Interview: Vaughn, Favreau, Billingsley
Wedding Bashers
Considering Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau and Peter Billingsley’s past works, it’s no surprise that Couples Retreat, their new movie about marriage, features a quartet of couples in crisis. Question is, will any of them live happily ever after?
By Glenn Whipp
The harried marrieds played by Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau in the new movie Couples Retreat could, with a little imagination, be seen as distant extensions of their Swingers hepcats, 13 years down the line, with drooling kids and simmering resentment replacing all the cocktails and Rat Pack repartee.
Favreau will be the first to tell you it’s not that great a leap. He wrote Swingers about his experience of relocating to L.A. while trying to get over a broken heart and break into acting. Couples Retreat, which Favreau co-wrote with Vaughn and Dana Fox, came from a personal place too. He and his wife had just been through counselling and the experience was fresh in his mind.
“When you live in Hollywood and your career is going well and your wife’s career is going well and you add kids to the equation, all those things totally vampire your energy,” Favreau says over the phone from L.A. “You have to make sure you’re actually present and not just checking all the boxes that fulfill your obligations as a good spouse and good parent.”
Those kinds of philosophical musings might seem at odds with the campy comedy in the movie’s promotional campaign — most memorably a Speedo-wearing yoga instructor who’s clearly unaware of the meaning of personal space. But Couples Retreat, like The Break-Up and other studio comedies featuring Vaughn and Favreau, attempts to mix in a dash of authentic humanity to go along with the laughs.
The movie’s storyline is simple enough. Four couples travel to an island resort (“Disneyland for adults” is the sales pitch) together in order to get a group discount. The peppy, PowerPoint pair (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell) behind the travel plans paint it as a trip to paradise, even though they themselves, teetering on divorce, are going as a last-ditch effort to save their marriage.
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Director Peter Billingsley
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The other three couples are in different places altogether. One pair
(played by Favreau and Kristin Davis) has completely checked out of
their marriage, counting the days until their daughter leaves for
college and they can formalize a divorce. There’s the freshly divorced
guy (Faizon Love) trying to handle a young woman (Kali Hawk) from a
generation he knows nothing about. And there’s the movie’s most
realistic couple (Vaughn and Malin Akerman), who put their marriage on
the backburner when their children arrived.
“It’s three cringe-worthy couples and one more at the centre of it
all,” Vaughn says in a separate phone interview. “It’s like what Jon
did with Swingers. You take the person who’s the proxy for the audience and surround them by more extreme characters.”
“It’s the Wizard of Oz paradigm,” says Favreau. “It’s a great way to tell stories.”
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Couples Retreat is the sixth collaboration between Vaughn and Favreau, who met in 1993 while making Rudy and followed the Favreau-written Swingers with another Favreau film, Made (2001). The two also appeared in The Break-Up, Four Christmases and Vaughn’s 2006 stand-up comedy documentary, Wild West Comedy Show.
Adding to the familial feel is the presence of Peter Billingsley, producer of a number of Vaughn and Favreau’s movies, and on board for Couples Retreat as a first-time director. Billingsley’s behind-the-scenes work has provided him with a formidable second act in Hollywood, following his iconic work as Ralphie, the Red Ryder BB Gun-obsessed kid in Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story. Billingsley was originally going to produce Couples Retreat with Favreau directing, but they switched jobs when Favreau committed to Iron Man 2.
“Pete went into adulthood and made up his mind that he loves film and he wanted to continue in it,” says Vaughn, who met Billingsley while acting in a 1990 after-school special about steroids. “He worked really hard, and it was a dedication to becoming educated rather than just trying to be successful. Everything he has done has been well-earned.”
Favreau, a father of three who’s closing in on a decade with his wife, Joya Tillem, is the only one of the three with experience at the altar. Billingsley and Vaughn are lifelong bachelors.
Favreau says the different perspectives on relationships added an inside-outside point of view that helped make Couples Retreat more interesting.“For a studio movie like this, the comedy has to hit hard, but you need some authenticity, too,” Favreau says. “We don’t do sketch or broad comedy.”
Again, that statement seems somewhat at odds with the big joke in the movie’s trailer, featuring the buff French yoga instructor who gets up-close-and-personal with both the male and female participants.
“Yeah, it’s pretty out there,” Billingsley admits over a pastrami sandwich at a Hollywood restaurant. “But you can relate if you’ve ever gone to a yoga studio with your wife or girlfriend and the yoga teacher says, ‘Let me help guide your wife into a position.’ And you look at him and think, ‘Really? You can’t just tell her?’”
Glenn Whipp lives in L.A. where he writes about movies.