Bromance fever in The Wedding Ringer

For any man getting married, there's a lot to take care of before the big day. But no matter how stressful it gets, he can be certain of one thing: the guys that make up his wedding party - from best man to groomsmen - will help him out, from the bachelor party to the reception toast. They're his crew, after all: the guys who have always been there for him, through good times and bad (and good times that memorably go bad, right?). They're the guys who matter. The guys that lovable, socially awkward groom-to-be Doug Harris (Josh Gad) never had, and doesn't have.

And if he doesn't want to look like a fool to his bride, they're the guys he desperately needs. Fast. Where most men have the luxury of choosing among childhood friends, current friends and close family for a best man, Doug's in an especially tight jam because he can't find anyone to be his best man. In fact, after going through his entire address book, Doug - with less than two weeks to go before marrying the beautiful girl of his dreams, Gretchen Palmer (Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting) - has come to realise that he simply has no friends.

Bogus groomsmen

With very little time to work with, Jimmy (Kevin Hart) pulls out all of the stops in assuming the role of Doug's right-hand pal, putting together an all-star team of bogus groomsmen in order to impress Gretchen's increasingly suspicious parents Ed (Ken Howard) and Lois (Mimi Rogers) Palmer. But as Doug's wedding and future hang in the balance, an unexpected bromance develops with the flashy operator he's hired, which fills Doug with the confidence he never had. What ensues in the boisterous comedy The Wedding Ringer is a hilarious charade as Jimmy and his misfit team of rent-a-friends create a series of outrageously funny dude-ventures while circumventing myriad tests initiated by the Palmer family, in order to pull off their biggest and boldest con to date.

The genesis for the premise of The Wedding Ringer can be traced all the way back to a random phone call director Jeremy Garelick received from a high school classmate.

"A person I knew in high school called me out of nowhere many years later and said: 'Rebecca and I are getting married,' recalls director Garelick. I said 'Congratulations' and in my mind I am thinking 'Who's Rebecca and why are you calling me?' He asked me to save the date, but I'm thinking why would I even go to this wedding? I wasn't really friends with this guy in high school, but a month later he called again and said 'Rebecca and I would be honoured if you would be in our wedding party as one of my groomsmen.' I was caught off guard and didn't know what to do, so I said yes and after I hung up the phone, I thought, 'What did I just agree to?' Now I have to fly from Los Angeles all the way back east for this wedding with people I don't even know."

Another surprise

Being young and a good sport, Garelick decided to make the most of the wedding and be a supportive friend and groomsman. But when he arrived, there was another surprise waiting for him.

"I showed up to the wedding because I thought, What's the worst thing that could happen? I was single and weddings have good food and lots of girls, but when I got there I discovered that there were not many groomsmen yet there were 15 bridesmaids. I felt bad for him and it was clear that this guy didn't have any friends. So I started telling stories, making up things about how great this guy is and how we used to hang out and run on the track team together and what a great athlete he was. At the end of the night I thought to myself, I should be getting paid for being at this wedding. And then it hit me, I should write a screenplay about this experience."

Garelick then turned to screenwriter and friend, Jay Lavender, who he worked with at CAA.

"I had read Jay's scripts and I was always a big fan of his work," says Garelick. "I didn't really know how to write a screenplay and I was just sort of learning, and Jay was a great guy and we had a similar sense of humour."

"I loved Jeremy's attitude and could see how hard he worked," recalls Jay Lavender. "I called him and said: 'Let's write something together.' We both had ideas, and were going back and forth when he pitched me a great idea. He said: 'What if there's a professional best man?' I immediately started laughing and we were at that age where you're either in the wedding parties or the young guys at weddings. We thought it was so ripe to make fun of from the guys' point of view that wasn't mean about weddings, but that captured the pomp and circumstance of it. So we started working on the script together between our other projects and jobs."

