‘Step Brothers' Created the Catalina Wine Mixer. Catalina Island Made It Real.
The 22-year-olds stepped off their ferry in matching blue button-down shirts and argyle sweater vests, dressed to recreate the movie's memorable poster of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, who star in the film as two middle-aged men that begrudgingly become family when their parents remarry.
The mixer is the emotional finale of the film, where the bickering step brothers finally come together to save the day after a bad Billy Joel cover band nearly ruins the event.
'This has been a dream since watching 'Step Brothers,'' Ms. Brister said. 'It's our favorite movie, we watch it all the time.'
The couple traveled from Granite Bay, Calif., to attend the 10th year of the Catalina Wine Mixer, an event that was inspired by its fictional counterpart in the film, and which the Catalina Island Company decided to make real in 2015. The group owns about 11 percent of the island and is behind various efforts to attract visitors.
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Is there a deeper significance? With the title, there's a deeper meaning in the sense of our character has to learn the way things need to be, the way things change. One spoon of chocolate can change a whole glass of milk, you know what I mean? That's the idea. A character has to realize that, first of all, he represents change and he has to make a change within himself. There's a scene in the film [where the character Unique is trying to make chocolate milk] and he's complaining that it's only one spoon of chocolate powder left. But an OG tells him 'one spoon could change the whole glass.' I know is something you have been working on for a number of years, in terms of the story of the film, how did that come about? What inspired you to come up with the overarching themes? It came to me like, man, over the years. I mean, it was 13 years of getting to a point of finally having a screenplay that we could film. To be quite frank with you, the movie is like 100 pages of a 200 page story, and it came to me almost like how my lyrics come, not forced out of me, just flowed out of me. It was something that [I needed time] for me as an artist to create. When I tried to create it before, I was getting stuck. I got inspired to make it, [but then got stuck again]. But then doing the New York State of Mind Tour, traveling on a tour bus and traveling through the country during the writer's strike, I was like, 'I'm gonna write something.' I started writing something new and it just kept freezing and then I went back and started reading some of my old stuff and [One Spoon of Chocolate], I said, 'wow, this was the one!' I had about 40 pages. I said 'this one was gonna be good.' I had got to part in [Karensville, a fictional town in the film], basically, in the early draft, and then it just started flowing. I read that originally you were going to do a period piece, that it was going to be set earlier, like in the 70s or around that period, but actually you moved it forward to, I guess, it's the 90s, right? Well, actually, I made the time ambiguous. It was always going to be ambiguous, but for the audience it was going feel like you were in the 90s or the 70s and all that. The whole Blaxploitation vibe, the whole genre mixing was what I was aiming at, but my goal and my intention was to remove the time aspect. This could be happening right now, even though Karensville is a fictional place, the idea of what our hero is going to go through, that could happen tomorrow, in all reality. When I started getting deeper into the draft, [when we were on tour] I was just conscious there are places that you [could be in], in our country, and you will definitely think you took a step backwards in time. That's how when you're on tour, you get a chance to see that. 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What are the qualities of him as an actor? He's what I like to call a sponge. He's able to absorb the material with a free spirit. When we did our first movie we did together, Cut Throat City, he told me he never held a gun before, he grew up as an artist. He dances, he sings and acts. He's not a street guy, and so he didn't even know how to hold the gun. And I was like, 'well, this is how you hold the gun. This is how you load it.' And the next take he held it, loaded it. It looked real. He shot it, it looked real. He's a sponge and for me as a director, and a writer, you wanna have an instrument that allows the music to flow through unintruded and uninterrupted, and he's that kind of kid. You also worked with Paris Jackson on this film. I've not seen her in many things before acting wise, was it interesting to work with her as an actor? Yeah, very interesting. I got to give a shout out to my casting director, she was able to put some good people in front of me. 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When I was making this one, I just felt my rhythm, my use of my days, there was not a lot of overtime days. My planning was better. Everything about me as a filmmaker, I think has evolved. The challenging parts that we faced [in the movie], there's also a spoonful of horror in this movie [when you watch it]. You think about the horror genre, you think about Eli Roth, that shit popped up in this movie. You go back [and see it] and then you think about the classic, 70s movies like Walking Tall. Then you think about the blaxploitation. I was able to use cinema as cinema, and put a spoonful of ingredients from the things I love. There's a shot in this movie, when [Moore's character] walks [Jackson's character] home and they're on the porch, that's an 80s romantic comedy [vibe]. I wanted to shoot it like that… I was just being conscious of all the things that I loved as a film watcher, all the things I love from the people who inspired me to make films, of course. 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At the Tribeca Festival, bro, this shit played exactly how it should have played. People were laughing, we got some tears. We got a big fucking cheer at the end. People were yelling at the at the screen. A lot of films sometimes you're not getting that visceral response. This film makes you react, and that's what I think all of us as filmmakers, that's a joy for us. That's our task. How can we get a reaction out of this? It's why the horror movies and the horror drama is so big now. They get reactions. We were able to do that with the action thriller. Sorry, I'm running my mouth, but I showed the film to Quentin Tarantino, and that was like a kid showing his essay to the teacher. And I sat like three rows behind him while the film played, and he laughed every time he was supposed to, screamed at the [right] scenes, and at the end of it, he said, 'man, great fucking job.' He was asking me 'how the fuck did you get a fucking car chase like that? How did you do that? 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