Dave Franco and Nicholas Braun Explain Why They Waited Eight Years to Make ‘The Shitheads’

When you roll into Sundance with a movie called “The Shitheads,” you don’t need much more than your title to attract attention. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a cast that includes Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Kiernan Shipka, and Nicholas Braun. Then consider the fact that it’s a roadtrip comedy about two slackers transporting a teenager to rehab and it starts to look like you have a bona fide hit on your hands.

Ahead of the film‘s Sundance premiere, “The Shitheads” director Macon Blair and Franco, Jackson, Shipka, and Braun visited the IndieWire Studio, presented by Dropbox, to discuss the long road that the project took to the big screen.

“It’s a road movie, it’s a comedy. We took inspiration from ‘Midnight Run’ and ‘The Last Detail’ and things like that. Disorganized losers on the road getting into shenanigans,” Blair said of the film. ““The producer and I, Alex Orr, we were working on a movie years ago. And he said ‘I know these guys who work for this service that transports teenagers to treatment facilities. But the thing is, they’re really unqualified. They’re not trained, they’re not regulated, there’s no oversight. It all seems really sketchy and dangerous.’ And he presented that as a premise for road movie comedy, and I was like ‘That’s delicious.’”

You might think that such a hooky pitch would make it an easy film to get off the ground, but Blair spent over a decade trying to make “The Shitheads.”

“We’ve been trying to make it for a long time,” Blair said. “It almost happened in 2017, and then it fell apart and we let it sit on the shelf for a while and we brought it back. At the time that was encouraging, but in hindsight I’m glad that it happened, because this is the version of the movie that I wanted it to be.”

It’s almost unheard of for a film to take so long in development and reemerge with its original cast members attached. But Franco had been interested in the script from the very beginning and was eager to rejoin the project when it came back to life.

“When we started it back this time around, the first person we went to was Dave Franco,” Blair said. “He had read the script a couple years before and was really excited about it. He came on board very quickly when I said we’re trying it again. He had a lot of casting ideas, he was like ‘You should really look at O’Shea, you should really look at Mason [Thames].’ And it kind of grew from there.”

Blair was also eager to cast Braun, who had auditioned for an earlier iteration of the film before “Succession” made him a household name. The director assumed he had become too big for the project, but Braun never forgot about the script.

“I saw an announcement for Dave and O’Shea starring in the movie and I was like ‘Oh, Shitheads is back! Amazing! It’s too bad he probably won’t come to me again,” Braun said with a laugh.

Franco recalled Braun telling him on set that he hadn’t stopped thinking about the film for eight years, and filming key scenes allowed him to get some much-needed closure.

“After you filmed your main scene, you came to me and you were like, that was so cathartic because you had been living with that scene in your head for eight years!’ Franco said. 

Watch the complete conversation with the “Shitheads” team in the video above.