NOVOCAINE Interview: Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen Talk Their Action Comedy. And Pain.

Mild-mannered Nate Caine (Jack Quaid), an assistant manager at a San Diego bank, has an unusual condition, a genetic disorder that makes him incapable of feeling pain.

He can still be wounded--he just can't feel the knife cutting his arm or the frying pan burning his hand. To avoid harming himself, Nate leads a rigorously sheltered life.
That is until his coworker Sherry (Amber Midthunder) is abducted during a bloody bank robbery. Nate sets out to rescue her, no matter what the bad guys throw at him.

Directing partners Dan Berk and Robert Olsen previously worked on the thriller Villains (2018) and the sci-fi Significant Other (2022). In Novocaine, they turn Lars Jacobson's script into a bright, bouncy comedy of action and gore. Nate is like a character out of silent film comedy, and the directors point to Buster Keaton's influence as much as John Woo's.

Berk and Olsen talked with ScreenAnarchy via Zoom during a recent press junket.

ScreenAnarchy: How did you decide on rules about Nate? Can he be killed? How much blood can he lose? Things like that.

Dan Berk: Rules were really important to establish. He is just as vulnerable as a regular person. He's a human being, not a superhero. He can be killed. He can be knocked out.

Actually in the first draft of the script we got, there were a lot more head hits. A lot of pistol whipping and gun stocks being jammed into his temple and his head hitting countertops and things. Only he wasn't being knocked out.

That felt to us like flying a little too close to the sun. We might get some eye rolls in the audience. You're allowed to push things to a certain level, but you don't want it to spin out to be so unbelievable that there aren't stakes anymore in the movie.

We went through with our stunt coordinator to audit all the hits and make sure that, within our rule system, Nate could believably still be standing. We put in some patch-up scenes. At the hardware store he pulls a bullet out of his arm and bandages the hand that was deep-fried. Later Roscoe (Jacob Batalon) helps him bandage up an arrow wound.

We made sure to keep it on the rails as much as we could. We wanted to land Nate in a place where he was just about dead at the end of the movie. We had to graph his deterioration properly.

Were you worried about keeping it R-rated?

Robert Olsen: That was something we were never really restricted by. You can kind of do whatever you want to the human body, as long as it's violent and not sexual. So the restrictions didn't come from the MPAA, they came from the human body, and how far can we push Nate before it gets ridiculous. You want to push to the absolute max to really get all the juice you possibly can out of the concept.

But we never had anybody telling us, "This is too gruesome." If Nate could feel pain, if he was wincing or calling out for his mother like Giovanni Ribisi in Saving Private
Ryan, it would be way too much.

The fact that he can't feel gives the audience the permission to laugh. Which means you can handle a little bit more gore than you might in something that did not have a comedic undertone.

In silent comedies they could do whatever they wanted to characters because you couldn't hear what was happening.

Robert Olsen: Absolutely. Buster Keaton was getting thrown around left and right, almost dying all the time.

Dan Berk: Houses falling on him.

Robert Olsen: Grabbing onto a moving train.

You said earlier you took a pass at the original script. What exactly did you change?

Dan Berk: The biggest thing was probably also the broadest thing: the tone of the movie. When we first got our hands on this script, there was really no comedy in it. It was very down the middle, a straightforward actioner.

We identified this very sticky, very commercial core conceit in a character who couldn't feel pain and didn't know how to fight suddenly being thrust into an action movie. When we met with the producers, pretty much our entire pitch was: let us do a tonal overhaul and turn this into an action comedy.

If you want to get specific, we basically pitched a totally different second half of the script. The ambulance chase, the scenes in the shipyard stuff, none of that was in the original. Lars Jacobson mapped out a brilliant concept. If we could take that and run with it, forge our own path, put our tonal mark on it, we knew we would have something really special.

How do you work together?

Robert Olsen: When we're writing, we outline in person together. Then one of us will write the first act, send it to the other guy who will rewrite it. Write act two part one, send it to the other guy who will rewrite that, and so on and so forth. By the time we get done with a first draft, it's really more like the third or fourth draft.

That's kind of the writing side of it. As far as directing goes, we do not have some set division of labor. It's not like one of us is the camera director and the other's the actor director.

We're both generalists. We both like to do everything. You have to make sure that you're not both doing everything for no reason. With our first movie, we were so excited to finally be directing a feature that we both had to go up and give notes every time. After a while you learn how to trust the other person and know that, okay, Dan's got this, or Bobby's got this.

That kind of extends to day-to-day on set. The night before we'll look at all the pages we're going shoot the next day. We'll read the scene to each other just in case one of us has a separate idea about, say, intonation.

We have that argument or discussion with just the two of us, so that by the time we get to set, we are not having visible disagreements. Not to say it never happens, but at this point in our careers, five features in, we've learned to minimize those moments.

Do you shotlist and storyboard?

