Interview – Troy Duffy, Chris Brinker, and Sean Patrick Flanery of The Boondock Saints II

Like many, I came to know and love The Boondock Saints through DVD (and now Blu-ray.) Browsing through my local DVD retailer, I checked out their new releases and saw the film for a reasonable price. This was also at a time I had decided I wanted to be a filmmaker so I was interested in seeing obscure, off-beat films. So I purchased the flick, went home, and was instantly assaulted by all of it’s awesome. From the unrelenting action to Willem Dafoe’s outlandish performance, I was thoroughly entertained by what Troy Duffy had delivered and eagerly anticipated the sequel, which by this point in time was still rumored.

Well here we are, ten years after the first film debuted and The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day is upon us. While it’s been playing New York and L.A., everyone else gets it this weekend. When I went to sit down with these guys, I have to admit I was a little intimidated. I was a fan of the first, and here I would be having a chance to talk to guys who’s film I admired (which, quite honestly, doesn’t happen often at this level of the game.) I shouldn’t have been, as Sean Patrick Flanery, Troy Duffy, and producer Chris Brinker treated me like one of the guys. They even went so far as to let me tell them my relationship troubles for the time being (and let me say, what they said REALLY perked me up that day to where they asked “Are you recording it?”)

Sadly, I didn’t get that part, but what I did get was a fun conversation with three guys who have a pure passion for their film. Heck, even two fans came up and sat down with us. Coupled with them letting me vent my problems to them, you can tell they love their fans. And you know what? It was bleeping awesome.

First I wanted to ask you [Sean], are you ever going to join the UFC?

SEAN PATRICK FLANERY: Um, I’m too old for that man. Too old.

TROY DUFFY: You’re a ninja dude.

SEAN PATRICK FLANERY: I would if the whole thing came around when I was younger, but I’m too old for it now. The guys now, they’re not dappling in it, they’re professional athletes. They don’t have a job. Like they wake up, they do two hours of strength and conditioning then they have a healthy nutritious science diet, and then they do two hours of cardio. Then they do an hour of grappling, y’know it’s Olympic caliber training. It’s not like it was in the mid-90s where like a fireman could enter. And y’know, I have a job.

So, did this dude [Sean] and Norman pull any pranks on set?

TROY: Man, it was like a friggin’ fun factory. You feel like you’re in high school.

SEAN: For a welcome present in his trailer, I gave Norman a dozen Dunkin Donuts and he gobbled those down. It took him like two days to gobble all down. He’s like ‘Dude Flannery, thanks man, can’t wait to do this movie. It’s going to be amazing man.’ The next day I presented him with an envelope and inside it was a Polaroid with me sitting in a chair with my donut wrapped around my dong. He was like ‘TELL ME THAT WASN’T IN THE BOX! TELL ME THAT WASN’T IN THE DONUTS!’ I was like ‘I can’t lie to ya Norm, it was.’

TROY: So no. Not much messin’ around.

SEAN: Pretty much standard issue filmmaking.

You just came in there, did your work, and went home. Was it like a high school reunion though when guys came back to it?

CHRIS BRINKER: Yeah.

TROY: It was man. It took us ten years to make the second one for reasons outside of our control.

SEAN: We know each other, we kept in contact anyway. It’s one of the few films where every time you do a movie, everyone exchanges phone numbers, and never hear from the other person.

TROY: It was different on this. You kept in touch with pretty much everybody.

This is where the fans approach us and sit down while we have an interview. Loved it.

What kept you guys confident that a sequel would get made?

TROY (points at fans): Stuff like that. Boom. Man the fanbase man, I run into thousands of kids with tattoos of this on their body. Murals of these guys with their guns and you can’t pay for that kind of fanbase, like corporately organize for that to happen. There’s something about Boondock with it’s fanbase that just cuts way deeper than most films for some reason. I don’t know what it is, I’m not sure I want to know what it is.

SEAN (shows picture of him and Norman Reedus as a mural on a wall): Stuff like that. That’s in some dorm room. There’s no stuff like this for Simply Irresistible (NOTE – I told Sean this was the first time I saw him, which was true.)

TROY: And look at that guy. He’s kneeling down like you’re shooting him.

CHRIS: In the ten years it took to get this made, I don’t think any of us ever lost faith that it would get made.

I saw it through word of mouth. I saw the DVD sitting in Media Play and was like ‘I’ll give this a try.’ Bought it, went home, never looked back.

CHRIS: What year was that?

2002.

CHRIS: Oh ok.

TROY: Early in the game. Every Boondock fan I talk to has almost the same story. Either one of their buddies sat them down and forced them to watch this movie and an hour and fourty-five minutes later you got another droolin’ Boondock fan. Or, they heard about it from their buddies so much they had to go get it themselves and try it out. And that means that nobody ever tried to sell this movie. No red carpet, snapping cameras, no advertising campaign. Just came out on video, and the kids found it, and did it themselves and made it successful themselves.

What inspired the story to the first film? I know there was the murder, but what about that made you want to go through with this story?

TROY: Regular crime, and being a victim of crime and realizing the police really couldn’t do anything. We all see that disgusting story on the news, y’know four year-old girl gets raped, tortured and killed and the guy gets off. Everybody has that gut reaction, and you could be the most liberal of people, everyone has that gut reaction of ‘Whoever did that should die.’ Most of us don’t say it, or act on it, but we all have that little seed in us. Boondock kinda lets you play with that fantasy a little bit

To me there’s a lot of John Woo, Hong Kong action influence and what were some other influences?

