A content Johnny Knoxville casually took swigs of a Bud Light while Bam Margera slyly nursed a gin and tonic in a hotel on Hollywood Blvd. Chris Pontius, mostly seen naked in the “Jackass” films, absent-mindedly strummed a ukulele—fully clothed.
It was one of their easier days, one where they didn’t have to hurt themselves to get a few laughs.
The cast of motley characters are truly themselves in the stunts that are captured on camera, and they sat down to talk with the CU Independent about the latest installment in the “Jackass” collection, which will be in 3D.
Director Jeff Tremaine said he thinks the 3D only adds to the film.
“It’s all real,” Tremaine said. “No one’s done it before where there are no computer graphics to enhance it.”
In the first two films and when “Jackass” was on MTV, it didn’t really matter to the crew when bodies, unorthodox objects and fecal matter were hurled in range of the camera. Now, Tremaine said, they have to use a little more caution when being so spontaneous.
“Anything that’s flying at the lens, you know, that’s flying at a really expensive [3D] lens,” he said. “And the way that we do it, it’s going to hit it.”
Film was shot with a phantom camera, which shoots over one thousand frames per second—much different from the hand-helds and not-so-expensive cameras used before.
Pontius chimed in over his ukulele strumming, adding his take on the 3D experience.
“We did our best open and close [to the movie] ever [because of 3D],” Pontius said.
There is a super slow motion effect that is enhanced in 3D. Because of this, the open and close scenes were improved.
Besides the 3D effects, not many things have changed from the original Jackass theme. However, this time veteran daredevil, Steve-O, is two and a half years sober.
For the first time since he has been a member of the Jackass crew, he performed all the stunts sober for “Jackass 3-D.”
“It was important to me to prove it to myself,” he said. “Being present and clear-headed, I was dreading doing the stunts so much more than ever before, but at the same time I was more eager than ever before to do it.”
Tremaine stressed how important it was for the cast to support Steve-O in his sobriety. He said it produced better quality material.
“Steve-O’s fear is what made him better than ever,” he said.
While fellow daredevil Johnny Knoxville played a major role in Steve-O’s drug intervention, Knoxville experienced an intervention turned on himself.
He said the producers from Paramount intervened when he wanted to do stunts that Paramount said he is frankly getting too old to do.
“They took me [into the trailer] and said, ‘The editors are bottleneck with footage, we’ve gotta stop,’” Knoxville said. “That’s the only time I cried in the movie!”
As for the infamously crazy and sometimes disgusting stunts, the cast said they agreed that it is best to get them out of the way, fast.
“I’ve figured out that it’s easier to get up there and do it as soon as possible,” Bam Margera said. “Because if you eye it up and figure out, you know, are you gonna fall or what might happen, it makes you not want to do it even more.”
Even though these guys have been working together for over 10 years they still haven’t become predictable.
“You never know what’s gonna happen [on set],” Knoxville said. “And sometimes you know something’s gonna happen, but you don’t know where it’s gonna come from. You think, ‘Oh, it’s coming from around the corner,’ and boom! We hit you from the ceiling.”
Between all the groin-hitting and face-punching, the guys said there is still room for brotherly love.
“It’s a dysfunctional family we have here,” Tremaine said. “We love each other, but….”
Chris Pontius interrupted, “But love is a battlefield.”
Despite being daredevils, there are some things that make these boys wince. Besides the usual hit in the groin, they have fears such as heights and snakes.
“If I could think of my worst fear ever, it would be falling into a pit of snakes,” Margera said. To understand the background behind this, it’s in a scene from “Jackass 3D.”
The cast said the ideas for the stunts come from everyone. They all keep their ideas in a notebook. Margera said that when they take the ideas to Paramount, they may be two-pages in detail and other times they will be two words—and that will simply describe the stunt on its own.
“There’ll be one idea from Tremaine that says, ‘Shit shoe: Find a shoe and shit in it,’” Margera said.
Not missing from the unruly crew were the remaining five that included Jason “Weeman” Acuna, a fully-bearded Ryan Dunn, Ehren McGhehey, Preston Lacy and Dave England.
Dunn said that when it comes to drawing the line with pulling off stunts, there is none.
“I wish I had one,” Dunn said. “When it comes to a stunt, you just do it. It’s either die now, or die boring later.”
The guys gave advice to anyone who may visit the Jackass set.
“Don’t ever express anything that you don’t wanna do,” England said. “Because then you’ll have to do it. Like, I would never want to be sodomized by Weeman.”
The prospect of making a third Jackass movie was not popular with everyone in the beginning, like Dunn.
“I hadn’t been around these guys in a long time and I didn’t know if we’d mix together,” Dunn said. “I didn’t know if I had anything left in me. But as soon as we started filming, I was way wrong. I had more fun with this movie than any before.”
A big question the Jackass guys get asked more than any other is: “Why?” Why would they put themselves through stunts that may harm their health or overall quality of living? The answer was unanimous: To make people laugh.
“I never had the yearning to hurt myself,” Dunn said. “I just had the yearning to make people laugh. So whatever tools I have to make people laugh, I use them.”
The “Jackass” movies have generally attracted the same demographic in the past: daredevils, skateboarders, and adolescent boys. But when asked why the general public should see the movie, Weeman said simply:
“It’s a good [expletive] time!”
With so many stunts that had to be edited out due to time restraints, Ehren McGhehey said that “Jackass 3.5,” a straight-to-DVD supplement to “Jackass 3-D” which will have the extra stunts not seen in the movie, will have plenty of material.
England said that he had an empty feeling when they were done shooting for “Jackass 3-D,” which begs the question: will there be a “Jackass 4”?
“We’re not really on that level of thinking right now,” Weeman said. “We’re kinda stoked that this one’s done.”
Dunn added, “I can’t believe it made it past ‘Jackass One.’”
But Tremaine said they can never predict when they will be done producing Jackass movies.
“We’ve made each one of the movies like they were the last,” he said. “But we’ve learned that saying it’s the last one ends up sounding stupid every four years.”
Contact CU Independent Entertainment Editor Taylor Coughlin at Taylor.coughlin@colorado.edu.
