First came the white wedding. Then came the red wedding (Game of Thrones fans). Now we have the Drunk Wedding. We recently had the chance to catch up with the Drunk Wedding‘s director Nick Weiss to talk about this comical romp centering around a couple’s trip to paradise to exchange their nuptials. Once there, everything turns from good to very bad with one hilarious bad decision following the next.
[the_ad id=”17737″]The film was shot entirely in South America with modest resources. “The movie was made from a very tiny budget. We had to make a little go a very long way. We had a couple of producers that were very good at stretching a dollar. So, no money, less resources, less time to shoot in. The pace of shooting was extremely fast because we had a tremendous amount of material we had to cover every day and that was challenging, but it also kinda made it crazy in a fun way,” says Weiss.
The biggest challenge (aside from a limited budget) for this film was actually shooting outside of the country. “To bring an entire crew and all the equipment we needed down to Nicaragua was a challenge,” Nick reveals.
He continues, “The whole experience was like a big crazy experiment. We had the opportunity to shoot the whole film in Nicaragua, which added this wild card element to the movie. You get to see these characters in this exotic place. I think that elevated that whole experience. We weren’t just getting up at our houses and driving to set, we were waking up every morning at this resort and in this beautiful corner in Nicaragua to go eat breakfast with the cast. It was very cool.”
Nick talks about how the concept of Drunk Wedding came about. “The idea came out of a conversation with my friend Cooper Samuelson, who’s one of the producers. It was a time where the found footage movies were taking place, where the footage you’re seeing is presented as if the characters themselves shot it. It had broken through in the horror world in movies like Paranormal Activity, and Blair Witch Project some time before that. This technique hadn’t really been explored through a comedy however.”
“Oftentimes when people are having a wedding they’ll put little cameras on the table for people to shoot some footage so they can see everything that was happening during the wedding. When we started talking a few years ago flip cameras were popular … which you don’t see so much anymore … but they were very popular back then. It just seemed like a cool way for a movie to be made that was wild and crazy with the found footage technique. We got very excited about that,” he explained.
Weiss elaborates on his vision for the film. “I wanted to do something that felt really real and authentic where the relationships between the characters felt genuine. These people (characters) care about each other … now take that and put them in some really wild, comedic raunchy situations.”
“I think there’s a lot of amazing movies made that examine the relationships of people and feel very authentic and true to nature that aren’t necessarily designed to be huge laugh movies, they are just meant to be touching and clever … and then you see movies that are very raunchy and wild and crazy, but maybe aren’t so ‘real’ or true to nature, or aren’t necessarily trying to create some really caring relationships with their characters.
“I really wanted to hit both of those targets. I’m excited to see those really big raunchy scenes from the perspective of an audience who really cares about the characters. There are two scenes in particular that tickle my juvenile funny bone,” he laughs.
In this production, preparation was key with such a low budget and little time. “I am a big believer of improvisation being used as a tool. The way we developed the project was; we wrote a script, cast the movie and we did a bunch of workshops with the cast members to kind of develop who these characters were. The actors even added something of themselves to these roles,” says Weiss.
“We did a bunch of rewriting based on the work we did with the actors. By the time we were on set, where time was very limited, we had already brought some improvisatory impulses into the material. There was then on top of that more improves that happened on set, but in a pretty focused way because there is a limited amount of time to shoot each scene.”
Nick went on, “You don’t really have the opportunity to find the scene or find the moment under those circumstances (limited time). You wanna have a good handle on what you need going into each scene. We did a few takes where it was opened up and let them go crazy. Certainly many of the funny moments were spontaneous things that happened.”
Nick really enjoyed making this movie and he thinks adult audiences who enjoy a good laugh will too. “This movie is like the Hangover, but it could actually happen. We set out to make something that was really funny, and that was really fun for audiences, that felt really real and authentic. I think people should check it out.”
Drunk Wedding is available on Amazon
I write like I think—fast, curious, and a little feral. I chase the weird, the witty, and the why-is-this-happening-now. From AI meltdowns to fashion glow-ups, if it makes you raise an eyebrow or rethink your algorithm, I’m probably writing about it. Expect sharp takes, occasional sarcasm, and zero tolerance for boring content.
