Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone Break Down a Scene from Life of the Party

Hi there, Melissa McCarthy.

Ben Falcone.

[Melissa] And we are doing...

[Melissa and Ben] Notes on a Scene.

Hit it.

Life of the Party is about...

I play a woman, Deanna Miles, she's a mom and a wife.

One thing she always wished she had done

was go back to college, so Deanna Miles

goes back to college at the same school

that her daughter is attending.

Today we're talking about the oral presentation scene.

Deanna does not like to give public speeches.

Hello to you, class.

Why don't we start off with...

I gotta get some air.

My favorite student.

Deanna Miles, would you get us started, please?

So I finally do get up in front of the class.

I can't quite keep my nerves or my bodily moistures...

That sounds terrible.

(laughs) She sweats a lot.

She starts sweating.

That's a different way, yeah. That sounded...

Uh, I don't...yeah.

That's terrible.

It was technically one of the more difficult

scenes I've ever shot, for sure.

A lot of the scene was improvised,

so it was very difficult to keep that straight,

because we had four phases that we were trying

to get back and forth between, so she might

improvise something really funny,

but she was in the wrong sweat area.

Because you can't really stop her

when she's in the middle of a thing.

So I'm writhing around, like oh, oh my God.

And then Ben's like, nope, none of it's usable.

Nope, but that's true, because you

don't have the right sweat.

Okay, that's great.

But it sounded like it was like a paramilitary,

just people screaming like, Back to phase one!

Back to phase one!

Her pits are drying!

We've gotta start!

And then you can't unsweat.

Like, you can't unring that bell.

We can't unsweat the sweat.

Once this gets a lot of lip gloss and Vaseline on it,

it's not coming off that easily.

Deanna Miles is gonna start us off, everybody.

Uh, lights?

Oh, I didn't expect that.

Well, this is the first time we're gonna see the pit.

And there it is.

[Melissa] That's...oh, wait.

[Ben] Here, I'll circle it for you. I don't have it open.

There you go.

Pit.

First.

That's really our first landmark pit.

A lot of discussion right in here, where it gets pitty.

How much pit?

This is phase one.

We're in phase one now.

It started with water, I think, in here,

and then the water was drying too fast.

And then Pamela Westmore, who I will rat out,

just started applying lots of Vaseline.

On the day we were for sure trying to kill Dawn,

who was my lovely costumer,

Dawn! We had 25 of these shirts,

because we didn't know 25.

if we were gonna ruin them, if we were

gonna end up putting, like, some chemical on them.

And the minute that you put too much stuff on it,

and we had to go back to phase one

from phase three... Phase one, guys, phase one.

I did have some crotchal sweat down here,

but it really doesn't read on camera,

which was a bit of a disappointment.

And I think, and we kept doing

underboob sweat here and here.

[Ben] We wanted sweat here.

Did you take it out?

No.

God, I'm sorry.

Is it part of the core curriculum

that I must use the podium?

No, of course not.

No, not at all.

[Melissa] This is really some kind of

Vaseline-based product.

This was just spray bottle.

[Melissa] Spray bottles from Dawn.

Dawn provided the spray bottles.

This was also Dawn.

Well, do you remember first they built a rig.

They were gonna put her in a Oh God, I forgot about that.

a rig, and the special effects guys...

They were like, Hey, let me, I blow up cars.

Let me put something in your pants.

Which is always like...

[Ben] If we'd gone with the machine,

it would have really started here.

[Melissa] No, it would have been like pew, pew, pew, pew.

And blown up there. And it was like,

sweat was like, oh, like, shooting out

like my ribs. And sweat did

directly kind of go that way.

[Melissa] Yeah, and like none, none anywhere

[Ben] near a gland. It would come

hard out the sleeve.

Lots of sweat here.

Yeah, as if my elbows were just like...

She's got buckets.

She's just got buckets in here.

And water's pouring out.

[Ben] That's my bucket, guys. I like the bucket.

Let me give it a water line.

Which means it's a clear bucket,

which doesn't really make sense.

She's totally pitting out.

She's gonna be fine.

Tomb of Attila the Hun thought to be in Budapest, Hungary.

[Ben] In here, this is important.

That's nice.

[Melissa] That's some nice, there's some real

back sweat there, and I think at one point

we tried to put a little sweat here,

[Ben] but we didn't. We tried to put

a little sweat there.

We wanted a little buns sweat, but it didn't...

We wanted a little buns sweat.

We tried, Dawnie, didn't we?

[Ben] This...

[Melissa] A little pit here.

Was augmented a little bit with a computer.

Oh!

It was?

You guys, it's the future.

No, it is.

This, like, probably the real back sweat was here,

but I said oh, let's really see it.

So this part here, oh, that's starting to look...

[Melissa] That's starting to look...

[Ben] Like something I don't...

That's starting to look like a lady part.

Don't need that.

A lady part.

Let's just undo that.

