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"\n\n GQ: When did you and [The Hangover director] Todd Phillips and start working together?\n\n Scot Armstrong: Well, way back when, I worked in advertising. First I started at Second City in Chicago and then I was onstage at Improv Olympic and did stuff at Upright Citizens Brigade, too and at the same time I was working in advertising. I was a huge fan of Todd Phillips' movie Hated, his G.G. Allin documentary, so, we hired him to do a commercial. And as soon as we met, we just hit it off. I can't really explain why we hit it off so well, but he just made me laugh, and right around the same time he had won the Sundance Film Festival for Best Documentary for Frat House and Ivan Reitman asked him to pitch an idea for an Animal House-on-the-road type of movie. I called in sick at work and flew to Universal Studios and met him there and we pitched what eventually became Road Trip.\n\n GQ: How did you guys conceive it?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  The amazing thing about writing with Todd is it mostly comes spontaneously between the two of us, or on this movie writing with Craig Mazin, you just kind of make each other laugh and one-up each other and heighten everything that's happening and invent the stuff. We came up with a pitch that was pretty tight. When we write I think we will go off and write our own pages and then come back and trade pages and then adjust the other's pages and add to each other's pages and discuss everything and that's kind of our process. Then we'll sit back down again and invent more of the story and the movie and the map of the characters.\n\n GQ: When you were working in advertising, did you see yourself a screenwriter?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  I don't really know if it was screenwriting, but I always wanted to get paid to write. Even though I performed onstage, I never saw myself as an actor or a comedian in that way, I always wanted to be a writer. Whether that meant writing for \"SNL,\" at one point when I was really young I wanted to be a cartoonist, I always wanted to write funny stuff and to hang out with other funny people and invent stuff. Then once I was in college, I was actually trying to write a comedy screenplay and I wrote basically the worst movie ever and just threw it away and never showed anybody. Everyone needs to get that first bad screenplay out of your system before you start writing other stuff.\n\n GQ: What was that first screenplay about?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  It was called Six Dates and it was about six dates between the same two people that kept going horribly wrong even though they were in love with each other. If anyone wants to pick up on that and finish the screenplay for me, go ahead.\n\n GQ: Why wasn't it working?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  I just threw it away. I think everyone needs to try their first script, and usually the first one isn't as good. You learn so much as you're trying to figure it out. I've done this for a long time now and I look back and you can see how much you learn as you go on.\n\n GQ: What happened when you first wrote Road Trip?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  When they bought our pitch, I packed up my stuff and moved to NYC and lived in a studio in Little Italy on Mulberry Street near the office and wrote the whole thing. Looking back now, that was probably a pretty rash decision, it was like \"Oh, yeah! We sold a movie!\" To assume we could just move and have a whole career going based on selling one pitch was probably a bit naive at the time. I would say, looking back at the way Todd and I pitched that movie, we probably should've had the whole pitch before we walked in the room. I think it was easier to sell stuff back then. These days, it's always competitive, but it's gotten more competitive now that studios have gotten tighter with their money.\n\n GQ: Obviously Road Trip was a massive success. Was it easier to pitch after that?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  We mainly just jumped back into bed with Ivan with Old School. Then we knew what we were dealing with more. I think we were writing that before Road Trip even came out. As soon as Road Trip came out, we were excited about that and had a big surge of confidence. The one thing Todd's always been fantastic at is casting and I think that's the most evident with Old School. We wrote that character for Vince Vaughn, obviously he'd been in Swingers, but after that, Clay Pigeons, a re-make of Psycho, all these things that didn't make much sense for what he could do. Todd from the beginning always wanted Vince for that part, and that really launched him, I think. The same with Will Ferrell, he'd been fantastic on \"SNL\" for years, and the only movie he'd ever done was Night at the Roury, and Todd fought to get him in the movie and we wrote that part for him. So that is one of Todd's great talents, is not just to cast things but to cast a group of people that have great chemistry.\n\n GQ: Is that something you guys discuss when you're working on an idea?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  Yeah, definitely. But it's always Todd's...he's the director, he comes up with the most ideas and has the final say, but we'll debate stuff.\n\n GQ: Was there ever a famous disagreement?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  I remember fighting to get Rob Corddry in Old School and I felt like Todd threw me a bone and let him be in Old School and in the final cut of the movie, he never spoke. Todd thought he was good, but he ended up playing a character that didn't really work in the story. But then he went on to do \"Children's Hospital,\" now my favorite show.\n\n GQ: What was the genesis of The Hangover Part II?