Jason Biggs directed and stars in “Untitled Home Invasion Romance,” as Kevin, who tries to woo back his estranged wife by having an actor friend pretend to be a burglar. Kevin thinks that if she sees him bravely confronting the burglar, she will respect his strength and courage and fall in love with him again. Meaghan Rath plays Suzie, the wife who turns out to have enough strength and courage for both of them.
This storyline could be played for thrills or comedy, and in an interview with both stars, Biggs talks about balancing both genres—and about the advice he got from Eugene Levy when filming “American Pie” that still guides him, and Rath talks about how her vision for Suzie evolved from the first script reading to being on set.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Jason Biggs: There is a broader version of this movie. You read the script, and it could go so many different ways, tonally, and how you shoot it, and so forth. And so, Meaghan was saying, “You know, I’d be interested in the broad version of this movie.”
Meaghan Rath: I actually think the broad version would be a great movie.
How did you define the tone and how did you as a director talk to the actors and crew about it?
JB: I knew that there could be a broad version of this for sure. It’s a high concept, right? A guy fakes a break-in in an attempt to win back his wife by playing the hero, and someone ends up dead. Even in the broadest comedies that I’ve been a part of—and this is the Eugene Levy School of Comedy—is ground it, ground it, ground it. How deep can you take this? But I just saw the movie more as sort of more like a sort of Coen brothers. The Coens can get broad too, but I felt like it was more in that world of a little, certainly for me, unexpected, and a little more, with the comedy coming about in the moments where you don’t know whether you should laugh or not.
And then sometimes you are laughing in spite of yourself or right on the heels of having just squirmed because you saw someone’s brains blown out. To me, that was, I think, more fun and interesting. And so that’s the way we went now in terms of working with the actors.
The challenge was in everything. It was, “How do you shoot it?” How light is it? How dark is it going to be? Performance-wise, this is why Meaghan was the perfect casting for this, because she does comedy, she’s so funny, she can do drama, and she also knows that there are levels. So we got to play around. She was so great at taking notes. We could say, “Oh, you know what, maybe this was a little too broad here, maybe bring it down, let’s do the comedy.” I think most of the tone work came out in the edit, like 80 percent.
Meaghan, you had a real challenge as an actor. We learn right at the beginning, as we hear your wedding ceremony, that you and Kevin do not know each other very well. In the film, he learns a lot about you that he didn’t know throughout your first year together, and we learn it, too. How did you strike that balance?
MR: We had a lot of discussions about it. I mean, it’s interesting because I think the way that it was written and the way that I read it at first is that these two are not meant for each other in any way. They could not be more different, and this marriage is not going to work out. Through some rewrites, but mostly when we got on set and started talking about it, and even the way that we ended up playing it, we realized that there was a romance that was still there and a softness that we hadn’t thought about. I think the end result was really interesting and definitely fun to play.
JB: I totally agree and was just going to add that the wedding ceremony at the beginning of the movie is something that we had done after the fact, which was not scripted. We went back partly because we did want the audience to perhaps root for them as a couple. We wanted to give a little more background. We needed just a little bit more into their relationship so the audience wouldn’t feel completely cold toward it.
I love the idea of people sitting down to watch this and it presenting like a Jason Biggs romantic comedy, you know, like something that they’ve seen me do in the past, kind of down that sort of road in my wheelhouse, and then letting things fall off from there and take these turns and tonal shifts.
