect and love they once shared.

The film is fairly gory, and Taccone recently endured his own experience of body horror; while attempting to finish a mural at his home in Connecticut, the director fell from a ladder and shattered his pelvis, leaving him unable to walk for months. (He spent his recuperation obtaining and refurbishing a miniature truck, among other pursuits.) 

Now, Taccone is up and walking again, and met up with Variety in his home borough of Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife, the director Marielle Heller, and their two children. 

Can we talk about your falling off the ladder? 

This is nearly seven months after. It might be seven months to the day.

Are you totally back? 

No. I’m sore. I just went to PT this morning. If you see me, it’s like, I’m walking. It’s really nice to have the bar so unbelievably low.

You’re upright and ambulatory.

Yes, I’m ambulatory. I’m thrilled. It’s rough, and I would say it’s a wild life lesson. I had a moment in the air — the ladder had given way a second before, and I knew what was going to happen. I had a moment of my life flashing before my eyes. I truly had that moment in the air, because it was so high — I’m going to die. I hit the ground. I never lost consciousness, but I shattered — pulverized — my left pelvis. I had regular breaks on the right, but on the other side, the doctor was like, “You can’t even quantify how shattered.” My sacrum detached from my spine on the left side. 

I was screaming for an ambulance for ten minutes. It’s my daughter’s birthday. So on the other side of the yard — this is going to make me sound really ritzy, and it was not ritzy — my wife is being told, “The pony’s here! Where’s the pony parking?” I moved my toes immediately, so I knew that I wasn’t paralyzed, and then I was like, “Okay. I’m going to have surgery. If they do a surgery, I’ll be able to walk, and I’m not dead.” Those two are the checklist.

When they pulled me out, I felt like a bag of bones moving around; then, when I talked to the surgeon — yeah, that’s what it was. Just bones floating around. But in the ambulance, I was like, “You know what? This is all part of my journey.” I make a lot of choices in my life — this was a bad choice, so learn from it. A lof of my decisions are based on wanting to be creative. We have a big side of a barn, all white, and I wanted to make a mural, and I was finishing up and hanging lights around the mural. But maybe there’s a time and a place. 

For a creative person who wants to stay in constant motion, what does being bedridden for a length of time feel like? 

I tend to figure out ways, even when incapacitated, to make creative ideas happen. Photoshop still works when you’re stuck in bed. The day after I fell I decided I wanted to buy a kei truck — a Japanese-style work van. I was on Craigslist, talking to a woman in Japan who imports kei trucks. My friend is an amazing designer, and I was asking her to wrap the car; my son wanted to have a dragon on it, and now it’s getting rims on it. You find ways to remain creative. 

You’re in bed, but the mind is still moving.

My wife is very disappointed that my mind is still moving.

Which brings me to the movie. The couple at its center are both entertainment-industry professionals, and have no small measure of resentment toward each other. Is that something you related to, being married to a fellow director? 

Creatively and in the same industry, moving forward as a couple, I feel nothing but: Same team, same page. Maybe because we’re both directors, I know exactly what each part of the workflow is going to be. The relatability is there.

But her successes are truly something I’m so proud of. We’re so different — we’re not trying to make the same thing. She makes things that are really funny. “Nightbitch” is a really funny movie. But there’s no competition: She’s making films and I’m making movies. 

The thing that’s always difficult in any relationship is losing yourself to parenting, because everybody needs the validation of work, and you can’t do that if you’re taking care of a kid. The miscommunications are if you don’t provide the time to check in with each other — when you stop trying and retreat to your corner and the resentment builds, and then you don’t even know how you got there. That’s what’s happening in this movie: A realization that every day you have to work on it. 

There’s that quote from Ernest Hemingway, about how one goes broke first gradually, then all at once. I feel like that can happen with a relationship falling apart: Things shift little by little, and one day you wake up 10,000 miles from where you’d thought you were.

I think a really important thing for us making the movie was this joy when you see people being nice to each other and finding that love again — even though these characters have been incredibly selfish. Both of them have committed the sin of wanting to kill each other, so they have to go through the wars and be totally broken down to their basest level to see each other the way they did when they were first together.

It’s impressive that the tone of the film manages to stay aloft, given that, as you say, the characters really hate one another.

The reason I wanted to make this movie was that there are so many tones. Comedy is the throughline that bonds it all together. But we’re playing real drama. There’s real vitriol between them. 

I was genuinely surprised by that. 

And then the gore is really fucking gory. Did you like that, or were you grossed out? 

I liked that I was grossed out, if that makes sense. But I was grossed out. 

So was my mom. 

When you first read some of the most violent set pieces in the script, did your mind start ticking with how you’d film them?

I’m not really a horror person. I dipped my toe in with MacGruber getting shot in the leg. I’ve heard people say that they aren’t usually comfortable with that level of gore and they found it really funny, which, I think, is a trick in itself, to always have a comedic element to it. 

So much of your work has been with Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer — including “Popstar,” which the three of you wrote together and Schaffer co-directed. Was it odd doing this film on your own? 

Co-directing is so fun because there’s lonely moments in directing, and it’s nice to be able to bounce ideas off of each other. Being alone, that’s not the case. Sometimes I can go overboard — overshooting, but this is not a movie you could overshoot on because we didn’t have enough time or money to do that. The parts you miss are the camaraderie and the fun of having a pal. But with this movie, it was fun for me to be in the world. Shooting dramatic scenes was fun — letting it breathe, leaving the cameras rolling, not interrupting. You’re trying to create a safe space to allow real emotion in. That was a new thing to be able to do. 

I’ve been listening to your “Lonely Island” retrospective podcast. Are you ever surprised at the tie people still feel to those “Saturday Night Live” shorts, years later? “Lazy Sunday” just marked its 20th anniversary.

We all have our moments where “SNL” meant everything to us. It’s usually before you’re going out and drinking, so there’s a couple of years where, if you find “SNL” and that’s your thing, it’s fucking mindblowing. To even get hired on that show — to even audition for that show, and not get fired! — but to make anything, and then to get these things on each week was mindblowing. And then in those moments where we would release an album or promote a movie, when you got to do a talk at, like, a little comic book store in Boston, you got to see the kids it meant something to. And they were the exact age I was when I was watching Adam Sandler. 

Phil Hartman, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey — I felt like they were making it for me, because it was my sensibility, or what became my sensibility. It was almost a cheat code for me that I’m trying to make Andy laugh, he’s trying to make me laugh: We’re all just doing it for ourselves. You can kind of tell that it’s three friends fucking around, right? The things that really meant something to me are when I got to meet groups of friends inspired to do the same things we did, because it was possible. “Lazy Sunday” we made for fucking $8. You could do that.

This interview has been edited and condensed.