No Kid Anymore

Bruce McCulloch is sipping hot mint tea on a blistering summer day on the garden patio at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, engaging in a spirited round of tease-the-reporter. Here to talk about his recent adventures in directing feature-length films, the Canadian writer-actor-comedian-songwriter engineers wordplay games from questions, throws off-the-cuff smoke bombs in the path of earnest answers, occasionally dictates what he imagines will end up in this story (“ ‘I come from a broken home,’ he said, his eyes welling up”).

Casting the te^te-a-te^te known as an interview into playfully self-conscious relief is just what you’d expect from McCulloch, 38, whose quirky, surreal observational humor was honed during his tenure in the five-man comedy troupe show “The Kids in the Hall,” often referred to here as the Canadian “Saturday Night Live.” Others also caught his portrayal of Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein in the Watergate spoof “Dick.”

McCulloch was minding his own business on the Greek island of Sifnos when he got the call to direct “Superstar,” a movie based on Molly Shannon’s long-running “Saturday Night Live” sketch about Mary Katherine Gallagher, the Catholic schoolgirl riddled with compulsions, that opens Friday.

“The last thing I wanted to do was direct another film,” asserts McCulloch, who at the time had just finished directing his own script for the newly released romantic comedy “Dog Park,” starring Natasha Henstridge, Luke Wilson, Janeane Garofalo and himself. “It’s a much mythologized job. It’s fun but it’s deadening too, the detail obsession, the minutiae of the physicality of the machine, like ‘Oh we just lost the location for tomorrow, there’s gonna be a rock concert there.’ I don’t think people are that interested in hearing how hard people’s jobs are. But it’s like if you get out of a long relationship or if you get your heart broken, you just remember how hard it is.”

So, making a film is like getting your heart broken, inquires the reporter, having caught on to how to tease him back. Next you’re going to use the one about it being like a war.

“The other cliche I don’t like is that it’s like your baby,” he joins in cheerfully. “No it isn’t. A baby is like a human thing. You have to raise it.”

Regaining his seriousness, McCulloch says that once he read the script--which was faxed to Sifnos’ tourist office--he couldn’t resist the feeling that he was the man for the job: “Generally I’m happiest making my own work, I’m on my own path. But it felt like I don’t know who else is gonna direct this movie--I know how to do it.”

For McCulloch, knowing how to do it meant heeding his own ideas about comedy and acting, developed during his five seasons with “The Kids in the Hall.” It was there that he wrote many of his signature characters--Cancer Boy and the “my pen” guy and Cabbage Head Man--and began directing in the second season. Later, he wrote and directed short films for “Saturday Night Live.”

“Dog Park” is more about letting the story breathe and not moving the camera very much,” says McCulloch, dressed in khaki shorts, white socks and tennis shoes, a crisp T-shirt beneath his open button-down. “It’s about the truth of the world I know, more or less. In ‘Superstar,’ I was creating a world that was more fanciful and kind of frothy. My ethic in ‘Superstar’ and even more so in ‘Dog Park’ is there’s no comedy for the sake of comedy. I’m more into character--and obsessed people--than I am in giving a big laugh.”

“Dog Park” has screwball elements, such as a story line about a broken-up couple who take their dog to a therapist to work out his separation issues, but it’s less an over-the-top comedy than “Superstar.”

“I wanted to write something that had some tenderness, or soulfulness in it,” McCulloch explains. He says he got the idea for the film during a five-month stint in Los Angeles in 1996--accompanied by a since-departed canine friend.

“It’s about the mythology of Mr. or Ms. Right coming along,” McCulloch says. “It’s about people looking for love in a modern way and people wasting away giving their love to their dog.”

McCulloch gave himself what he calls the role of a “dull guy,” the flawed half of the film’s seemingly perfect couple. “People have such a take on adulterers,” McCulloch says. “Like they’re really good-lookin’, dirty bad boys. . . . I certainly think that fooling around is terrible behavior, but it’s so common. There’s no social judgment on this guy.”

Garofalo, who had worked with him on “SNL,” says she agreed to play his girlfriend in “Dog Park” before even reading the script. McCulloch says he chose her because he thought they’d make a great on-screen couple.

“I laugh at everything he says,” Garofalo says, “which is probably irritating to him. His idea of funny is my favorite idea of funny: the way his face looks, the way he chooses to deliver a line, the way he walks across the stage. Every character he does is invested with intelligence.”

Many of the actors who have worked with him say he has an actor’s appreciation and respect for acting. Says Wilson, who plays the hapless romantic lead in “Dog Park”: “I would look at Bruce sometimes after saying something or asking a question, and I know I could see in his eyes he was asking, ‘Who is this guy I’ve hired from Texas to kind of play my alter ego?’ I could see that he didn’t know where I was coming from, but still he worked with me.”

Shannon says McCulloch had an instant feel for avoiding the pitfalls of translating sketch comedy to the big screen.

“Bruce had an understanding that you had to have character details you don’t see in the sketches,” Shannon says. “He said you might want to show what kinds of dressing rituals she has or have the priest measuring the girls’ skirt length. He’s also a good writer, so he would add his own scenes all over the place.”

“He’s very playful, easy to talk to and kind of intuitive,” says Shannon’s co-star, Will Ferrell, another “SNL” cast member and the actor who played reporter Bob Woodward in “Dick.” “He has a wonderful sense for this type of comedy, playing it real as opposed to playing a joke.”

Is there more directing in the cards? Quiz him too closely and he turns blase.

“It truly is an American obsession with what’s next,” he chides in his distinctly Canadian accent, momentarily dodging the question with commentary. “I know you have to write the end of the article,” he adds sympathetically, picking up the tape recorder: “His tired but boyish eyes sipped the last of his menthol tea. . . .” He trails off into giggles.

Once the press tours are over, he plans to revive his one-man show titled “Slightly Bigger Cities.” He also has a couple of scripts lying around.

“I’ll write some stuff, something neat will come up,” he says noncommittally. “I read a story last week about a kid who had 21 vacuums. Things come along, and I grab onto them. I used to drive a truck at Canada Dry and I used to frame houses. You don’t want to hear people say how lucky they are. But I have it pretty good.”