‘Super Troopers’ Oral History: Mutiny on the Highway, Adam Sandler’s Advice, and a Real Crime

“Super Troopers 3” opens in theaters today, a quarter-century after the original “Super Troopers” premiered to a packed midnight audience at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Grossing more than $18 million domestically and $23 million globally, the comedy about five wildly unprofessional Vermont State Police officers slowly built up a cult following, eventually bringing in $60 million in DVD, VHS, and Blu-ray rental revenue.

“It was three years before we really started to get a sense that people were watching it,” writer and star Paul Soter told IndieWire in 2016. “You’d start getting stopped on the street, and then if we went out together it kind of became a thing. A couple years after that, it was pretty regular.”

Despite “Super Troopers” reaching cult status, getting “Super Troopers 2” made was an uphill battle. It was such a low priority for Fox Searchlight that, in 2015, the Broken Lizard team turned to crowdfunding to raise the first chunk of the budget. They hit their $2 million Indiegogo target during the first 24 hours of the campaign and ultimately raised $4.4 million from fans. Released in 2018, the sequel took in $32 million globally.

It’s been a decade since IndieWire made a set visit to “Super Troopers 2” to meet the Broken Lizard highway patrolmen of Carl (Soter), Thorny (Jay Chandrasekhar), Mac (Steve Lemme), Farva (Kevin Heffernan), and Rabbit (Erik Stolhanske), but due to assorted shenanigans, our conversation was never published. 

Until meow. 

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Why the original “Super Troopers” was such a slow burn

Kevin Heffernan: I think partly because there are no stars in it. And when Fox put it out, they approached it that way. If you look at the first poster, we’re upside down in the glasses. We were like, “Why the fuck are you putting us upside down on the poster?” And it was because none of us had any recognition and they didn’t want to put people on the poster when nobody knew who the fuck we were. So they turned us upside down on the poster. It was clever. 

How making “Super Troopers 2” compared to shooting the original

Jay Chandrasekhar: This is a real film. It’s a Hollywood production. 

Paul Soter: To be perfectly honest, we had nothing on the first “Super Troopers.” We didn’t even have the most basic comforts.

Steve Lemme: Like food and water.

On the set of ‘Super Troopers’©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection

Soter: When you shot a scene by the side of the road, after you were done shooting, you stood by the side of the road. You didn’t even have a fucking chair. We were still so green. I remember the first thing we shot on the first day was with Jim Gaffigan, and he was like, “Where do I find a cup of coffee?” And I remember being like, “Oh, your majesty over here wants coffee when we’re on the highway.” In the intervening years, you realize that’s no way to make a movie.

Lemme: Truthfully, when I said we didn’t have food or water, I actually wasn’t joking. The first few days, there was a major water situation. It was an oversight. For some reason it became such a chore. Somebody had not bought water. And it wasn’t on set. And we were in the fucking sun on the highway, and people were snapping. There was a mutiny happening.

Our producer Rich Perello had to get out there in front of the cast and crew, and he started to cry. Of course, we’re like elbowing each other, but it was real. On the stunt where the police car goes by, screeches in the distance, backs up, and then comes in, on that first take, the transmission got blown out in the car, and we were down 50 percent of our police cars, right off the bat.

Getting Brian Cox for the role of Captain O’Hagan

Lemme: We were going after Paul Newman and Bill Murray, but Brian Cox’s agents approached us and said he wanted to do the movie. We wanted the biggest Hollywood legend to be Captain O’Hagan. Brian Cox said, “You’re never going to get those people, so I will patiently wait while you exhaust yourselves, and when you’re ready, I’ll be here.”

Chandrasekhar: We always joked that he was the one real actor, and then there was us.

Soter: I think about him, then at 55 years old, what he put up with, and how he didn’t walk. If any of us were asked to do somebody’s film and it was the conditions that we had with “Super Troopers,” we’d be like, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” I remember doing night shoots. Now, we’ve come to realize that Brian Cox, as he gets older, really doesn’t like doing night shoots. 

Lemme: There’s this scene in the first movie where it was 4:00 in the morning, and he was exhausted, and we were in the car with him, jammed in there, just like making mom jokes and insulting each other, and he’s staring out the window wistfully, and he muttered to himself, “What ever happened to craft?” It shut us all up.

When he came back this time, it was really nice to see him. He was happy to see us too. After a day or two, we could see that he remembered the process and was coming to terms with the fact that it had not changed at all.

The rumor that one of them was almost arrested while still in uniform

Soter: We drove the police cruisers back to the garage at the end of the day, and they were like, “You guys are in uniform, you fucking drive the cars back.” We didn’t have enough transportation people. And so we drove the cruisers back to the motel. Stolhanske got in trouble because he put the lights on at one point, which is, I guess, pretty illegal. 

‘Super Troopers’©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection

Lemme: It’s a crime.

