INTERVIEWS: Starsky & Hutch

10 days from the end of their 55 day shoot, the cast and crew of Starsky & Hutch greeted the press at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, where they were shooting the climactic confrontation between Starsky (Ben Stiller) and Hutch (Owen Wilson) and the villain, Reese Feldman (Vince Vaughn). Though spirits were high during the shoot, in which catch phrases and bullets flew, the cast showed signs of wear.

Wilson said, "It's been a long shoot it seems like. Long hours and stuff but it's funny. This is one of the first movies I've ever really shot in Los Angeles. [I get to] go home at night and kind of go out with friends and stuff, but more traffic. It seems to move slower."

Wilson was standing around in a cowboy outfit. The premise was that Starsky and Hutch were infiltrating a benefit dinner hosted by Feldmen, which was actually a cover-up for drug smuggling. Stiller wore a green leisure suit, which may have been one of his more comfortable outfits.

"It's all so too tight," Stiller complained. "It's not really comfortable to wear at all. The leather jacket is really cool, because it's really closer to almost the Fonzi jacket but I would never wear it in real life because the collars have all been made to stand up cause all their collars were always up."

Todd Phillips directs the film, which sees him reunited with Vaughn. Phillips expanded the part of the villain when Vaughn accepted it. "Well, I'd made 'Old School' with Vince, so I went to Vince first and said, 'Will you play the villain in this movie?' and he said, 'yeah.' Based on that, we wrote his part a little bit bigger, because Vince said yes."

Phillips also explained the tone of the film, which is set in the '70s just before the TV series began. "It's not a parody," Phillips siad. "It's an interesting tone the movie has, because it's not really a spoof or a parody. It's really just saying: this is the prequel to the series 'Starsky & Hutch'. This movie takes place before the series was shot, ostensibly, in your mind."

Setting up the buddy dynamic will rely heavily on the natural chemistry between Stiller and Wilson. Stiller said, "I enjoy him as a person. I like working with him. Doing this movie is the first time we worked together since 'Tenenbaums' and 'Zoolander'. It's just very comfortable, fun and we just know each other so well so it's not really like working with someone you have to get to know them. There is always that thing when you are working with new people you have to understand on how far you can go and what ever, but with Owen we are pretty loose with each other and basically now it's like some sort of bad Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise sort of vibe on the set."

Wilson said their comfort level made him more free to improvise on the set. "Some movies you feel more comfortable and you're encouraged more to improv, and then some you don't hardly improvise at all," Wilson said.

Producer Tony Gilroy has remade TV shows before, most notably, or perhaps least notably, The Mod Squad. However, he intends to correct that film's mistakes in Starsky & Hutch. "Number one, we have a script that we all believe in," Gilroy said. "'The Mod Squad' script we really didn't believe in. We really made sure this time that the audience really understand who these guys are, which we never really did with 'The Mod Squad'. We never really gave the audience the understanding of who they were of the three, who Julie was of the three, we were never able to do that properly in the script. Without the proper script, it wasn't going to work. The casting was great - we had a great cast - we just didn't have a good script."

The supporting cast includes Jason Bateman, who plays Feldman's "bitch." "I actually read for Vince's part," Bateman said. "They said, 'You were really great, the bad news is that we're out to Vince Vaughn.' I said alright. Vince said yes, so then they threw me the bone of Kevin. Which is, you know, the Bitch. The guy that gets beat up a lot. It was a little bittersweet. But believe me, it was the best day of my life when they told me I got this."

Fred Williamson plays Captain Doby. "[I'm] the tough police chief that's on top of Starsky and Hutch," Williamson said. "He loves them like you love your kids. He'd like to kill 'em without hurting them, if that's possible and that's not possible, so he beats them up verbally, tries to keep them in line and shake them up."

[Spoilers Ahead] In the climactic scene, Williamson's character takes a stray bullet fired from Starsky's gun. "I don't die. This does not break one of my three rules in the movies where you can't kill me, I don't die in a movie and I get the girl at the end of the movie. So, they're not breaking any of my taboos here. I get shot in the arm by Ben who takes a wild shot and misses and I'm the guy who gets shot. This is the only movie that I don't get to hit nobody, man! This is way out of character for me." [Spoilers End]

Phillips would not claim that this movie breaks new ground for the buddy cop genre. He just feels he's making a unique entry into the genre. "To me, movies are all about casting," Phillips said. "So, I think the casting in this movie is just so dead-on for right now. Between Ben and Owen, of course, and Vince, Juliette Lewis, and Snoop Dogg. Will Ferrell does a cameo, which is great. We have just some great stuff in the movie. Not that other cop movies aren't cast well. I just think that this movie's pretty exciting to cast, to me."

Starsky & Hutch will open in the Spring of 2004.