Anyway, but you get... Now it's a watermelon.

Now I have a watermelon on my back.

And a sandwich!

[Ben] No, this is the computer.

[Melissa] Watermelon plus sandwich equals...

[Ben] That's a computer!

And that's my buns.

There you go, there's that.

[Ben] So anyway, that was augmented.

That was augmented in post with

a little bit of a computer assist.

Oh, I didn't know that.

[Ben] Yeah.

Thought to be in Budapest, Hungary,

in 2014, but was in fact a hoax.

But how do we know?

I wanted my knee to buckle really badly.

I just thought she just should start

breaking down in general, like bones going out.

And also, when you do see someone who just

like does that knee drop...

We know.

I'm never one for a big, loud sound effect,

but every time they turned it down, I was like,

guys, we need to hear that crrrkk.

And every time, I was a little bit like,

am I actually gonna pop my knee out of socket?

Which could happen.

You know what, if I could just maybe get into

a couple of those tissues.

Oh, of course.

I'm sorry, it's just...

You may want to check with your HVAC guy,

because it is, something's going on in here.

Oh.

Thank you. Uh, you've got...

Now, if you actually go through this,

you're gonna see that as hard as we tried,

there are one, two, three, four, five.

Is that one thing?

[Melissa] I think that's one.

Six, seven.

It was really hard to keep those straight,

because we did this more than once, as you might imagine,

and we were trying to cut back

the fourth. And I couldn't reset it,

because I'm just, I can't see my face,

so I'm just literally rubbing my face with Kleenex.

[Ben] On the sweat. That's what,

that's what every woman wants, is that.

When you get that sweaty,

when you get that kind of sweat, pulling that hair down.

[Ben] And then this here.

Yep.

And we're starting to do just upper shoulder sweat,

which, when you get into places where

there are not even glands, it's good.

Historically...

(clears throat)

She starts to vomit a little bit in her mouth.

That was just, I think we missed

just a little bit of throat vomit.

Could I just have a small, small sip

of water from someone, um...

[Ben] This poor guy.

Now, we're bigger here.

Who I went ahead and asked him ahead of time.

I was like, can I come out of the audience

and can I take your water bottle?

And then I was like, I'm gonna come at you pretty hard.

I didn't want him to just give me the water bottle.

And then he really held it.

So it was with all my might, I had to, I was like...

I had to get that water bottle away from him.

[Ben] And then here is one of my favorite parts.

It's just when she...

[Melissa] Where it gets intestinal.

It gets intestinal.

That is surprisingly challenging my body.

Something about the water hits

that nervous stomach, and it's not good.

My intestinal back story was that

everything was just seizing up,

and I was cramping up, and just like I was

kind of snapping in my head.

Oh!

Oh, girl.

I think it's...

[Ben] There's some undersweat.

See? I was telling you.

[Melissa] There's undersweat. Oh, that there is.

[Ben] A little bit, it's subtle.

Under?

Oh, you're calling this undersweat.

I'm just calling that under...

And there's under...

Under, underboob?

[Ben] And then there's under...

[Melissa] Collar.

This, there is some in there in back.

[Ben] Under, under.

I think it's, it's okay now.

Many various different kinds of horse skeletons

to enable them to come into the next dimension.

Are there any questions?

That's a lot of sweat, guys.

[Ben] I like that hair.

Yep, and this one.

And this, there's just a...

I don't know, it looks bubbly,

because it's like chunks of Vaseline.

That's clearly Vaseline here.

We're gonna call that Vaseline.

But Pammy, nice shadow.

Ooh.

Nice shadow work.

That's staying on.

Look at that chunk of hair.

I mean, that's a sizable...

And that's a sizable thing.

[Ben] So she was squirting you.

And then here is the collar.

[Melissa] Collar sweat.

Here is this.

So generally, when we're shooting,

I would say we almost always have two cameras.

On this day we had three.

One camera, we're gonna call this the big camera.

[Melissa] Is this the crane?

[Ben] Crane.

Amazing when you can get that.

So we're just gonna call that big camera,

we'll call this B camera.

[Melissa] And it be shooting.

[Ben] And that was shooting both Parnell, who's over here.

[Melissa] Here's Parnell.

[Ben] Yep, and then we also really wanted

to make sure we were getting that pit.

And then we had--

It gives you a really nice up angle,

which is always great.

And then we had A camera, which was back here,

shooting at basically...

Sheila Waldron is going to kill me.

Basically, this angle there.

So we were trying to get...

And this is shooting.

Shooting this world.

Shooting of the world this way.

[Ben] Yeah, that wedge.

[Melissa] That wedge.

[Ben] This is this wedge, and this one was this wedge.

We never would have made the day with two cameras.

We needed every single camera and every trick in the book.

And normally a scene like this would take a day,

and we gave ourselves two days to shoot this.

We...

We needed it.

We needed it.

Are there any questions?