Vince Vaughn Talks The Break-Up

By Fred Topel: 2006-05-30 00:00:00

Vince Vaughn has been on quite a comedy role with Old School, Dodgeball and Wedding Crashers. Even before Crashers opened to record business, his pet project went into production. The Break-Up, his response to all the bad romantic comedy scripts he’s rejected, may be his most personal film.

“Whenever I got scripts for romantic comedies, they always had some kind of bizarre subplot to them that really didn't have anything to do with relationships,” said Vaughn. For example, “If you don't marry the girl, you will not inherit the family fortune and the mean guy who works for me will take over the company, or I have to write an article for the paper... Ooops, I really did fall in love with the girl, what do I do? And I always just felt relationships were kind of odd enough as they are.”

Conceived a decade ago as a twist on The Odd Couple, Vaughn’s The Break-Up sets a disintegrating relationship against a modern dilemma. “As I got older I realized a lot of people were sort of buying places together because they didn't want to just spend money on rent, they wanted to have ownership and get much more kind of savvy with making their money work for them. I had some friends who ended up in that position, where they no longer wanted to date the other person and were not married, but no one could afford the place on their own, so it seems kind of modern in that.”

The Break-Up may be the anti-romantic comedy since its entire premise is that the star couple will not end up together. With all of Vaughn’s anti-establishment comedies proving to have a large audience, one wonders why more executives aren’t following his lead.

“I think there's room for everything, it's just my sensibilities, sort of starting with Swingers, I like stuff that's kind of character-driven, exaggerated for comedy, but, like the scene in Swingers where he calls five times and leaves that message, it's funny, but it's also really painful. And I liked in this movie, that you sort of look at the male-female drama and laugh at it and then you kind of have a more serious complicated side that's more truthful in it and not really feel the need to say, 'OK, we're tonally this, or tonally that.' So, I don't know. You can only, sort of, for me, do stuff that you're interested in or that you find to be kind of fascinating or interesting. You certainly don't, like with Wedding Crashers or this, approach it saying, 'I want to be different just for being different.' You just try to put original thought into it and say, 'What's simple and truthful for this story even if it's not traditional?' So I don't really go into any of them going, 'What's a way to do this totally different,' I more go into it saying, 'What's an original way of doing it,' if that makes sense.”

Of course, that’s not how Hollywood thinks. If The Break-Up is as big as it’s expected to be, expect more copycat break-up movies to come. “I think that's just normal. I think there weren't a lot of rated-R comedies being made and then not only ourselves, but Virgin did so well that now there's a lot more rated-R comedies in production. But again for us with Crashers, we weren't really going to say, ‘Let's use the R in a way to be as shocking or vulgar as we could be.' We really wanted to tell a great story that had good turns and twists in it and be R because of situations that happen and not because language was constantly being thrown out there. So then, the unfortunate side is sometimes people go, 'Oh, R comedy must work, so let's just go and do a bunch of R material but not really necessarily have good story or good turns and stuff in the movie.' And whenever something's successful, like Unforgiven did really well and then there was a series of not-so-great Westerns that sort of followed that. I think that you're always going to have people try to follow something that's successful, that's pretty normal. I just try to do stuff that I think is challenging and stuff that's kind of inspiring to me.”

Another twist in The Break-Up is that it filmed in Chicago, not the usual New York, Los Angeles or Prague For New York or Los Angeles. “I really love Chicago. I mean the people there are just great and I think just being from the Midwest, I have family from Ohio and lots of places, but I was raised outside the city. Chicago really takes advantage of the summer, because they don't get good weather all the time, so there's a lot of great outdoor festivals and stuff that they have and great restaurants and food and there's great museums, there's great theaters and plays and stuff in Chicago. It's just a great city. So, for me going up, I was a fan of all the John Hughes films and, of course, The Blues Brothers and all that kind of stuff. When me and Jon did Made together and I had gone back to New York, where he was from originally, I kind of got it in my mind, 'I'd like to do something and bring it back to Chicago,' so this seemed like the right kind of movie, because the city's sort of a backdrop lead in the movie and it just kind of made sense, it's kind of the Heartland, and it's a big city but it still has some smaller town sensibility and it just seemed like a good combination of accessibility for most folks.”

Filming was actually easier in Chicago than the usual cities because the culture was not so obsessed with the celebrities in their midst. “People are really kind of friendly in Chicago. They'll say hi to you and stuff, but it's not like other places and I think maybe being from there too, people were just always really nice, so there were no kind of like crazy stories. We just went to the Cubs games a lot. We went to the Taste of Chicago. We went and saw Second City when I was there. We went to some of those museum exhibits. We saw Sue that big dinosaur, which was cool. That was about it.”

The Break-Up opens June 2.

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