If you don’t know the name then you have been living under a rock for the last 10 years. Troy Duffy is the mastermind writer/director of the cult classic The Boondock Saints and he returns for the sequel. I got to talk to the man himself to get his thoughts on the upcoming sequel, the return of Rocco and the handling of the film release.
The Film Stage: Hi Troy, how are you?
Troy Duffy: Pretty good.
TFS: Ten years is a long time, so did you approach the sequel differently from the way you approached the first movie?
Troy: Definitely, I mean the fans had deemed Boondock I sacred ground and they know the film to the absolute minute detail. Every single word, every single frame; these people developed drinking games around it. It’s one of those movies that’s become a comfort zone. So you’re not really free when you sit down and put pen to paper and do whatever you want. You have to respect the first story, so it’s kind of like writing with shackles on — it took a while to crack that code. I probably went through seven to ten drafts. Some with Willem’s [Dafoe] character in it. Somewhere we finally dumped the idea of having Willem’s character in there. He and I were actually working on a couple of scripts together, trying to develop them and we realized at one point that his character experienced a full arc in the first one. I mean what else were you going to do with this guy. As soon as we took that character out it was like the code got cracked. It was a longer process for sure, every page in that script I probably wrote ten pages of stuff for it.
TFS: I spoke with Chris Brinker and he told me that you were picking it up, setting it down, picking it up, setting it down over the last 10 years, so over those ten years whenever you sat it down would you just stop thinking about it or were you constantly thinking about the movie over and over again?
Troy: Yeah I was thinking about it fairly consistently, but there was a bunch of stuff going on and life was interfering. We had a major law suit that lasted five years with the people who made Boondock I that we watched. That was a financially and emotionally debilitating thing to go through so you can’t imagine getting creative in there — doing something like that is a real chore sometimes. But we fought our way through it.
TFS: Did you start work on the sequel right after the first one? How much time was there between the first one and starting work on the second one?
Troy: I’d say about two to three years, but ideas were percolating even after I just wrote the script for the first one.
TFS: You have said over and over again that no one went away. Everyone was always in contact with you. Everyone has told me they were in constant contact with you so when you were finally able to tell them that the sequel was going to happen what was it like getting back with Sean [Flannery], Norm [Reedus], Billy [Connolly], Brian [Mahoney], Bob [Marley]? Just everyone?
Troy: Oh, man these guys were chomping at the bits as I was. I mean there were some times, conversations like Flannery calls me up one day, “Hey I got a bunch of investors to pay for this”,“I got these guys to give us the dough to do it.” I mean everybody was just trying to figure out ways to do it or there was periods of waiting by the phone. I’m throwing out drafts of the earlier drafts of the script; we were all working on it — me to the fullest of my ability, the other guys as much as they can, which is just kind of always around and on the table. It was always our agenda so when it actually got done, making those phone calls was like a verbal high five for every single one of them and it wasn’t like “OK, I got to call my agent and we’ll see if we can do this.” It was, “cool, send me a plane ticket.”
TFS: When you finally wrote Willem out and you replaced him with Eunice was it hard to find a really good replacement that would fill the gap that Willem was going to leave behind?
Troy: Yeah it was a process in casting. There was a lot of young ladies that wanted that role, and a lot of them auditioned. But I think one of the reasons for that wasn’t so much because of the Boondock phenomenon. It was more like young ladies in Hollywood, young actresses, they don’t get roles like that too often — strong woman. They get the victim roles or the stereotypical women roles that they’re supposed to be portraying and ones women are sick of watching. So there was a lot of young actresses that jumped at this because of what was on the page, the character could do something new here and cool and not so much the Boondock phenomenon — it felt like they were responding to the script. So it was a process, but when Julie [Benz] walked in it was one of those things like, “oh man, is this, please, please be good.” She looked perfect. She was exactly what I was looking for physically for the role. Then she actually auditioned and started acting the part — you almost feel like you got a Ferrari there. Put a little gas in the engine, take it around the block and see how fast you can go.
TFS: Were you a fan of her work on Dexter?
Troy: Yes, I was a fan of Dexter and the funny thing was, I wasn’t a fan of Rita’s though. I mean she plays basically a clingy, needy, single mom. The first scene with Julie they didn’t put much make-up on her, hair or anything like that, so she wasn’t as attractive but when she walked in the room I was just completely blown away by the hotness
TFS: [laughs]
Troy: And then when I started taken her around the script and getting into the actual created work in terms of her audition, I was just blown away how good she was because you’d seen her play a role like Rita and she does it very skillfully but men like me aren’t really attracted to that type of a role so then I start getting really excited because it’s completely against type. It’s completely against what we know her from. I mean people either know her from Dexter or probably Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Those two things couldn’t be more different from Boondock and her role in Boondock. So it was exciting for me to go against type, to bring her out as something nobody would associate her with, with her past work. I mean I love doing that. Look at how we cast Billy Connolly: legendary comedian, as a role, this bad-ass force of nature type killer. So not necessarily something everybody would do but it worked like a big dog for the fan base.
TFS: Speaking of Billy Connolly, I heard on an interview that this film has some back-story for him. Can you elaborate on that without giving too much away?
