Intrepid Waldo blogger Michael Liss recently met up with two members of the creative team behind The Waldo Ultimatum. The movie trailer parody was featured prominently on sites like Funny Or Die, College Humor, YouTube and MySpace, racking up over 6 million hits. In part two of the conversation with producer Brad Fox and director/co-writer Matthew Hoos, they go behind the scenes of producing the viral video.
Michael: When you developed The Waldo Ultimatum, where did the Bourne/Waldo connection come from?
Matthew: That came straight from the mind of Eric Toth, one of the guys in the sketch group The Imponderables, a long-time collaborator of mine. It just popped into his brain. He went to see The Bourne Ultimatum and I got a call about five minutes after he’d left the cinema. He said, “There’s a lot of running and hiding and stuff.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s a good movie.” And he says, “Well, imagine if you took Bourne out, and put Waldo in.”
It was brilliant, hysterical. Because then you can explore the motivations behind the pictures in the book. Who is this guy, and why is he hiding? Or is he hiding? Is he being sought after? And the fact that everybody looks for him is a clear indication that he’s probably the most wanted man in the world. Why? Immediately, the hysterical notions started to flow. It was ridiculous from that point on.
Brad: You can take a character who’s a cipher and give him slightly different motivations, and then it’s funny, because those aren’t the motivations anybody would ascribe to Waldo in the books. But they work remarkably well.
Matthew: With our comedy in The Imponderables, we try to take things that people are familiar with and turn them on their end, force people to look at them through a bizarre lens. This was the perfect opportunity to take an iconic character, and a movie that people were very well familiar with, and mash them together to create this thing that was ridiculous, but has enough context that it makes sense. If you try to think of what a Where’s Waldo movie would actually be, odds are it would be somebody looking for Waldo, probably on a very grand scale. Which is essentially what we created.
Michael: What was the experience while you guys were shooting it?
Brad: I’ve worked with Matt on hundreds of video projects, and lots of them involved running around in public with funny outfits. But I’ve never seen a crowd reaction like when you had Dave Brennan dressed as Waldo, walking out on the street. It’s like we had immediately turned the street into some live action video game. People pulled over to the side of the road and screamed, “I found him,” and took a cell phone picture or text messaged their friends. Tour groups ran across a busy street to get photos with Dave. It actually got problematic, because we had a very short window to shoot this scene. But he was immediately identifiable to everyone. Downtown Toronto is a very diverse, multicultural place. It didn’t seem to matter what countries people were from, if they were old or young. Everyone saw him and felt that they had owned a piece of him. They wanted to claim that on this one day, they found Waldo.
Matthew: The instantaneous recognition factor was insane. I couldn’t believe it. Later we had 15 or 20 extras out there wearing red and white, the sort of classic scenario in the book. And people just wanted to be a part of it. It was ridiculous.
Brad: It’s funny, because some people really knew their Waldo. They were like, “Where’s his scuba mask? Where’s his tin cup? Where’s the Wizard Whitebeard?”
Matthew: It started to get out of hand.
Michael: In the video, when Waldo has those rougher action scenes, were you figuring out where to take that within Waldo’s character, or is that more a parody of Bourne?
Matthew: We decided that the best way to play this was really straight. One of the great things about the Bourne trilogy is that they play it straight to the bone. There’s no winking. So we thought what would translate the funniest was to recreate the core principals of the Bourne world. Taking those qualities of Bourne, this ultra-action hero, and transposing them onto Waldo brings so much that is unexpected.
Brad: One of the appeals of Bourne is Matt Damon is kind of a Joe Everyman. He’s not Schwarzenegger. He could be normal, and then really he’s this incredible butt-kicker. And there’s no reason Waldo couldn’t be the same guy, and that’s where the humor comes in. Because we don’t know how he gets from page one to page two.
Matthew: We don’t know what he’s running from. When the first Bourne movie came out, it was, here’s mild-mannered Matt Damon, and by the third movie, everybody sees him and thinks, butt-kicking Bourne. So we’ve taken it back to square one. Nobody assumes anything from Waldo, and then it turns out he’s this awesome action hero.
Michael: What was the thinking for the motorcycle shot, where you transpose Waldo’s head over actual Bourne footage?
Matthew: From a comedy standpoint, you want to start somewhere and end higher. We wanted to take it to an awesome, macho hero moment. With our limited budget – and we don’t exactly know any stunt people with motorcycles – we were like, “We want explosions, we want car crashes.” We needed a hit that’s really big. And we were like, “You know what? Screw it.” We’re going to take it right out of the movie and simply transpose it.
Matt: The opening shot is also straight out of the trailer for Bourne. We originally put a little hat and cane on the Matt Damon silhouette. But even just in silhouette, it was too much. You immediately knew it was Waldo.
Brad: It ruins the joke when you reveal him later.
Michael: Did you ever expect how popular this video would become?
Matthew: You never really know. I wasn’t prepared for it to be so popular.
Brad: It didn’t take off right away. We put it out and got some great initial feedback. We were really pleased and moved on to other stuff. And then about four months later, it just exploded.
Matthew: We were concerned about people knowing the joke when they started watching it. We wanted it to be a surprise when Waldo shows up. So we buried it on YouTube under the name “Bourne Parody.” Then MySpace picked up the piece on their front page, and that kicked open the door. People started taking it and reposting it for us with a different title. That’s when the title officially became The Waldo Ultimatum, and traffic really jumped.
Brad: Any time someone major would pick it up, it was really fun to follow the traffic. You could see it spreading out as the big sites would feed the slightly smaller sites, which would feed personal blogs, and then all their friends’ blogs, and then it would work its way back up the stream and hit something large again.
Michael: Would you go back and revisit the Waldo character?
Matthew: I’m of two minds. The Waldo Ultimatum was kind of the perfect mash-up, where everything was aligned to make this funny thing, and a bit of a telling commentary on the world in which Waldo would be part of now. But knowing what new interest there is in this character, I would certainly welcome the thought of revisiting him.
Brad: We did not get rid of the sweater.
Matthew: There are so many questions raised by this, like, is Waldo always running? Or does he take off the sweater and glasses and go back to a family for a little while. It would be pretty funny to do a bit about a guy who’s got a secret double-life. People suspect him. Where does he go? He takes business trips? Really, he’s out of town again?
Brad: And who’s that old man with the beard who’s always hanging around? It would be great fun to take him and juxtapose him in a completely different set of adventures, and see how people relate to that.
Matthew: That’s what part of this whole thing is. It’s an interesting challenge to the fans to see what they can come up with, where they would put Waldo. Our interpretation of Waldo’s day-to-day life is Bourne-esque, but someone else…I don’t know what they could come up with.
Brad: Six months from now we may have a very different idea of who Waldo is. And then maybe we’ll have to pull the sweater out again and throw it back out there.
