Please Don't Destroy finds common ground with Beyoncé

The Please Don’t Destroys guys haven’t really been gone, but they’re back nonetheless. Sure, Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy returned to Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago after the writers’ strike ended, but when their new film, Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure Of Foggy Mountain, premiered during the New York Comedy Festival last week, they weren’t allowed to attend because the actors’ strike was still ongoing. That left producer Judd Apatow and director Paul Briganti to promote the film in their place.

Lucky for them—and us—the strike is finally over, and Marshall, Higgins, and Herlihy can talk about the movie, which premieres Friday on Peacock. They play three guys in their 20s, each trying to prove himself in his own way, who resolve to find a legendary treasure believed to be lost on Foggy Mountain. Along the way, they meet a couple of wacky park rangers (Meg Stalter and X Mayo), a cult (led by Bowen Yang), and maybe even learn about the power of friendship. Plus, the whole thing is narrated by John Goodman. “Judd was like, ‘Just call him! He’ll maybe do it!’” Higgins said. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen your guys’ stuff, let’s do it.’”

That spirit of collaboration is evident in the film, as Please Don’t Destroy recruited everyone from comedy “heroes” like Goodman and Conan O’Brien to funny friends in Brooklyn to work on the project. In this conversation, which has been edited and condensed, the guys walk us through their comedy touchstones and riff their way into a Beyoncé comparison.

John Higgins: Yeah, it was wild. The night before [the strike ended], we did The Tonight Show, where we couldn’t talk about [the movie].

Ben Marshall: We were also at work that whole time. It’s so funny, because we booked press months in advance thinking, surely by then it’ll be done. And then the week we were doing everything, it happened. Just happy that they got a fair deal and that people are getting back to work.

AVC: I went to the premiere with one of my coworkers and I was like, “Well, I guess it is a work night for those guys. It’s a Monday night, they’re probably—”

JH: Yeah, we were at 30 Rock getting texts from friends, like, “It went great! Good job!” We were like, “Cool! We’re here working.”

AVC: So where did the idea for this come from?

BM: For the movie?

AVC: The movie, yeah. Or the idea for anything you want to share.

BM: Like, the interview? This is for promotional purposes. [Laughs] I think we just thought about fun, trope-rich kind of genre things that we could make a giant, old-school-feeling comedy about. The three of us, we started out making videos in our apartment, now we make videos in an office. So it was fun to just be like, what if it was this giant adventure thing, where we’re on a mountain and finding treasure and it feels like an old-school comedy where it’s so stupid and big and fun.

JH: That’s one of my favorite parts about the movie, how it feels kind of nostalgic of a certain time of movie.

AVC: It was fun watching because I’m your age, and all the references were for stuff that I grew up with. It definitely felt like the kind of 2000s comedy extravaganza that they don’t really make anymore. What were some of your reference points?

BM: For the adventure and treasure stuff, Goonies and Indiana Jones were big touchpoints. In terms of comedy, I think we all love, like, Seth Rogen movies. This Is The End is a really funny movie that we talked about. Step Brothers, Hot Rod.

JH: Wet Hot American Summer.

BM: So many Judd [Apatow] movies and ones that Jimmy Miller produced that they were able to talk to us about, like, “On Pineapple Express what we did was blah blah blah.” Gosh, that’s so cool.

JH: It’s good to know! And then just throughout writing it, you know, Soulja Boy, “Crank That,” MGMT—stuff from when we were in like 8th grade or whatever that we were vibing to.

BM: We tried to just make it specific to us and the stuff that we grew up on and that we like. Hopefully make it feel like nostalgic, but fresh and a thing you haven’t seen before.

AVC: The Soulja Boy callback—funnier every time. You don’t get sick of that song. Maybe they did in 2007, but—

JH: I think they did.

AVC: They very famously did, in fact. [Laughs] When you sit down and write something like this, you can tell [as a viewer] that the script is structured really well. There’s a lot of set-up payoff stuff in there. But when it’s just the three of you guys, how much of that is scripted? And how does that improv stuff come together? Is it just being together long enough?

JH: We spend every day of our lives together. [Laughs] We’re putting in the work whether we know it or not.

BM: A lot of times we would run it a couple times together, with the director, Paul [Briganti], and then do a loose pass, where it would be kind of hitting the lines, but also riffing and talking over each other and jumping on stuff and adding stuff. I think that helped it feel more natural, and more alive.

Martin Herlihy: We’re really involved in editing stuff. A lot of when we were shooting stuff it was like us thinking about the edit and what other versions we might need. But at certain point I forget what was scripted and what was improvised because it’s all …

JH: I know there was a lot of improvised stuff that did not make the cut. [Laughs]

AVC: When you’re coming from doing social media stuff, where you’re writing it, you’re editing it, you’re directing it all yourself, how is the transition to having all of these resources? Does it make it harder in any way that you don’t have complete control over it?

