And though someone else will get the credit for the final product, these projects at least give Charles an opportunity to test the comedy techniques he’s become interested in. Charles, like David (who insisted on doing Curb Your Enthusiasm without formal scripts), became unsatisfied with the careful, pre-planned nature of most Hollywood comedy. He thinks that comedy can be better “when you release the reins of the normal filmmaking process.” In Brüno, Charles can create “a very spontaneous experience on-camera” because he has only one chance to get many of the scenes on film. In this world, being funny requires intense planning, but also leaves a lot up to chance once the cameras are turned on. “When we’re doing scenes at real locations with real people,” he says, “someone may step into the scene and suddenly become the focus of the scene. And we have to, on the fly, be able to shift our plan right there at the moment and sort of seize this new direction.”
The other thing Charles is trying to do in Brüno and Borat is figure out how today’s technology can serve the cause of comedy. Charles is in love with the ease and mobility of digital video, which he says has “advanced tremendously even since Borat” and allows him to make these movies with speed and freedom. Even the BlackBerry, which we don’t usually think of as a cinematic device, has become what he calls “one of the most crucial elements of the filmmaking process.” Because of the way these movies are shot, Cohen and Charles are sometimes physically “not anywhere near each other for hours. The only way we communicate is through BlackBerries.” On Seinfeld or Mad About You, Charles figured out new approaches to sitcom scripts; now he’s using movies as an experimental lab to see how unscripted comedy can be made more spontaneous.
The experiment may be over; Cohen has run out of Ali G characters to adapt into movies, and Charles is on his own again. But despite his recent success, he still isn’t getting a lot of projects greenlit; he wrote a dark comedy about Motley Crüe (which would have been his second umlaut-related film) that got caught in development hell. But Charles remains adamant about not settling into a comfortable niche: though Brüno is a follow-up to Borat, he says he tried to make it “an almost completely different movie in many ways. It moves differently, it’s designed quite differently. We care about the fans. We tried as much as possible not to feed them a retread.” Charles doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as the guy who directs and produces someone else’s projects, reminding us that “I have done many less successful things that were not like that.” But until he creates his own hit, he’ll get fulfillment by making sure that more famous people never repeat themselves.
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