Troy: I respond to the fan base while writing the script in a couple of ways. One, the biggest way was providing a history of Ill Duce’s past. From the first film character, the fan base was so interested in him. How did he become a killer? Why was he in jail? How was it that they didn’t know their father when they saw him? There was all this interest in his background story so I knew from the beginning I wanted to hint to the back-story. So what we ended up doing was sort of period piece flashbacks of 1950’s New York. Which of course Boondock fans are not used to that type of thing so it’s a bit of a risk to explain his history as a killer and how he became.
TFS: I remember that in an interview and just going “really?” So I am glad to hear that it works well in the movie.
Troy: You haven’t seen it yet?
TFS: No, not yet.
Troy: I’ll tell you this man, the fan’s reactions to the film are off the fucking charts. I mean, they’re just so relieved and excited at every single screening. We’ve had one in Boston, one in New York and one in Philly. They’ve all been complete fucking zoos.
TFS: [laughs]
Troy: The fan base shows up in masks, wearing rosaries, and the shirts and the tattoos and stuff like that. We actually just for shits and giggles, we asked the audience last night, who was about 400 kids, “who’s got Bookdock ink, who’s got the tattoos,” and ten guys raised their hands. If you think about that as a correlation in terms of statistical numbers, 10 out of every 400 guys got the Boondock ink, are Boondock fans — that’s a mind boggling stat right there. These people are sort of Boondock aficionados so to get a thumbs up from them so enthusiastically is amazing and one of the things like is how different the new movie is. Boondock fans are not used to seeing period piece flash back yet they loved it. When the fan base first heard there was going to be a female lead in Boondock II that was like cold water in the face. They were like, “a chick in Boondock?! What the fuck is going on?” They immediately thought “is this some love interest thing? Oh my god.” There was this thing of emergency. Now they can’t live without her so far. So it’s like all these kind of risks we took to provide a new experience to Boondock fans are paying off.
TFS: How much time did you put into creating new characters like the new “Rocco” in Clifton Collins Jr., You have Julie Benz, you have Bob Rubin’s Gorgeous George, so how long did it take to create these character and what did you go through to create them?
Troy: It took a while, like I said, it took a couple years to crack the code on the script. Some of them were sort of there from the beginning. I wrote Clifton Collins who plays Romeo, who has been a friend of all of ours, me, Sean, Norm, and Billy for a long time, like over a decade. I wrote the role for him. Which is similar to what I did for Rocco in the first movie — I wrote the role for Rocco. Rocco wasn’t particularly an actor at the time, but I made sure that he was cast in it and we did the same thing here with Clifton. But theres a very big dissimilarity between those two characters. To call him the new Rocco is a little bit weird because he’s Hispanic, obviously a bad-ass, and Rocco is more of a puppy dog with a big heart, and Romeo’s different and he’s a tough guy. It took a while to get these characters but eventually, like I said, that code got cracked and there they all were at the end of the day.
TFS: Speaking of Rocco, what was the approach to his cameo because David couldn’t tell me much when I spoke to him about it, so I know there was no way you were going to let yourself or let the fans see a cheesy, dream sequence of Rocco or the ghost of Rocco. So how did you approach that?
Troy: Very carefully, I knew that I wanted Rocco in it. The fan base did despite his death. Even in terms of filming it, me, Sean, Norm, Billy couldn’t really imagine not having the Roc with us while we were doing this. Even those may not be the best reasons to write something. It ended up being done very carefully. It’s not quite what you think. If you haven’t seen the film I don’t want to ruin anything for you but we did Rocco very carefully and he enters the film twice. We actually open with Rocco, he’s the first thing you see. He delivers this speech which is sort of a philosophy on life. Talks about, there are talkers and there are people in this world, and it’s one of those things where he set the table right off the top of the film. So it ended up being very effective.
TFS: I want to talk about the release for a second because I see you guys are doing a very small release on the 30th and then hopefully expanding out to more markets. Did you have any say in that or was that a studio decision?
Troy: I was begging them to do it that way. The Boondock fan base is kind of a.. we’re a randy lot. For instance, I knew I couldn’t cast a Julia Roberts in this role. Boondock fans wouldn’t like that — there’s that whole sell out to corporate America thing going on these days. I didn’t want Boondock fans to go “Oh god, some big studio’s taking it out now and it’s not ours anymore.” So my thought from the very beginning was we obviously have something here with a built in fan base therefore we have a better chance of success in terms of platforming the film. There something special about a film that platforms itself. If that story gets out there in the public and they look at that film as different, that it’s earned its way like the little engine that could, and everybody found it and love it. We had a real chance here of that happening. This is the way the fans can be involved in it again. When they first found Boondock I there was no red carpet or theatrical this, no advertising. They found it on their own and it became very personal to them. It became their flick, “this is our flick man, this is ours.” So, platforming in my opinion was always the way to do this because it’s the next way that the fans can own this thing again.
TFS: Last question, possible trilogy?
Troy: Yeah, I’d like to ride this one into the shore, see how we do, but there’s some ideas percolating.
TFS: Ok, well thank you very much for your time.
Troy: No problem.
The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day opens tomorrow in theaters.