Dan Berk: We always shotlist very extensively. Probably two months before we even started prep, we had a generalized shotlist of every setup in the movie. Once we got to Cape Town and started finding our locations, we dialed it in based on the specifics of each location.

We are insane about this. You can ask anyone who worked on this movie. We hand out giant booklets with a page for every day of the shooting schedule, so we all understand the workload for the day. Every day of the shoot, we make sure the shotlist for that day is distributed to every single crew member. Information that is so important to have.

Novocaine was a first for us because we don't usually storyboard. On this one, we had an actual storyboard artist. We did the action scenes that felt they needed to be storyboarded. They were very helpful to our department heads. With a shot list, you see, "handheld medium coverage of whole fight," "handheld wide coverage of whole fight," "insert on skillet." But with a storyboard, obviously you have a better sense of angles, how to build sets, etc.

How specific were the storyboards? Would you get down to lenses?

Dan Berk: They would detail the size of shots, certainly.

Robert Olsen: You could tell from the framing generally what you want to be doing lens wise. You could know kind of within two or three lenses.

Dan Berk: The actual lens choice was more our DP Jacques Jouffret's territory. We were using two different sets of lenses depending on what kind of stuff we were shooting. The non-fight stuff was anamorphic, and the fight stuff spherical.

Did you split the action from the dramatic scenes?

Robert Olsen: The original schedule was 44 days, and we actually wrapped two days under. There was some second unit for the car chase, but for the most part everything was built into the schedule.

There were some action days where Dan and I didn't have to do as much. In prep we're working with the stunt coordinators, like choreographing the car chase with little Matchbox cars. But the execution of that car chase is so safety dependent that we just sort of sit back and let the stunt coordinators go out there and run the show.

Dan Berk: This is our first action movie. We've worked with stunt coordinators, but it's usually for one day for the one fight that's in a horror movie. This was a totally different process. Large swaths of the movie we're collaborating with somebody else in ways that you just don't on a horror film. Like you don't have a jump scare coordinator on a horror movie.

Robert Olsen: We haven't made an action movie, but our stunt coordinators, [Stanimir] 'Stani' Stamatov and Kerry Gregg, they've made dozens of them. We were able to lean on them. When they gave us pre-vis of the fights, you're still having a creative dialogue where at the end of the day, if you don't like a shot, you're changing it.

The fight in the kitchen was my favorite scene. There have been a million kitchen fights, but yours had the physicality and sense of geography that I really appreciated. And with the flour gag I thought of Chow Yun-fat in HARD BOILED.

Robert Olsen: Absolutely, yeah, Hard Boiled was one of the movies we watched early on. We had Jack [Quaid] watch it as well. There's lots of fun slow-mo in that too, John Woo loves that stuff. It's a movie with a lot of humor in it, like when Chow is holding a baby in one hand and a shotgun in the other. We wanted our movie to have a little bit of a throwback vibe to it.

Because we knew we were not going to be able to out-stunt-choreograph a John Wick movie, you know what I mean? We were really aiming for a little bit more relatable protagonist and kind of like a throwback thing where it's not necessarily about how awesome is the punch and kick combination in this fight scene. It was more about the environment of where are we and what tools can we use? And how can we have fun with this?

So how long did the kitchen scene take to shoot?

Dan Berk: I think three days? No, we were in the kitchen for three days, but that includes the fight and also when the detectives come afterward. So I think the fight itself was two and a half days.

The thing about the kitchen fight that was so time consuming was the art resets. Every time we did the flour gag, which we had to do like eight times, we had to clear the whole set. Everyone had to leave. The art department had to go in and mop up the flour, wipe off every single surface while Jack's costume was cleaned.

That was probably the most challenging thing on this movie, and actually there was a point at which we only had two days to shoot that and not three. Which would leave a day and a half for the fight. To make that work, we thought, okay, we'll cut the flour gag.

Drew Simon, one of our producers, said, "No, you can't cut the flour. I'll give you guys another day." I'm so happy he did, because I think it's one of the first really enormous laughs in the film. When you're watching with an audience, it's where they really start understanding the tone.

Did you test screen this?

Robert Olsen: Yes, and it was awesome. You know, the testing process can be absolutely brutal. It's very hard to pull a random smattering of people into a theater and be like, "Here you go, watch Ex Machina," or, "watch Under the Skin." It's hard to find a consensus for those.

But Novocaine is meant for a broad audience to just come and have a fun time at the movies. After we tested it, Paramount started to see its potential. All of a sudden, before we knew it, we're coming out on 3,200 screens and there's billboards all like up near our apartments and stuff.

Dan Berk: This was a very blessed production and a very blessed post-production. You know, sometimes there's a lot of heartache in that there are things that aren't working, sequences that are broken that you're trying to save in the edit. We didn't have to save anything this time. Knock on wood, I hope we are in that position on future movies.

Novocaine opens Friday, March 14, only in movie theaters, via Paramount Pictures. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.