Vaughn and Akerman on Their Couples Retreat
They met as struggling actors in 1993 while working on Rudy and three years later, Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau were ubiquitously known by their clever catch phrases and quotable lines from their low-budget hit Swingers.
The two have been inseparable ever since and have corroborated on a string of projects including Universal Pictures new comedy, Couples Retreat.
When Vaughn came up with the idea, he took the concept to his longtime friend and co-star “Favs” who loved the script about a group of friends all having martial problems. While some issues are more drastic than others with the couples, Vaughn said “the fun is in seeing all of their relationships put under a microscope.”
ComingSoon.net talked to Vaughn and his on-screen wife Malin Akerman about the film:
Q: When you guys are shooting in Bora Bora, can you catch any sports or is it that cut off from the rest of the world?
Vince Vaughn: It’s pretty cut off.
Malin Akerman: The internet was like, what, snail speed. If you got one email a day you could open it maybe, maybe. It’s kind of nice though.
Vaughn: All you could do was actually get outside and enjoy the beautiful weather. I’d be in the room, going, “I can’t believe I can’t get this game on.”
Q: It’s just like your character in the movie; he’s upset that he can’t see the playoffs?
Vaughn: Really, for me, if you follow a team and you’re in any of that fantasy stuff it makes it fun to watch a lot of the games. I enjoy doing that on Sundays for sure, and especially football and college football I like. But I was really thankful to be there. The place really is breathtaking, unbelievably so. It’s just amazing.
Akerman: It’s paradise.
Vaughn: I did a lot of stuff that I never would’ve done. I always think of this nowadays for all of us, it’s like you track our DNA from wherever we’re from and to think that you’d be in a place like that at some point there’s like no way ever that that would happen. Thanks to those boys out of Ohio with that flying machine.
Q: Were there things that guys went off and did together and then things that the girls went off and did together?
Akerman: In real life? Yes.
Vaughn: Fishing and sewing. That’s just an old expression. You go to a barbecue or something and the guys are always huddling and talking about sports or whatever, and you say, “Oh, you’re breaking off into fishing and sewing.”
Akerman: A lot of the girls sat by the people and had maybe a piña colada or two at the end of the day, sat at the restaurant. Kristen Bell is quite crafty. She’s like a little Martha Stewart and so she’d literally call me in my room and say, “Do want to come up for pudding?” I’d be like, “You have pudding?” She had everything. She had Scrabble. So it was a lot of board games and a lot of that kind of stuff. I don’t know what you guys did, what the boys did.
Vaughn: I spent a lot of time with my fiancée. We had a lot of fun which was good and then my sister was there and my nephew was there.
Akerman: We had that poker day.
Vaughn: We had a poker day which was really fun.
Akerman: It rained and so we could do nothing that day but poker.
Vaughn: The jet skis were really [fun] going and doing that. We went and swam with the sharks which was crazy. That was great to do. I never thought I’d do that. I was always afraid of that, anything in the ocean because I grew up around lakes. So we did that and that was good.
Q: What kind of sharks?
Akerman: Black Tip Sharks and Lemon Sharks. Lemon Sharks get up to nine feet which is bigger than me for sure. It’s a little bit nerve racking.
Vaughn: It’s just like anything, if you’re not used to something it seems intimidating and then once you do it you got really comfortable and we just swam around them.
Akerman: Yeah, after a while.
Vaughn: So it was really cool to go into the ocean like that, being able to dive. I’d never done stuff like that before. It was amazing.
Q: Was it your idea or Jon’s to do a comedy on an island?
Vaughn: It was my idea. Location, a nice location. I’m a slave to my craft. Have to go to Bora Bora. I think that it’s just in your life, whatever priorities you’re thinking about and I just thought that would be kind of fun, doing a movie, not just a romantic comedy that’s only about one relationship but about couples. It’s about your group of friends, right? We all have our friends. If you have a really close guy friend, you love it if the girls really get along and vice versa but I think if you have a good girlfriend you really want the guys to get along because you want to spend time with your friends. So, inevitably you end up with a group of couples that’ll come over for barbecues or you go do stuff together. The fun of that is that the guys do stuff and the girls do stuff. The guys can do something that they want to do during the day and the girls can go do what they want to do and then you come back together at night. It’s sort of about that group experience. There hadn’t been a movie that I’d seen any time recently that really dealt with couples. The challenge of writing it and editing was that you really wanted to give every couple its due. There’s really no B story. Every couple has a beginning, a middle and an end and a real arc. The final conclusion, if you will, when they’re all sort of coming together, that editing style came out of necessity because you didn’t want to just sit through linear conclusions of each scene although they were all well acted and well done. You actually sit through one and then you’re waiting to sit through the second and then third and so we had to find a way to sort of inter-cut that for that to happen. So I like the dynamic of how the guys are and you seek advice from your friends and how the girls are and then how the couples interact. I think that most people have all the qualities in them to smaller degrees. The funny thing is that everyone sort of sees themselves more as our couple but then you have friends who go, “No. You’re much more like that couple.” No one sees themselves as those other more extreme versions, but we all, sadly, or not sadly but just humanely more of those than we’d want to recognize.
Q: You and Jon were kind of in reversed roles from “Made” and “Swingers.” He was more of the party guy and you were more of the straight laced guy.
Vaughn: Yeah. I think I had done things recently, like I guess with “Crashers” that’s true. Although in “The Breakup” he’s more of the comic relief. He’s a bit more extreme. He wants to put a hit on that guy and he’s more of a kind of a street guy, a neighborhood guy. He’s more grounded than that, but it’s fun for me where Favreau was concerned. I met him as a comedic actor doing “Rudy” and Jon is so funny that it’s fun for me to let him come in and be an actor and give him a part where he can be funny and just sort of extreme because doing comedic roles, sit second and have the ability to get to do just the comedy versions. A lot of times the protagonist or the lead will the burden of staying grounded so that the audience can see the movie through their eyes but a character like Trent is allowed more freedom to be out there because he’s the comic relief. So for me it’s just fun to watch Favreau in that role as it was in “Breakup.” I thought that he was really great and hilarious and in this one, too, he’s so driven and ultimately so likable because Favs is very funny and also has a real warmth to him.
Q: Was there a lot of improv stuff left on the cutting room floor?
Akerman: Yes. I think there was so much improv that we could probably do a whole other film on the side, but it was great. That was sort of some of the fun parts where you have your character, your intention, your goal for the scene and then it was really cool working with these guys because of the improv. I always love it. I think it’s so much fun and so great. Although, once him and Jon start you’re like, “Holy sh*t.” You can tell that there’s some history there because you guys together are like husband and wife. You guys should’ve been a couple.
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