Taking a direct route

LUKE WILSON stars in “Vacancy” with Kate Beckinsale; it opened Friday -- and it’s really scary. Close on its heels is “The Wendell Baker Story,” which he wrote and co-directed and which stars his brother Owen Wilson and was co-directed by his brother Andrew Wilson; it will be released May 18.

You shot “Wendell Baker” a while ago, no?

We made it a few years ago. We made it and we just, kind of, the company that made it got involved in this kind of legal tangle. And we never had a distribution deal with it. Thankfully they just held onto it instead of putting it straight onto DVD and trying to recoup. For the most part, people see things on DVD or cable -- but you make it for the big screen and hope it’ll get released. Now it’s with this great company, ThinkFilm. It’s really exciting -- even though I was pretty down about it for a few years because it hadn’t come out. I always liked it a lot.

It has the sweetness of a home movie -- like a lot of the work you do.

I like those movies from the ‘70s. They seem a little less formulaic. And just in writing the script -- I’ve never really written a script. Someone heard I was writing and they said, “There’s a great book about how to write scripts.” And I flipped it open and it seemed like algebra. No new characters after Page 50. Plot clear by Page 12. I just thought, “Well, if I can tell a story in 110 pages, why do you have to stick to the formula? Why does it have to have a three-part structure? Why can’t you tell a story and let it flow?” I think people might even respond to it being a little different, more episodic.

But that’s not easy to get put together, right?

It was kind of tough -- and pitching it? It was about this good-hearted con man who sells fake Texas driver’s licenses to Mexican immigrants and then he gets busted and loses his girlfriend and he meets up with Harry Dean Stanton. And Owen plays a kind of evil head nurse and -- you can kind of see people, a kind of vacant look in their eye. It wasn’t an easy sell.

Your brother Andrew’s work as Beef Supreme in “Idiocracy” was spectacular.

Yeah, that Mike Judge -- you can safely say [he has] a different take on life. That had come about just from being in Austin and being on “Wendell.” I heard he lived down there, and we had mutual friends. I had dinner with Judge, and then a few months later he asked if I’d be interested in doing “Idiocracy.” People feel like they’ve gotten their sense of humor beaten out of them over the years. You get older, things happen, you kind of lose that offbeat sense of humor.

When “Office Space” came out, it was similar to “Bottle Rocket” in that it was a commercial flop that the studio was not into for whatever reason, and then obviously it’s much more popular now. I had a lot of fun working on it. It was the kind of thing where we thought, “Is this over the line? Is this too crazy?” “Gentlemen’s lattes” at Starbucks? It’s the kind of thing when I was 13 it’d be hilarious -- and I still think it’s funny now. I have friends that say I haven’t changed, and they don’t mean it in a good way. They’re saying they don’t think I was ever grounded.

Well, it seems there’s sort of a teenage way about how you’ve lived and worked -- with friends, and all these brothers running around.

It’s just what I’ve wound up doing. For years I did every movie that came my way. I like to work. That’s just kind of the way that’s happened. Definitely stuff like “Old School,” “Idiocracy.” You mind shutting that door, please?

What the heck’s going on over there?

I just have a friend who dropped his kid off at preschool, and he sometimes comes over here and hangs around. But you know what I mean, that whole kind of group of people who, like, Jack Black and Owen and Ben [Stiller] and Will [Ferrell], I think it’s maybe the comedy stuff and we have fun doing comedies.

Comedy is a group sport. So Nick Styne at CAA comes to you. Surely there’s a script pile-up and he’ll come to you with stuff -- but group comedy is more naturally generated?

When I saw Robert Mitchum’s biography in Variety, this guy wasn’t agonizing over parts to do. I just like the idea of working all the time, I just feel I’m more productive working. If I ever had a goal, and I don’t have many, it’s being in “Charlie’s Angels” or “Legally Blonde” and you get more recognizable and maybe one day I can put my own movie together. That’s the only goal I’ve ever had.

The most fun I’ve ever had was doing “Wendell Baker” and feeling connected to the movie. Sometimes a movie will come out and I think, ‘Wow, I wish I’d known about that!’ But the business moves in weird ways. I had a friend staying at my house from Austin, a prop man, we worked together on a couple movies. He was going off to do “3:10 to Yuma” with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, and I got in touch with Jim Mangold and said I’d like to do something if you have anything. He had this great part.

And just working with someone like Judge. “Vacancy” came about, I guess, by the conventional Hollywood thing, them getting in touch.