How ‘Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice’ Director BenDavid Grabinski Pulled Off His Time Travel Gangster Romantic Comedy

Writer/director BenDavid Grabinski’s “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” is the kind of movie that Hollywood supposedly doesn’t make anymore – a sizably budgeted R-rated movie, full of genuine stars like Vince Vaughn, James Marsden and Eiza González and an original concept that is gloriously outside the box. It’s sardonic but also earnest, violent but also surprisingly sweet.

Like we said – something that rarely happens these days.

“Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” started with a fusion of ideas. Grabinski said that he wanted to make a movie where the Scrooge from the beginning of “A Christmas Carol” met the Scrooge from the end of “A Christmas Carol” “having to bump heads.” “The idea of the enlightened version of yourself and the unenlightened version felt to me like a fun buddy comedy thing,” Grabinski explained during an interview ahead of the film’s debut at the SXSW Film Festival.

The other idea was a time travel story where nobody was a scientist or knew how the technology worked, so “you can strip out all of the scenes with charts and graphs,” he said.

“Where I realized that there was a couple different things that I wanted to do, that I thought could become one story, I just started writing because I wanted to do something that was a buddy action comedy in a way that I hadn’t seen before, and this all lent itself to it,” Grabinski said.

With “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice,” Grabinski was able to make two buddy movies at once – there’s Mike (Marsden), a lower level gangster, and his boss Nick (Vaughn), who has traveled back in time, and then there’s future Nick and present Nick. “You have two of those dynamics, even though, technically it’s still just two guys,” explained Grabinski. And the best part – since none of them know anything about time travel, they aren’t sitting around talking about it. That’s right – in “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice,” nobody folds a piece of paper and punctures it with a pencil.

And – slight spoiler warning here – “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” begins with the destruction of the time machine.

“Because the crux of it is, when you’re watching these movies and it feels like people can keep using it, you’re not that worried. The driving force was, I want to do a one night gone wrong movie,” explained Grabinski. “And the entertainment factor of these, to me, is they just have got to be alive until the sun comes up, and if the time machine is still in play, that makes it less of a risk.”

He admits that there could be a fun version of the movie that is just constant time loops, which he said would enter into a kind of “Rick and Morty” world. “I wanted to limit things because I have to self-impose rules to make it feel contained, because it needed to feel like it’s both a small character movie with clear stakes and a movie that’s a bunch of genres at once,” Grabinski said.

Grabinski wrote the script in 2021. It was lockdown and “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” the Netflix animated series that he co-created with Bryan Lee O’Malley, was getting going. Producer Andrew Lazar, who had worked for years on an action movie Grabinski wanted to direct, came onboard. When that earlier movie fell apart, Grabinksi came up with a movie small enough that he could actually make it, which wound up being his directorial debut “Happily,” released in 2021, which meant that the premiere got canceled and it only had a limited theatrical release. A TV show that Grabinski was set to do was also canceled because of the pandemic.

“After I got done licking my wounds, I wrote this script but I was too busy to do anything with it,” Grabinski said, who spent years making “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.”

“Somewhere in the middle of it, I got a call from Andrew, and he’s like, ‘Hey, so don’t get mad. I went rogue and shared the script with 20th Century and they really like it and they want to meet you.’ And it went from that call, which seemed a little far-fetched, to me having a meeting, and then they were making a deal. I was in the middle of ‘Scott Pilgrim’ and I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to be in the middle of something that has an end in sight, and then know that you’re going to jump into something that you really care about.”

Grabinski had spent so long trying to get other things made and now had a producing partner who “did the hard part of the process for me while I was making another show, which is something that I’ll always appreciate.”

20th Century was the only studio that Grabinski talked to about making “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice.”

“They had no creative issues with any of it and I didn’t think that was going to happen. I thought I might get stuck doing it independently, because I felt very strongly about how idiosyncratic it is. But I also do feel that it is a very entertaining, crowd-pleasing movie. I wasn’t trying to make like a niche thing,” Grabinski said. “I was realistic, in a sense that I thought maybe some money people might look at it and say, Oh, this is R rated, and it’s not based on IP, and it’s multi-genre, but I always believed in it as a big piece of entertainment and I was really excited that 20th got on board and didn’t want to round off the edges of it.”

And it was always something that Grabinski was going to write and direct.

“There wasn’t a word of it that was written in a way where I wasn’t also thinking about how I was going to execute it, to a point where there was more stuff that I think was in my head than some people had realized,” Grabinski said. When he was courting one actor, he told them that what could have been a brief cameo was going to be a full-on musical moment (we are forbidden from spoiling what actor or what the song is, but you’ll know it when you see and hear it).

