Comedic duo Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney (BriTANick) are having a busy month. They recently celebrated the release of two feature films: Pizza Movie, which they wrote and directed, and Over Your Dead Body, which they wrote. Pizza Movie follows college kids who take a fictional drug as they attempt to navigate their dorm to retrieve a pizza. Meanwhile, Over Your Dead Body is an American remake of the thriller The Trip, directed by Jorma Taccone.
We at FandomWire spoke with the duo about balancing the absurd, their cinematic inspirations, and the ongoing debate between streaming and theatrical releases.
Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney: Pizza Movie Interview
Credits: Hulu
Credits: Hulu
Credits: Hulu
FandomWire: Congratulations on the films. What is the timeline of when these all came about? How does it feel that you have your two movies arriving right in the span of one month?
Nick Kocher: It’s equal parts amazing and overwhelming. If I could nitpick, I would definitely spread these movies out over the past seven years, when we were doing nothing at all. We did Over Your Dead Body first. We wrote that and went right in after. Jorma was attached around then, and we started doing his notes while we were also writing Pizza Movie. There was a little bit of overlap.
Brian McElhaney: Pizza Movie began right after the writers’ strike ended in the fall of 2023. It moved prettyquicklyk for films. Over Your Dead Body was actually shot six months before Pizza Movie. They both coincided at South by Southwest. We did not expect both of them to arrive at the same time for the same press tour. So this has been an overwhelming process.
FW: I really loved Pizza Movie. I loved how funny and absurd it was. Tell me about the process of writing and directing it.
Kocher: Pizza Movie was a really fun idea. For people who don’t know, it’s about a group of college kids who are high on a fictional drug, and they’ve ordered a pizza. To get the pizza, they have to go down to the lobby of their dorm. Because they’re on this fictional drug, this journey down two flights of stairs is the feature film. It’s a really fun vehicle because we aren’t bound by the laws of reality. Because of that, you get to do a lot more weird, absurd things. We constantly have weird ideas, but we’ll pitch them for a TV show where they don’t belong at all. We were constantly being told in writers rooms that our ideas were way too crazy. This was so fun because it was a vessel that anything could kind of work with. It was a really fun thing to get to put all our weird stuff in one movie.
McElhaney: We enjoy writing different filmic tones. From the beginning, we knew even without this idea of the drugs that we wanted to do this big, bold comedy where we got to utilize the whole camera toolkit. We weren’t just going to put a camera on two actors and let them talk and improvise. If we wanted to go into an Inglourious Basterds parody, we were going to do it. If it was going to turn into an action movie by the end, why not? If it was going to be kind of Michel Gondry and dreamy for a second, we wanted to go there as well. All of our sketches on YouTube are all these different genres of films, so we wanted to find a vehicle for film where we could put all of that into it. Once we found the drug phases and had that conceit, it lended itself perfectly to a movie that could be all over the place tonally, but also hopefully have this consistent, grounded main throughline underneath it.
FW: What movies inspired you? You see the obvious Inglourious Basterds homages in there, but what tonal comparisons were you looking for?
Kocher: We love the very obvious comparison films of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Dude, Where’s My Car? Those movies are really fun and silly. We wanted to do our take on those movies, but add our weird brand of nonsense to it, which is very inspired by Edgar Wright’s films like Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. There are very obvious influences of his filmmaking style on us. The Daniels is another group that we love and look up to.
McElhaney: We also talked about farce from the 70s like Fawlty Towers. In terms of writing, I was thinking a lot about The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coen brothers movie from the early 90s. During the actual drug phases, we thought about the literal movies we were parodying, which was Liar Liar and Freaky Friday. And like you said, Groundhog Day. We pulled from so many different places to make this work. We wanted to take this classic teen movie we’ve seen before and then elevate it with the style of the modern filmmaking age and also a lot of the comedy classics from the past.
FW: Walk me through working with American High. What was it like working with those guys?
Kocher: They very much left us alone to make the movie that we wanted. They would suggest things and were very helpful, but they were very clear with their notes that we didn’t have to take them. They let a lot of first time directors make their first feature for a decent budget, which is amazing and incredible. We’re so grateful to them for letting us do this.
McElhaney: How many other production companies say, “Here’s an entire high school, use it how you want. See you later.” That’s the most you can ask for when you’re making a movie like this. They have their cast of rotating actors who were Luke, Pete, Chelsea, Lydia, and Tommy. They’re in the movie and they’re so funny. You’re just in this high school surrounded by all these kids making these vertical videos for Instagram as we’re trying to shoot our movie. It’s just this empty, abandoned, haunted feeling high school full of laughs. It’s a very strange place that I recommend visiting.
Credits: Independent Film Company
Credits: Independent Film Company
Credits: Independent Film Company
FW: During the process of the film, were you guys rewriting stuff, or did you have it all locked down before you started?
