Vince Vaughn heads to Couples Retreat

Couples Retreat looks like more fuel for Vince Vaughn’s fire. We followed his dating tips in Swingers and dealt with our commitment issues in Old School, Wedding Crashers and The Break-Up. Now he’s going to give us marriage counseling. Vaughn is one of four men who go to Bora Bora with their wives for a week of therapeutic exercises, including swimming with sharks and stripping on the beach.

Crave Online: Was it tough to focus on work when you’re shooting in a tropical paradise and might want to go hang out on the beach?

Vince Vaughn: I don’t think so, no. For me, I grew up where it was flat and cold, so to go to a place like this is so foreign to me. Both my parents worked and any time I’d do something fun, I could always hear my dad in my head, just making fun of me, like I was a wimp for going and trying to have a good time. I’d feel guilty about doing anything fun. The place was beautiful and it was great to be there, but the challenge, from a producing side of shooting in that place, became very apparent, very quickly, with the logistics. That place hadn’t been filmed in, in a long time. There were a lot of challenges in the execution of the filming.

Crave Online: Does writing allow you to have quality control over the projects that you’re involved in?

Vince Vaughn: For me, it’s something that I’ve done forever uncredited. Even on Return to Paradise, I wrote a lot of the stuff in that. I’ve never taken credit. It was just my approach. I remember a moment in time, when I was talking to Favreau, and I said, “Man, I’m so tired of sitting around and waiting for parts to come. No one’s hiring me, but there’s no material.” I was waiting for material that I would do. I couldn’t get hired for anything. I was just an out-of-work actor. I said, “We should really write stuff,” and then he wrote Swingers, and we got to improvise and do stuff. I really got my wings, in that moment, and took it upon myself. Sometimes rejection in an area, at the time, can seem hard, but it can actually be a gift because it forces you to get better at things that you weren’t initially considering doing. I’ve always written and done stuff, and the best case scenario is when there’s a collaboration. In this case, it was easy because Faizon [Love] and I are friends. We had done Made together with Favreau. We had all been through the process that way before. And, I had done The Break-Up with Jason [Bateman]. The girls were new to the equation but this is the system I’ve always put in place. This time, I took credit for the first time. Favreau wrote the first draft, and then he was occupied with Iron Man stuff. So, me and this wonderful female screenwriter, Dana Fox, wrote the next draft. But then, I always bring in the actors and say, “Well, what do you think?” I always find that, when you include people and give them a voice, it’s a better collaboration and it’s easy to come to a common ground, and your actors are more invested in the roles themselves, and have ideas. Some of it sticks and some of it doesn’t stick, but you go through this improvisation process and you get some things that work and you shape scenes, at that point. And then, you go and shoot whatever you land on and write, and you allow a couple free takes and see if something comes up that makes sense.

Crave Online: All of your comedies seem to be based in real life moments, so where did the concept for this come from?

Vince Vaughn: As you mature, you start to think about different things. I got to a stage where I was ready to have kids and a family, and I started thinking, “What makes a relationship work?” There had been a series of romantic comedies, but I thought it would be funny to do one that would encompass a larger group of people that would be couples. That way, it wasn’t just one thing to dive into, but it’s that dynamic that we all have. If you have a good guy friend, you really are thankful if the girls get along. And, if you have a good girlfriend, you like it if their guys get along. People come over and you BBQ, or you go to a game or concert together, and you have that dynamic within the group. And, I’ve always found that it’s easy to see other people’s stuff and go, “God, if they just did this,” or “Boy, they’ve got problems.” But, you never can really see what’s going on with yourself. It’s just the nature of all of us. So, I felt it would be fun to take a bunch of regular folks, who are having a hard time conceiving, or their wife left them, or you think that you’re doing good at life because you have a job that’s working, make a kids a priority and then go and realize, “What happened to us, in all of that?” The danger of not dialing in to each other is that the trust is gone. With The Break-Up, I had a thesis to say, “Here’s two immature people who handled a relationship immaturely, but at the end of the movie, have grown from that. The lesson was not wasted on them. They’re in a better place, in the future.” My thesis with Couples Retreat was to say, “Take regular folks with regular problems and give some hope, love and a little optimism for the case for marriage and the reasons for the value of it.” That was the intention of the idea for this movie.

Crave Online: We’ve seen you and Jon Favreau banter at different times in your lives: as single guys in Swingers, in the relationship you had in The Break-Up, and as married men in Couples Retreat. Considering where each of you are in your lives, how different is your banter these days from when we first saw you?

Vince Vaughn: It’s really about the tone for the movie. Swingers was really about a guy who was left by a girl, and had to try to meet a girl for the first time, who he didn’t have a class with or didn’t know from his neighborhood. You have to go up to someone you don’t know. It’s a skill to learn. You think, “How do I approach this person and not have them think that I’m a threat?” The movie really is about that, and the male friendship that happens in it. The tone of this movie is about couples and relationships, so the subject matter is different. Swingers was an R comedy. Wedding Crashers was an R comedy. This is not. We intentionally didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain in this. You’re allowed a f*ck, but we didn’t use it because it wasn’t fitting for the type of movie that we were making. It wasn’t the tone. I would love to go back and do another R comedy, if the subject matter inspired me, and have the banter be fitting to that. But, for this, for what we set out to do with it, it just felt inappropriate to be shocking for shocking’s sake. It wasn’t consistent with the spirit of the piece.