SEAN: His dog Tootie, influenced him.

TROY: John Woo for sure. Those ballet gunfight sequences. We do it in our own way. You pay homage to him in your own way you’re not so much directly copying them.

CHRIS: For me it was Pee-wee Herman, and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.

SEAN: My dog, Donut.

When you got the first script, what attracted you to the property as a whole?

CHRIS: Y’know it was a trip. I read a lot of scripts when I was working with the studio. Most were like ‘Yeah it’s good, yeah it’s good,” but then I got this and was like “Oh, snap.”

TROY: He calls me up, and I’m a bouncer at this time, and he goes ‘Hey man, do you mind if I handle this property?’ And I’m like ‘Knock yourself out dude.’

CHRIS: It was raw too. Y’know, Troy had the structure and all of that stuff down but he didn’t read that book or this book. You can see his voice, and you can see his voice. Y’know, things weren’t like, traditional, and that’s what was like ‘Ah, this is so raw.’ That got faxed through a bunch of machines and big studios guys were looking at it like ‘This guy doesn’t know how to format this. He’s a genius!’

TROY: That’s what every writer should do.

One of my friends who’s kind of a higher-up filmmaker than I am. And everytime I send him a script he gets on me about formatting.

CHRIS: They didn’t even care when we read this script. I think they fixed it. It was funny, Troy and I were laughing and were telling us to fix that stuff. Then we found out Miramax was sending it out and that they had bought the other one.

SEAN: Y’know the truth is this, if you could put a supermodel in crap clothes, you’re still going to bang her. If someone writes a piece of art and the format is wrong, they don’t give a flip. They can fix the format, you can’t fix a bad script. Elle Macpherson is in a crappy bikini..it’s still Elle Macpherson! Y’know?

TROY: Talent wins.

SEAN: You can redress the pig, y’know? You can’t change the pig into a cow.

What was the most exciting scene for you guys to make?

TROY: Hands down, there’s this thing the fans are calling “the mantage”. One of the reasons was, Rocco comes back in a dream sequence and he talks to the brothers. And we wrote this together; me, Sean, Norm and Rocco minutes before we shot each one of these lines. We didn’t know what we were gonna do because were supposed to get Fenway Park for that, and we couldn’t get the park. So it comes to shooting day and we got nothin’. It’s just this thing that smacks you right in the face and is so anti-authority and basically begs for John Wayne to come back. It’s like ‘Hey, all you sensitive, sharing dudes out there? Stop being a bunch of wusses.”

SEAN: It’s like for the chicks who are like ‘I’m opening the door myself’ it’s like ‘No, I’m opening it for you and you’re gonna like it.’ ‘Oh my God you’re right. I am gonna like it!’

CHRIS: You know what, it would have to be the first flashback to Il Duce.

TROY: Isn’t that Italian for ‘The Douche’?

CHRIS: Cause it was the first day. It’s a great scene, but it’s not necessarily my favorite scene in the movie, but most exciting.

TROY: That was the first thing we shot.

CHRIS: Yeah, so that for me was the most exciting. Seeing him call action, and the guys weren’t there yet. And the guys came back to shoot their scene. The first thing we shot with you [Sean] was on the freighter wasn’t it?

SEAN: Yeah.

CHRIS: That was a really cool, like windy. 100 mile per hour winds.

TROY: What was your favorite scene to shoot?

SEAN: My favorite scene to shoot was the one where I got to bang Julie Benz. Didn’t make it into the film, but the fact we got to shoot it. Connor MacMannus is going to….OOOOOOH!

Speaking of Julie, I know her character was a placeholder for Willem Dafoe’s Speckler character from the first movie. Did you guys try to bring Willem back, or did you decide we wanna put a female in here?

TROY: Ah I worked on a couple of drafts with Willem and he just wasn’t workin’. We decided that after you put a guy in a dress you go ‘What a dark side’ and kills somebody, he’s an FBI Agent, what else can you do with him? Once I decided to take him out and put her character in as his protege. You can tell Speckler trained her, but she’s got her own thing going on. Script locked right in, it was almost like cracking a code. I’d say thirty to sixty days we had the shooting script.

Why did you chose to not make her a love interest?

TROY: Because that would be lame.

SEAN: Because then they’re like Ken dolls, there’s no genetinalia.

TROY: Everyone instantly assumed love interest, and to me that ruins a lot of good movies. And the Saints, they’re very sexual man. It’s not about that for them. They have a job to do.

SEAN: Their sex is killin’ people. They’re like ‘Uhhhh.’

Did you guys ever give up on this?

SEAN: No.

CHRIS: Nah.

TROY: Fans weren’t givin’ up, we weren’t givin up man. We’ve had some depressing moments sure…

CHRIS: Minute it crossed my mind, we were forced to give up, like something happened we’d be like ‘(sigh) I wanna off myself I think.’ It was so much of overcoming adversity, and getting the movie made. And he wouldn’t make the movie unless certain things were right, creative side, business side. These guys were the same way. But everybody was on the same page.

TROY: We actually walked from several deals because they didn’t give us enough to make a good sequel. So we could have made it a couple of times and decided to take the risk and walk and allow that fan base to keep growin’ and growin ’til we got our number.

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day is now playing across the globe. The first film is available on DVD and Blu-ray here. Give these guys love. They deserve it.

Interview - Troy Duffy, Chris Brinker, and Sean Patrick Flanery of The Boondock Saints II4.356