One of the biggest draws of the project was that he was able to do elaborate action sequences, which has always been a dream. This is a man who once maintained a “Mission: Impossible 2” fan site to keep track of all the latest “Mission: Impossible 2” developments.

“I think realistically, just to be frank, people in rooms that I was not in probably said, ‘OK, but do we know if he can do action?’ And I think my enthusiasm about action and my kind of clear understanding of it, even having never done it, probably made people relax,” Grabinski said. “It took 20 years to get my first big studio movie. So while I’m acting like it wasn’t really difficult to get this made, it’s also after two decades of work, building up a reputation and knowing what I wanted to do and being clear and articulate about it.”

The studio was heartened by Grabinski’s commitment to prep and Lazar’s track record of identifying talent and helping to shepherd that talent – everyone from the Wachowskis on “Bound” to John Requa and Glenn Ficarra on “I Love You Phillip Morris.” He was also surrounded by key collaborators like cinematographer Larry Fong, who had worked on movies with J.J. Abrams, Zack Snyder and Shane Black.

Shortly before production, Fong and Grabinski attended a revival screening of “Last Action Hero,” with Grabinski asking Fong how certain shots were achieved or earmarking elements that he wanted to replicate in “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice.”

“It’s such a difficult movie to make that if I was working with people who also were creatively hedging their bets or not sure about it, it would have been impossible,” Grabinski said.

For the action sequences, he had a team that was articulate and attentive. “When I’d say, ‘I want this scene to feel like it’s 1/3 Jackie Chan, 1/3 the fight scene from Fincher’s ‘The Killer’ and 1/3 the fight scene from ‘Used Cars,’ and they take that as marching orders,” said Grabinski. When he would see the pre-viz of the stunt he was shocked to see that the team not only understood his references but actualized his vision.

For all of its disparate elements, Grabinski wanted to make sure that if you watched “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” without sound that you could always tell that it was a comedy. “That applies to costumes, props, lighting, sets, locations,” said Grabinski. In order to get on the same page, he would start every day with a meeting with the department heads, “so the left hand always knew what the right hand was doing.”

“You want it to feel like everything works in sync. And especially, this is the kind of movie where, if you don’t have a clear vision for it, and don’t really have a strong take on what you’re supposed to do, it could just spin off into the atmosphere,” Grabinski said. “You could read the script and think that it was just a farce, or you could read it and think it was just a dark crime movie. There’s ways to interpret it, and you find ways to make sure everyone knows the choices they’re making are in sync with each other for these things.”

The fine-tuning continued into the edit, where he would get feedback from people like O’Malley and “Coyote vs. Acme” director Dave Green. When they bumped against a certain element, Grabinski had to get creative. “I don’t have the luxury of other movies where you can do reshoots and it wasn’t like a mistake that was made,” said Grabinski. He was worried about the glut of “unrated” movies released to home video during the explosion of DVD, where an extra two minutes could be added to a comedy that would make it feel 20 minutes longer.

He took a scene from later in the movie that he was going to cut anyway, put it in the place where people were getting confused, and never heard another word about it. It’s almost like fixing something in the past via time travel. “I found a balance that I’m really happy with, but it took a lot of trial and error,” Grabinski said.

If there’s one thing he’s disappointed about, it’s that “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” won’t have, besides a few festival screenings, a wide theatrical release. Instead, it will head to Hulu, where similarly impressive movies like “Prey,” “In the Blink of an Eye” and “No One Will Save You” debuted.

“I very naively didn’t think about it as that at all. I just was making it as if it was going to be in 4DX and IMAX in the biggest screens. And I shot it that way. When I did my coloring and my Atmos mix, I always thought I should just make a movie and not think about that at all. I would be lying if I said I hoped that it would be in theaters but at the end of the day, I had a studio partner who really got behind something that would have been very easy to nitpick everything about it, from the rating to the tone to song choice, there’s just so many things about it that people could be like, Are we really doing this? Do we really want to do this thing? And that’s the most important thing to me,” Grabinski said.

Now that he’s at the end of it, he’s beside himself.

“I’m thinking, Oh, holy shit. I got to make the thing that I wanted and people are watching it and reacting it to it in that way,” Grabinski said. He heard from people who read the script and saw the movie and told him, “I didn’t know it was going to be that from the script.” When he asked them if that meant that they didn’t really understand the script, they would sheepishly say yes. Not that it bothered Grabinski.

“That’s the thing I appreciate about the studio, because so much of it just makes sense in my head, and I really saw the movie, and the movie that we have now is that movie,” Grabinski said. “It’s different in some ways, because there’s stuff that’s funnier than I thought it would be, and there’s stuff that I thought would be funny that I realized I should lean more into the drama, and you’re reacting to performances of actors on the day and in post. But I’m just stoked it exists.”

“Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” will be on Hulu on March 27.

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