'Neighbors' Director Nicholas Stoller on How Raunchy Is Too Raunchy — and the 'Revolting' Scene He Had to Cut

The deliriously funny new comedy Neighbors, which opened last weekend to a very friendly $51 million, has drawn raves for its relatable, casually progressive portrayal of two 30ish parents (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) struggling with adulthood, especially in the face of the wild rumpus taking place next door after a fraternity moves in.

Director Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek), himself a young parent with kids aged 6 and 1, admitted to us that there were lines that needed careful toeing in a raunchy comedy that oftentimes finds the couple on the brink of utter irresponsibility.

Stoller also told us about one particular scene that clearly crossed that line and was subsequently voted off the block.

Yahoo Movies: The parents in your movie don’t always act, how shall we say, super responsibly — they leave their baby alone while they go next door to a frat party, smoke weed, take mushrooms … Did you ever worry about taking it too far to the point where they’ll lose favor with the audience?
Nicholas Stoller: Yeah. I was certainly concerned with that. And because I have kids, I know what would make me concerned in a movie, and lose respect for the characters, which you don’t want your audience to do. So we had a lot of conversations about that, and I always overshoot stuff, too, to make sure we’re covering ourselves.

There was one [scene] that the audience completely rejected that I ended up cutting out of the movie, and it was disgusting, there was a reason we cut it out [laughs]. There was basically a scene when they’re over at the black light party, the babysitter that they’ve hired drinks all of Rose’s breast milk. It was revolting. And more than just being disgusting, the audience was like, “Oh, they hired a bad babysitter.” That was one of the reasons that joke failed.

But for the most part … if you cut to the baby smiling, that’s fine. Your characters can do the worst things on Earth, cut to a happy baby, it ends up being OK.

So was this babysitter a breast milk fetishist? Those do exist.
We cast this really weird guy who just drinks all the breast milk. It was just disgusting. Even as we were shooting, I was like, “I don’t know about this.” In the “friends and family” [screening], which is the only place that scene has ever seen the light of day, and which is all comedy writers — they’ve seen everything, and they’re a very cynical audience — and they were even shocked. So I was like, “OK, this is something we’ve got to cut.”

I did notice a couple carefully placed cuts to Rose’s character holding the baby monitor close to her ear.
Rose also keeps talking about the monitor, and she’s not drinking. So I think that also makes it seem like it’s OK … That’s what I would be nervous about. If she didn’t care, and she got drunk, I’d be like, “These aren’t good people.” But because she wants to go over there, but is still concerned about the kid, it feels OK.

There are so many relatable scenes for young parents in this movie.
One of my favorite laughs in the movie is when [Rose’s character], I had her sing this song when she’s walking to the car about how she has to go to Mommy & Me even though “she hates all those bitches.” And all the moms in the audience laugh, all of them. That’s a really satisfying moment for me. Because it’s so awesome, parenting, but it’s also so boring, and you have to deal with so many weird people.

I was going to ask you “how far is too far?” in a comedy like this. But it sounds like “an adult stranger man drinking breast milk” would be the answer to that.
Yeah, the audience tells you. I’m always kind of dialing in jokes, and in this one when the baby eats the condom. … In reality, that condom’s made of Fruit Roll-Ups or whatever. I put it in front of the baby, and the baby grabbed it, immediately put it into her mouth and made a really funny face, and we all couldn’t believe it, it was so hysterical. We had like 20 seconds of a baby chewing a condom, probably, and the audience was just like, “No.” As Seth put it, the audience said, “F—k this movie.”

Also Jason Mantzoukas’s joke about “your baby has HIV,” I had a Todd Solondz-esque pause between ‘Your baby has HIV’ and ‘Is how bad this could have gone’ and that was another moment where the audience said, “F—k this movie.” … Everyone was like, “We should cut it,” and I was like, “No, I know I can time this joke correctly so it works.” So we shortened that pause so it’s like barely a second, it’s probably a half of a second. So it’s all by degrees.

Was that your baby in the movie?
[Laughs] No, that wasn’t.

How was it working with that baby’s parents? I’m assuming they had to be pretty liberal.
They were really cool. It’s really weird casting babies, it’s kind of the dark underbelly of Hollywood, to meet babies and judge them [laughs]. But I walked in and I said to them, “Just so you know, there is a scene in the movie—” and the dad went, ‘Where the baby eats a condom, we’re fine with that.” They totally got what we were going for. They’re fans of Seth and they’re fans of my movies, and I think the movie has an inherently sweet message. It’s not some cynical movie, and I think they understood that. And there wasn’t really any other thing that I asked them to do that was close to the condom-eating thing. They were just mellow.

And the babies, they were incredible. They’re twins, named Zoe and Elise [Vargas]. No one on set had seen babies this mellow before.

You didn’t write this movie but were there personal experiences of yours as a parent that you drew on or incorporated into the story?
Oh yeah, I always end up writing and rewriting whatever I’m directing. [Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien] wrote a great script but I certainly brought my own things into it, as did [producers] Seth and Evan [Goldberg]. … Especially a lot of the parenting stuff, because Brendan and myself are the only people involved in this that have kids, so we were bringing a lot of our own personal experiences to it. The last scene between Seth and Rose in bed, a bunch of those things are things that my wife and I have said to each other. I have a tomato garden [laughs]. Even stuff like, “We are the party,” my wife and I have said that to each other. And also the meltdown that Seth and Rose are having is something my wife and I went through when we had our first kid.

Have you ever caught grief from your wife for including something personal?
No, it goes through a thousand filters by the time it [hits the screen]. I would never make a purely autobiographical movie because it would be incredibly boring [laughs]. But I always bring something. It’s usually some emotional truth I’ve experienced, like in Get Him to the Greek, the relationship between Jonah Hill and Elisabeth Moss, I had certainly had that kind of relationship with a girlfriend. With Five-Year Engagement, I was never in a five-year engagement but I have had similar feelings of compromise in my life.

A lot of people are surprised to see Seth Rogen in the parental role in this movie, like, “Whoa, he’s grown up.” You’ve known Seth for well over a decade. Has he grown up?
The thing about Seth, even though he smokes an inordinate amount of weed, he’s one of the most responsible, grown-up people I’ve ever met. As an 18-year-old, that’s when I met him on Undeclared, he was a fully formed comedic personality. I’d never met that before. Usually people go through an evolution, I’d put myself in that camp where you kind of find your voice. But he had his voice even at that stage. And yes, as he’s gotten older and now he’s married, and he’s more interested in using his Big Green Egg and smoking meat than he is in staying out all night. … So he has grown up in certain ways but he has always been weirdly responsible, especially for someone [who smokes so much weed].

Finally, how old will your kids be when they’re allowed to see Neighbors?
[Laughs] I think the gray zone is 14, but by 16 I think it’s fine. I watched all kinds of dirty movies as a kid, my parents were very liberal about that, and I was still an uber-nerd who never drank or did drugs. I don’t think it matters.

Photo credits: Universal