Tag: snl

driverdaily:

Excerpt from Vulture:

This was your first episode. How was the process for pitching the sketch, and going through all the steps of production, for the first time?
Yeah, that was insane. Everyone’s been great. Around 10 p.m. [on Tuesday, writing night], I sent it over to one of the head writers. They gave me some good notes – like [Melissa Villaseñor] is maybe more into it. Then the next day is the table read. By the way, before every step of this process I’m thinking, This sucks, I’m a fraud, and they’re gonna find me out. I hate everything about this; it’s not funny. Luckily I came in with two other writers from Chicago, Alison Gates and Alan Linic. They both read it and said it was good. I said, “You’re lying; it’s terrible.” But then it went to table read. And right before table read, you can go around and give the cast a note or two. I had to go into Adam Driver’s dressing room and give him a quick talk. But when I went in there, he’d already read it and already had an idea of what he was going to do. It’s 150 percent Adam Driver doing it and being extremely good at acting. I lucked out so hard with him. 

Did you get to choose the cane and the bird? Did they hold up an owl and a crow, and after much deliberation you chose the crow?
Yes. In the initial production meeting, they wanted to know what kind of props we’d need, and I said we’d need a cane and a bird. They asked what kind of bird I want, and I said, “Um… seagull?” It was cool — they asked me what I wanted the high school to be named, and I went with my high school: Sierra High School. So they put on the sign out front “Sierra High School,” my actual high school in Tollhouse, California. And the class was Ms. Linder’s class, my favorite teacher from high
school. That was cool when some friends from high school caught that. At rehearsal they showed me some cane options, and I picked what I thought was a good cane. They were working on the bird, so they had a stand-in bird at the initial rehearsal. Adam really didn’t want to crush it all that much for that first go. At dress, they showed me this seagull that was full of beans. We used that at the dress rehearsal, and I loved it.

Read the full interview with Eli Coyote Mandel here.