The Source Magazine caught up with “Anchorman 2″ director Adam McKay on the red carpet for the film’s New York premiere, where he shared his hip-hop roots with us. Apparently, before he was a director and comedy writer on SNL, he was a music producer and mixer who went by the name of DJ Goat…
1) What took so long for the sequel to be made?
You can blame Will and I. 5 or 6 years after the first one, we were just so excited to make other movies, it never occurred to us that there would be a sequel to this and rather than the fans getting quieter about a sequel, they got louder, so this movie is entirely for the fans.
2) How did you get Drake and Kanye to appear in the film?
Well, I hope a lot of people know I’m a pretty big hip-hop producer. I’ve done a lot of tracks, a lot of beats for a lot of different hip-hop artists, that’s a big part of my life, most of my life actually, you know I’ve done hits for Jay Z, Missy ‘Misdemeaner’ Elliott was my initial teacher, so the hip-hop world just is part of who I am and it was easy to ask them to come in.
3) *SPOILER*
We hear Will Smith has a cameo in “Anchorman 2,” can you tell us how that came about?
I am actually working on another movie with Will Smith, a remake of “Uptown Saturday Night,” so he and I were talking about that and I just said, “Hey man, want to come and do this?” and he’s a fan and he flew in and did it. It was awesome.
4) Tell us about casting Meagan Good in the film.
Meagan Good was great. We needed a ballsy, smart, sexy lady to kick Ron Burgundy’s ass in a slightly different way than Veronica Corningstone and Meagan Good was it, we auditioned a lot of people and she’s fantastic.
5) Can you tell us more about your hip-hop roots and how you made that transition to directing and comedy writing?
I started off back in the day in New York City, I was a DJ for MC Shan back in the 80′s. I used to work with Steady B out of Philly, I had my old Gemini mixer. My name back then was DJ Goat and most of my experience was mixing up beats and stuff and then eventually I had a chance to go to SNL and I just jumped at it and then I started getting more into comedy and directing.
6) Can you speak about your long standing working relationship with Will Ferrell?
Will is so easy going and he just likes to laugh. It’s not about the status and the money for him. Both of us just want to laugh and try new stuff, so that’s what I love about working with him, it’s he’s a real and so far to this day I don’t think we’ve ever had a creative argument.
7) Any final thoughts?
I wasn’t really a DJ by the way or a mixer back in the day just, so you don’t get in trouble – that’s totally made up, although I was an old hip-hop fan way back in the day…I was purely kidding!
Disclaimer: Yes, Adam McKay attempted to prank us. So the answers to questions 2 and 5 are made up, but we still thought it was hilarious, so we ran it.
During our roundtable interview with McKay, he told us about working with Kanye and Drake for real…we I think he was telling the truth…
Speak about the hip-hop cameos from Drake & Kanye. How did that come about? What was it like working with them?
It was a dream. I’m a huge hip hop fan going way back like back to ’83. I had my Gemini mixer listening to Run-DMC and Kurtis Blow. So the idea of Kanye West on the set and Drake on the set and at one time Kanye and I were talking about a song he was doing, kicking around rhymes for it. I was like he’s probably not going to use what I’m suggesting, but it was really fun and a treat. Drake is an experienced actor so he was no problem, but Kanye hasn’t done as much acting, but the trick with Kanye, which I didn’t know, but Kanye is really funny and actually improvised some funny lines. One actually made it into the movie. I would throw him a line and he would say, “I don’t know if I like that” and he would say, let me try this and we would go back and forth and play with the lines. It was such a blast and he would play his new album for us on set.
“Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues” hits theaters on December 18, 2013.
