Interview: What the Men of THE BACHELOR WEEKEND Have to Say About Stags

I love me some Irish men. So sitting across from a trio of triple threat actor/writer/director strapping lads had me all in a tizzy this past week at Tribeca Film Festival.

"We're coming at you from every angle!" co-writer and co-star of The Bachelor Weekend Peter McDonald joked, flanked by his co-writer and director John Butler and lead Hugh O'Connor.

In addition to the exclusive clip we posted on Wednesday, and on the eve of their limited theatrical release in Chicago and on cable VOD/iTunes, here are some snippets from our interview at TFF.

Peter McDonald: A lot of those films sell you a bit short on heart, and they don't represent the men and women we know in our lives. Part of our impulse was to try and write a story that had heart, but also had men that we recognized. The stag [in this film] is really about friends of ours, people we know that approach similar problems in a similar way. One of the frustrating things I often see in comedies is men dying to get away from their wives -- these controlling shrews that they secretly fear. That's not something we see in our lives, and we wanted to gently push back on that and still do it in the context of a mainstream comedy film.


John Butler: The idea of going away with 20 men and doing Jello shots really diminishes with age.

McDonald: Like it or not though, it's a ritual that people engage in in mass numbers. We wanted to explore what kind of significance this ritual has and where it could be taken [as a fictional story]. We took it in a direction where these guys become vulnerable with each other. 

Butler: We started the entire shoot with the nine-page argument between Davin [Andrew Scott] and Fionnan [O'Connor], so on day one these guys were naked, fighting with each other in the freezing cold.

McDonald: It could have been terrible, but hey went into it with a no moaning policy. That was something they agreed upon themselves before shooting.

Hugh O'Connor: As actors you don't have to do a lot of work to get to that physical state when you're actually in it. You're not telling yourself, 'OK, it's supposed to be really cold and I'm naked in a forest. You're actually really cold, naked in a forest. Also, if you're naked on your own in front of an entire crew, there's shame, but if there's six of you, it's hilarity.