Erik Stolhanske: I was driving the police car one night and a woman cut me off and I was like, “Are you stupid? Why would you cut a police car off?” And I was just looking at the switch for the siren. I was like, “I should teach this lady a lesson. She’s a bad driver.” I didn’t bloop her, but I wanted to bloop her. You felt the tremendous power of what it meant to be a police officer. There would be times when you’d be driving home and you’d look in the rear-view mirror and everyone is behind you going exactly your speed. Nobody was passing you. That’s why it was so infuriating. She had no respect for the badge. 

One time, I decided to see how slow I could go, to see how slow I could get the traffic going. And they started zipping by me and I started getting upset, so I turned on the rollers to see if people would slow down. But I realized I was in a Vermont cruiser, not a New York cruiser, and that because I was in New York, I had no authority. And then I went back to the motel and there was a knock on the door and it was a cop. I was nervous, so I jumped under the bed and I was looking at the feet underneath and I hear as the door opened, “There’s someone who was impersonating an officer and we know they’re at this hotel.” They covered for me.

Chandrasekhar: The cops went through this charade, because I think they knew you were under the bed and they said, “Well, if he ever does that again, you tell him that we’re gonna have to arrest him.”

Writing new jokes at 3:00AM in the middle of production

Lemme: No, that’s pretty common. We do that. That’s the way it always came about. We value that in our creative sessions. We’ll work and work and work, and then when we’re done, we’ll go out and you’re laughing as hard as you can laugh at things, and then at some point you figure out how to inject it into the script. 

Chandrasekhar: When you shoot movies on location, you get another half a dozen jokes or so because there are things that happen at night while we’re at bars, and little riffs form. And then I think, where can we stick this riff? The state of mind that a lot of people watch comedies in is similar to the state of mind that we’re in when we’re out at bars. You have to be true to the fact that if you think it’s funny then, it’s going to be funny to other people when they’re in that somewhat altered state. It’s important to not judge the night. It’s a time when your brain lets go. It’s a time when your mind opens and it’s really a critical time for jokes. You have to respect it and go for it. 

It’s all effectively situation comedy. The meow thing, for example, came out of a late night. We were hanging out in a motel in Burbank and it was like five in the morning. I have a bad left ear. And someone said “now” and I said, “Did you say meow?” And then we riffed for like an hour. And then somebody wrote it down on a napkin and a year later when we were writing it, someone said, “Remember that thing with the meow?” And then who knows who came up with the idea to stick it into a pullover.

‘Super Troopers’©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection

Working with Adam Sandler

Lemme: After “Super Troopers,” Adam Sandler called us in for a general meeting and said, “You guys are the real deal. I went and saw your movie in the theater. You guys are funny. If you ever need my help, let me know. And when “Club Dread” was coming out, we opened up against “Passion of the Christ,” and we bombed, and the Monday after we bombed, Sandler called and said, “You guys need my help, so come on in.”

Meanwhile, the day before we had been sitting around lamenting the reviews that said we were sophomoric fraternity boys with frat boy humor. And Kevin [Heffernan] said, “You know what. They want to see something sophomoric? We should do a movie called ‘Beerfest.’” 

Heffernan: Like, what a great sophomoric title, “Beerfest.”

Lemme: So then what happened was, we actually started to work “Beerfest” out in our minds. Sandler called, and we went in and pitched him the idea for “Beerfest” and he said “I love it. Let’s do ‘Beerfest.’” We’d written the script, handed it in, and we went over to Happy Madison and Sandler and Jack Giarraputo and Tom McNulty were there, and they said, “We’re going to say something we’ve never said before. We have no notes.” 

This was right before we were walking into the meeting with Sony to see if we were gonna get a green light or not. We were flying pretty high. We went into the Sony meeting, and the notes that they gave us were discouraging. I actually liked this executive very much. He said, “You guys missed the mark. You made a sports movie. And this isn’t a sports movie.” And in our minds we were thinking, this is a sports movie. That’s the joke. It’s guys training for a year, and the worse shape they get in, the better shape they’re in. And he said, “I think the characters are unsympathetic.” We said, “How so?” He said, “They’re like Budweiser guys.” To a room full of guys who love Budweiser. And we said, “What should they drink to make them more sympathetic?” He said, “Stella Artois.” And I like Stella Artois. But we thought, since the movie is about Americans who own an American brewery, it makes sense for them to drink American beer. 

‘Super Troopers’©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection

Finally, he looked at the Act Two break where we killed Kevin’s character and brought him back as his twin, and he said, “You guys are cynical.” Then Jack Giarraputo got mad and said, “Come on guys, we’re not making the movie here,” and we walked out and he said “We’ll circle the wagons next week,” and they went off.

We were there on the steps outside of Sony, reeling from what had just happened, and the phone rang — literally rang while we were on the steps — and he said, “Warner Brothers is offering you guys a production deal, and they’ll greenlight any movie you guys wanna make. What do you want to do?” And we said, “‘Beerfest?’” And they greenlit it.