Kocher: The answer is yes to both. For five weeks before we started shooting, we had one script, and in two weeks Brian and I completely rewrote it and made a very big change to the script. All the locations and all the scenes remained intact. The dialogue of those scenes changed every night beforehand. We were rewriting the night before, during the take, which I think is necessary with a comedy. Even when you have incredible actors, every once in a while there’s going to be some line that’s not coming out of their mouth quite right, and that makes the joke not work. You have to immediately pivot and figure out a way of making this work. If you’re making a comedy, you have to be just continuously adapting to your present circumstances, and that was very much the case with this.
FW: The cast is fantastic. You got Sean, Lulu, and Jack. You also have Caleb Hearon, Sarah Sherman, and Daniel Radcliffe. How did the casting phase happen?
McElhaney: We auditioned everyone except for Daniel Radcliffe. Gaten was one of the guys we were thinking about actually for Montgomery when we started writing it. He came in and auditioned for both characters, and knocked both out of the park. We hired him for one character and did testing with other actors. It just became obvious he was our Jack. We auditioned Sean and Lulu and it was a long process. We wanted to find people who could hit the comedy but also really play the emotion and the heart. Caleb Hearon auditioned originally for Blake the R.A..
Kocher: We wrote a role specifically for Caleb. After he auditioned, it looked like scheduling wise he was going to have to drop out. They asked if we could find another actor for this role and we were like, absolutely not. Sarah Sherman was a friend and we just offered it to her because we came up in the comedy scene together.
FW: There is a Harry Potter throughline in your films. You have Daniel Radcliffe in Pizza Movie, and the names Ron and Hermione in Over Your Dead Body. Was that a coincidence?
Kocher: There were about 30 Harry Potter jokes that were cut out of Over Your Dead Body. It was a coincidence then that we had no idea Daniel Radcliffe was going to be in our movie. We didn’t even know that was going to be a character until the edit. In the script, the butterfly has a very quick line. It was not something we thought we were going to be stunt casting. In the edit, we found room for this whole big monologue. Our first choice was Daniel Radcliffe, and we assumed he would say no, but apparently he’s a lunatic.
FW: Tell me about the process of adapting Over Your Dead Body. Was this a spec that you guys just wanted to adapt?
Kocher: XYZ and 87North were wanting to do an American remake of The Trip. I had become friends with Aram at XYZ because we’d both been in Finland in a sauna together. They approached us with the script and we loved the original. We were initially brought on to do a dialogue polish, and then we ended up changing a fair amount more. We left the structure intact of the original because we loved it.
McElhaney: It was a process of taking this previous material and trying to figure out how to make it our own, and also stay true to what it is. If it’s not broke, you don’t want to try to fix it. How do we take this thing that works really well but update it and make it something right for our actors and in our voice? It’s different than writing an original because you don’t have to come up with all the foundational elements, but you get to play with the details.
FW: How did you land that final balance of humor, action, and horror in Over Your Dead Body?
Kocher: Largely that’s Jorma. We put a ton of jokes in the script, but you never know what’s going to get kept in or cut. The director’s job is really handling the tone and the execution of the movie. We love tonal shifts in movies. If a comedy can make you cry or genuinely scare you, that fear is going to be all the more surprising because it’s coming within a genre you didn’t necessarily expect. If a horror movie makes you laugh, you laugh way harder. We definitely try and lean into that in a big way.
McElhaney: We were worried after writing this if the director would know how to do this. Would they be able to see that this is a humorous moment within this violent moment?. Once Jorma was attached, we were in great hands. Comedy is something he’s good at. He was literally an idol of ours when we started doing sketch comedy. With his work in MacGruber, you can tell he can blend different styles and genre and action with comedy. We knew he would have the respectful tone that this movie needed.
Credits: Independent Film Company
Credits: Independent Film Company
Credits: Independent Film Company
FW: Now that you have one film going theatrical and one going to streaming, how do you think audiences will perceive each of these films?
McElhaney: When I went to film school in 2008, I was really against the idea of streaming. I still think theaters are the best way to watch a film. I wanted Pizza Movie to be in theaters, but some of our favorite memories as kids watching comedies weren’t in theaters. It was movies that our parents showed us, like Airplane! or Monty Python and the Holy Grail, watching on a VHS tape with our friends. I think Pizza Movie is a sleepover movie for teenagers. It will be great on Hulu late at night on a couch. Over Your Dead Body coming to theaters is a really great choice because when you feel all the yells and the laughs together as a group, it feels really cathartic.
Kocher: In a theater with a crowd is the best way to watch a movie, but streaming allows so many more people to see your movie. I just want you to watch the movie. I don’t have a super strong opinion about the exact format. We wrote that streaming joke at the end of Over Your Dead Body when we assumed this movie would be released on streaming, not in theaters. The joke was meant to be punching at ourselves. Now that it’s in theaters, it’s punching at our other movie for being streaming.
McElhaney: It feels very cross-meta between two movies.
Pizza Movie premieres on Hulu on April 3, 2026. Over Your Dead Body hits theaters on April 24, 2026.
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