Dan Harmon says nailing down what the Group film’s plot can be a decade after the present ended has been a mixture of anxiousness, avoidance and a tough problem in how one can deal with the passage of time.
The author and showrunner appeared on the most recent episode of the Six Seasons and a Film podcast and mentioned his thought course of round producing the long-awaited subsequent chapter. Through the hour-long dialog, Harmon shared how he and co-writer Andrew Visitor have been grappling with returning to the present’s characters in a brand new decade, the place audiences have grown together with their stances on comedy and topical points like (paintball) weapons in colleges.
“Andrew and I simply began asking ourselves what would this factor be?” he mentioned. “The years since stopping Group have been transformative for me. So it’s not as simple as simply placing my head proper again up my butt and having every little thing be precisely the place I left it. Not to mention wouldn’t it be as simple as that to please followers who’ve grown for 10 years for the reason that present went off the air.”
The conclusion, Harmon says, was that point was not their enemy. “The candy spot that we ended up going by means of philosophically was, ‘Aha! You realize what all people likes to see is that point has modified, and so have the lives of the characters and the world that all of us share with them,” he mentioned. “The character has tailored — they reacted to a altering world the identical as all of us have — however they’re unmistakeably themselves.”
However earlier than they reached that time, he and Visitor contended with answering what, and extra importantly what not, to do for the plot line — particularly when it got here to having the film’s story resemble episodes from the sequence that had been “style homages,” like “Epidemiology” and “A Fistful of Paintballs.”
“Do we actually assume that it might be a good suggestion for the Group film to be a paintball episode? I feel it’s one of many first issues to rule out as a result of it’s the very first thing off the highest of your head and that’s a problem with the Group film idea. We did a variety of episodes the place, from web page one to web page 30, you’re joyfully locked in as a assemble that isn’t a conventional sitcom narrative however is, in actual fact, moderately by means of the lens of David Fincher or [Martin] Scorsese or extra importantly, by means of the lens of one of many character’s perceptions,” he mentioned. “I acquired to form of rule that out. Perhaps a greater author wouldn’t.
The author and producer famous that there was even deliberation about whether or not the movie may try a narrative extra tied to the literal actuality of what occurred to the present — like Greendale Group School closing down for 10 years. However doing so, he mentioned, felt prefer it may make an excessive amount of of the film “unrecognizable” to Group‘s longtime followers.