JH: Doing stuff in an office or an apartment versus doing stuff on a mountain, there’s just like a huge difference. We tried to just maintain what we do here but just make it a little bit bigger.

BM: It’s a good lesson to learn, like, having your hand and your vision touch everything but also trusting your team of incredibly talented crew people and editors to make choices and contribute creatively. Obviously, they come up with so many things that we would just never think of.

MH: The editors on that movie—Daniel Gabbe and Sean McIlraith—are two of my favorite people. So talented.

JH: They would show us something that they cut and it would be like, “Oh, right, yeah, of course.”

BM: Also—to give credit to some people—with the writing process, we would have contributors sending alts, too. Our on-set writer was Albertina Rizzo, we had Carolina Barlow sending alts like every day from L.A. She’d read the script that we were shooting that day, and go, here’s 10 ideas. It would be like, oh, great, these are great jokes, great ammo to have when we’re on set. Mike Lawrence was another guy who wrote alts in a lot of the treasure, lore stuff.

JH: Also, everyone on the cast had also been a performing comedian or even a comedy writer; like Conan, or X Mayo worked for The Daily Show. Everyone knew how to write jokes and knew how to improvise.

AVC: I think William Banks, who plays the “All Lives Matter” tattoo guy, I feel like I saw him do comedy at the Brooklyn Comedy Collective like two years ago. I hadn’t thought about it since, and then I was watching the movie and after 15 minutes I was like “I know him from somewhere. Oh, I saw him in a basement with 15 people two years ago.”

JH: Yeah! That was a dream of doing this movie, resources-wise, is we get to cast our hilarious friends in this big thing and show them to the world. Banks, Chloe Troast, Liz Demmon, Jamie Watson—there are so many of our friends in this thing that we think are so funny and killed it.

AVC: Where was the mountain?

JH: North Carolina! We shot it in Charlotte and then on mountains kind of close to Charlotte.

MH: Some of the exteriors are Ashville, I think.

AVC: When did you film it?

BM: Last summer.

AVC: I know a lot of people from SNL do other projects. How is it finding the time to do that? You must be pretty exhausted week to week.

BM: It’s a hard thing to complain about when you’re getting to make a movie with your best friends, so I just wanna preface anything we say about how it’s exhausting—it is so cool that we got to do this and we feel crazy lucky. But yes, it was a lot of, on a Sunday, as we’re done with three weeks of SNL, flying to L.A. to write this with Judd and bang our heads against the wall until we come back to SNL. And the editing process was the same way. Yeah, it was like an all-encompassing experience for the better part of two or three years.

JH: Luckily, we had written somewhat of a draft before we got hired on the show.

MH: We had written the draft that Judd bought, or whatever, we had written pre-SNL. We rewrote.

BM: We started writing in like 2020.

AVC: So you have Judd—he came out at the premiere and spoke very highly of you guys. You also have Conan in the movie, who’s one of those comedy—

JH: Heroes.

AVC: Heroes, if you will. What was it like working with Conan?

MH: He’s the best.

BM: I think we can all say that we would die for Conan O’Brien. He is the funniest, kindest person in showbiz. I remember Jack White was doing a show in Charlotte and Conan found out that the second assistant director was a huge fan, so had Jack White call her and talk to her. She was crying and he, like, got her a signed record. He’s just an insanely nice, funny person, who, luckily, thinks we’re really funny. And I think we remind him of when he was young and doing comedy with his friends. So we’ve just been extremely lucky to have his support.

JH: Totally. And a really cool thing about this is I feel like I’ve gotten a lot of texts from people like, “Conan can act really well.” Like, he’s not playing just Conan O’Brien in this movie, he’s fully doing a character and does it incredibly well. Just another mark of his excellence in show business.

BM: The first day shooting with him on set, we did the scene where he is yelling at us for being late to work and the scene where I’m pitching him my idea in his office and … that was one of the most surreal days of, “Holy shit, I’m getting to improvise with Conan O’Brien all day. What is going on, this is crazy.”

[At this point, my email notification goes off.]

JH: Who emailed you?

AVC: Who emailed me? My boss just asked if I wanted to review the Beyoncé concert movie, which—

JH: Hey! There ya go.

AVC: Obviously I wanna review the Beyoncé concert movie.

BM: You should, like, compare and contrast our movie to the Beyoncé concert.

AVC: I think we could make that work. There’s gotta be something. The triumph of nature, the triumph of the human will.

JH: That’s the article! “Much like the Beyoncé concert, Please Don’t Destroy…”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misattributed editor Sean McIlraith. It has been updated.