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  Todd and Craig Mazin and I sat in a room together, and had a moment of panic, trying to match the highest-grossing Rated R comedy of all time, but we had the starting point of Bangkok at the very beginning, and I think Bangkok is special because it has no tourists, just the wildest most insane nightlife on the planet and also culturally it's so different than anything we're used to. When you're in Vegas and you don't know what he hell is going on, you can go to the pool and have breakfast and discuss what's going on and in Bangkok, they have no such luck and are hit with things from all sides. Being challenged on such a deeper and more intense level. We never considered another city. It represents an intensity and insanity you can't get from anywhere else. Truth be told, I hadn't been there, but the magic of the Internet, you can do tons of research and go through so many things and a lot of time screenwriting can be guesswork but once the location scouting started, still weeks out from the actual shoot, I think we realized we had a pretty good batting average going. Most of the stuff we had set up seemed to match pretty well with what we were gonna be able to get away with and the location matched what we wanted to do.\n\n GQ: Is improv something you guys think about when you write?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  I'm an improviser at heart, when I'm writing, I'm improvising in my head. When you're an improviser on stage, you can never be precious about anything, you can't control what anyone else is going to do. The best stuff comes out of moments of inspiration that spontaneously happen. I love when people improvise as long as they're great improvisers, what I mean by that is people can improvise within their characters and within the scene. This movie is a mystery, you're trying to achieve the insane. I've seen some movies where people improvise and will say some bizarre phrase they had heard the other day, and unless it's coming directly from character and the moment they're experiencing and driving the movie forward, then it's always welcome. Some of the best stuff is invented by Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper, and Ken Jeong. I always tell people afterwards that we thought of it in the writer's room. We take credit for it.\n\n GQ: What's it like being a screenwriter for major studio films these days? \n\n Scot Armstrong:  Well, I've been lucky enough where Todd and I had a lot of success early on and that's given me momentum to do things on my own, too, and I think that we've been lucky enough to have a lot of stress from Warner Bros. Studios and Sony lately to do things we want to do. I think that comedy kind of goes in fashion cycles, where studios will try and imitate what was hot last year or what was done recently. They're always looking for a guaranteed format for what comedy is going to work. I like to count myself as someone who doesn't follow that stuff and someone who's just trying to invent stories and characters and movies that are just funny and work because they're good and not because they're a slight variation that were hot a few months ago.\n\n GQ: Have you wanted to do something people won't respond to?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  I'm trying to get this movie called Will made, and it makes no sense that it hasn't been shot. It's a fantastic script from Demetri Martin, it is an existential comedy, but it's really funny and it's something that I think is a perfect example of what's wrong with, if the system has anything that aren't working on all cylinders, it's the fact that Will hasn't gotten shot. At one point we had Zach Galifianakis and Paul Rudd attached and it's a fantastic cast, and the budget wasn't even very high at all, and that fell through... studios haven't wanted to take chances on movies that aren't sort of an 80-mile-an-hour fastball down the middle and Demetri is a first-time screenwriter so he doesn't have a resum\u00E9 of big-budget film hits. I think we're gonna get it made. It's probably my favorite script I've read in the last 10 years.\n\n GQ: Is that part of what you do? Trying to get projects greenlit?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  That's a huge part of what I do, I'm working here at American Work Inc., a production company I started with Ravi Nandan about five years ago and I come from my theatre background, Upright Citizens Brigade especially, I see so many people with raw talent that have the ability to do fantastic things and you see people get bad advice or led the wrong direction. That's how the company started, just trying to help people and develop and produce the things they want to make. The whole point is to bring peoples' vision to life in the right way and give them the benefit of the... I've probably been in about 2,000 meetings so if I can tell people what they're gonna hear before they hear it and we can put together a script and a presentation that will make something that the writers are proud of but gets made and released.\n\n GQ: What do you say when people ask for advice about starting out as a screenwriter?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  The number one trick to screenwriting is to sit your ass in a chair and type, type, type, and stop talking about it. There's no way around working your ass off.\n\n GQ: There is a strange culture of neurosis around screenwriters who never finish that thing. Do you suffer from that?\n\n Scot Armstrong:  For me, I don't know what it is, I'm kind of OCD about making sure it's finished and tight. But my other advice would be keep your nose in your notebook. Too many people are surfing the web and trying to figure out the politics of getting a movie made or taking meetings and trying to get someone to read something instead of creating a truly great script, because something great has a great chance of getting made, but something average that you've sort of talked people into reading doesn't have as good a shot."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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