This story about “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” first appeared in the Limited series/movies issue from TheWrap Awards Magazine.
The opening night of last year’s Toronto International Film Festival culminated in one of the craziest and, yes, weirdest screenings imaginable. Debuting at midnight, Roku’s “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” left a TIFF audience full of dots on the almost entirely fictional saga of young Al’s rise from a boy whose passion for accordions and Hawaiian shirts embarrassed his parents to a global superstar who found time to romance Madonna and take down a Colombian drug cartel.
The film was inspired by a video for Funny or Die that director Eric Appel made in 2009, parodying rock biopics in the same way as Yankovic’s songs (“I Love Rocky Road,” “Another One Rides the Bus,” ” Eat It,” “Like a Surgeon,” “Amish Paradise”) gleefully distort rock hits. Expanded from a three-minute trailer starring Aaron Paul as the Weird to a 108-minute romp with Daniel Radcliffe in the title role, the The movie has sex, violence, drugs, tantrums, lots of accordions, and as many celebrity cameos as “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” which might as well have been an alternative title.
Yankovic and Appel spoke to TheWrap during a photo shoot for our Limited Series/Movies awards magazine.
About 35 years ago, Al, I interviewed you to write your record company biography for the “Dare to Be Stupid” album.
Rare Al Yankovic: Oh my God. Wow.
I don’t remember what I wrote, but after watching the movie, I’m thinking I should have made shit up.
Yankovic: (laughs) Yes, it is always easier to make it up.
Eric, this movie started over a dozen years ago when you made a trailer for a non-existent movie. Was there a part of you that thought it might be a pitch for an actual movie one day?
Eric Appel: You know, at the time I was doing some fake trailers for other fake movies. And the point was, if people think these are real movies, maybe someone will let me direct a real movie. (laughs) But with this, no. It just existed as a three-minute sketch comedy, really. It wasn’t until a decade later that I got an email from Al saying, “Maybe it’s time to make this an actual movie.”
Al, at what point did you start thinking it was more than a trailer?
Yankovic: For a long time, I thought, “It is what it is: It’s a viral video for Funny or Die.” I’ve shown it at my live concerts for about a decade, because I do a lot of costume changes on stage and it always got a great reaction. And after the shows, people were like, “When does the movie come out? This sounds amazing. And I’d have to explain what it’s like just a little bit.
It wasn’t until about three years ago that out of the blue I emailed Eric and said, “I think it might be time.” Because “Bohemian Rhapsody” had come out, which is known to be inaccurate in many ways, but it won many awards and is very, very popular. And I thought, it’s time to pierce the biography genre once again.
However, I think it’s a challenge to take five really fun minutes and turn it into a fun hour and a half.
Yankovic: Was. We didn’t want to get criticism like, “Oh, this should have been a three-minute video.” So when we were writing the script, we made sure…
appeal: To give it a really strong arc and not just make it a parody of a specific biopic. We took all of that genre, everything that we love about that genre, and everything that’s fun about it. It’s a false story, but it works.
Yankovic: We want it to be a comedy, obviously, but we want it to play like a very serious standard Hollywood biopic.
So what is true in the movie?
Yankovic: (laughs) Well, one of the true things about the movie is that I took accordion lessons from a door-to-door salesman. He came in trying to boost his music school business. They offered accordion lessons and guitar lessons, and my parents of course knew that the accordion was going to take over the world, so they gave me those lessons. But my dad didn’t beat the daylight out of him. That was something we added to make it more cinematic.
appeal: We took a lot of real events and used the events as inspiration for the movie. Like Madonna. (To Yankovic) What is the story of Madonna?
Yankovic: She was kind of responsible for him doing “Like a Surgeon” because apparently one day she was talking to a friend of hers in New York and wondered out loud, “Oh, I wonder when Weird Al will do Like a Surgeon.” ‘It wasn’t like she wanted me to do it or she was requesting it. It was like, “This is going to happen, isn’t it?”
appeal: So we took that little nugget of truth and in our movie, Madonna will stop at nothing to get Al to parody her song.
The offbeat celebrity party around Dr. Demento’s pool must have been wild to cast and film.
appeal: When launching it, I basically relied on Al’s Christmas card mailing list (laughs) for many of our cameos. We wrote all these weird celebrities from the late ’70s and early ’80s that we wanted to have at this party. And then Al provided me with a list of people he could personally contact. And we just select names. It was a shock to say, “Yeah, let’s go out with Conan O’Brien for Andy Warhol,” and 20 minutes later, Al texts me, “Conan’s in.”
Yankovic: Conan tweeted something and made a joke about the movie. I didn’t know him well enough to ask him a favor, but because he tweeted that, I was like, “Hey Conan, since you mention it, do you want to play Andy Warhol in the movie?” I can’t believe we got everyone we did because not only are they major stars, but we had to do it on a very specific day. The whole pool scene was shot in maybe half a day. On the coldest day of the year.
appeal: Yes we couldn’t put anyone in the pool. (laughs) Whenever the camera doesn’t show the pool, I put on splashing sounds to trick the audience into thinking maybe people are swimming.
I mean, the entire shoot took place over 18 days. That pool party scene fell into a week where Monday we shot the pool party, Tuesday we shot all the concert footage, Jim Morrison’s big collapse, and the fight with the band in the tunnel. sand. And then the next day it was the all day Grammy Awards. This is what a typical week looked like in our movie.
Why Daniel Radcliffe? Why doesn’t he look like you?
Yankovic: Well that was part of it. (laughs) “Who doesn’t look like Al?” It was not one of our criteria. We just love him in terms of his acting chops, because he’s great at comedy and he’s also amazing at really serious dramatic stuff. We needed someone who could do both because we wanted to hit the dramatic beats of the movie, but his comedic sensibility. So we wanted someone who was aware of comedy and knew comedy and could play comedy in the context of being very serious.
On the set, were you off to the side giving him Weird Al lessons?
Yankovic: Yeah, I was kind of an accordion technician. I gave him a couple of lessons and sent him some videos of me with my fingers on the buttons and keys. I’m like, “This is what you do for ‘My Bologna’ and ‘I Love Rocky Road.
The only notes I really gave him were related to the accordion. Because that always bothers me, when I see people in movies or TV shows and they’re obviously faking it. And Daniel did a great job. (laughs) I mean, for the three or four people who know, he’s actually playing the right buttons on the accordion.
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