Something really special

For Garelick, one of those other jobs was working for Joel Schumacher, who at the time was directing Veronica Guerin out of Dublin. Says Garelick: "I asked Jay if he wanted come over to work on the script, so he flew out to Dublin and he stayed in my hotel room and we finished it and felt we had something really special. I think that weddings make such great targets for comedy because most great comedies are crossroads in life stories and getting married certainly is a big one."

All the years of working hard on sets prepared him to direct his first film. "I always wanted to be a director and when I moved out to Los Angeles, I was told to go work for a director," reveals Garelick. "So I got a job working for Joel Schumacher and it was the greatest film school of all time. I met so many talented people, some of whom are actually working on this film. After Jay and I wrote The Break-Up, we were able to be on set from start to finish and I learned a ton from Peyton Reed. Then when I worked on The Hangover I was on set every day with Todd Phillips and so I was able to learn so much from great people."

Director Jeremy Garelick says a new silver screen partnership was born when Hart and Gad were put together to bring his crazy premise to life for The Wedding Ringer. "When you boil the script down, it really is a buddy comedy between Jimmy and Doug so we need audiences to love seeing Kevin and Josh together," says Garelick. "I think after this film audiences are going to fall in love with a new comedy team and laugh their ass off."

Plenty of ripe and raucous scenarios

A comedy team is only as funny as the situations they're in, of course, which is why the screenwriters dreamed up plenty of ripe and raucous scenarios from which to wring big, unforgettable laughs.

"The pairing of Kevin and Josh is very reminiscent of Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder," adds producer Adam Fields. "Watching them together reminds me of Stir Crazy and Silver Streak. It's two completely sort of diametrically different characters with each one's skills complementing the other. The chemistry between them is fantastic."

With so many great, funny actors on set every day, wrangling all that talent and keeping them firing on all comedic and creative cylinders is not an easy task. Although The Wedding Ringer marks Jeremy Garelick's directorial debut, everyone on the cast and crew were impressed with the enthusiasm and leadership he exhibited though out the entire shooting schedule.

Skilled and unbelievably aware

"I have never seen a first-time director who was so skilled and unbelievably aware of his vision so everything is the best it can be," says Josh Gad. "He set the tone for the production and film and never looked back, and he's doing some ambitious stuff. There are car chases, there are people on fire, there's a crazy football sequence, big wedding sequences, in addition to all the comedy and heart in the film. He really is brilliant."

"Jeremy been part of this project for so long and knows it so well that no one put themselves up on a pedestal," says Kevin Hart. "He's a great director and I loved working with him, but on the first day of shooting I played a little joke on him and made him turn red and feel so uncomfortable. Then I let him know I was messing with him and it broke the ice and we both started laughing. Then he understood that I'm just silly, and he could throw anything at me to make a scene better. I think that's the best thing that you want to do with a director is build a good rapport and from that day on we were totally in sync on set."

"It's a really funny movie," says director Garelick. "People are going to love watching Kevin with Josh Gad and there is also a new batch of comedians that keep you laughing throughout the entire film. My goal with every project is to try to make a film that people will quote lines from and watch over and over again. I really feel this will be one of those films."

A fresh concept

The Wedding Ringer is a fresh concept, adds Kevin Hart, but in the service of a hilarious bromance, not just another boy-marries-girl movie. "Yes, there have been movies about weddings, but this isn't necessarily about that, it's more about the relationship between two men who think that they're different and slowly realise that they're very much alike in many ways," says Hart. "I'm sure after the film comes out somebody's going to open a business for men with no friends or best men, and I'm telling you right now, if you do, I'm coming after you for my cut."

"This film is more fun than you're supposed to have in a movie theatre," says producer Will Packer. "It's a fun ride, and very rarely in a film do you get to see this much talent on the screen let loose and you're going to see some absurd things that are going to make you say: 'Did I really just see that?' Yeah, you saw that. This is that movie. I hope people enjoy watching it as much as we did making it."

Read more about other films opening this week at www.writingstudio.co.za