Neighbors
Photo: Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures
Every day was a party on the set of Neighbors, and often quite literally. Director Nicholas Stoller staged several full-scale frat bashes for the movie — which finds new parents Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne warring with the rowdy, Zac Efron–led frat house next door — and those shindigs inspired plenty of weird stories, as any good party ought to. Click through as Stoller takes us through eight photos snapped behind the scenes of Neighbors and dishes on what the camera won’t show you.
Many of the party scenes in Neighbors are bathed in colorful lights — Stoller wanted to emulate the trippy, neon-bathed atmosphere of Gaspar Noé’s decadent drug movie Enter the Void — and though that looks cool onscreen, it can take a toll on set. “The green light was fine, actually … the black light party was the problem,” Stoller told us. “Black light can hurt your eyes, so we all had to wear these crazy goggles for the black-light shoot, which lasted around two or three days. I remember the whole crew was wearing these goggles, and after the first day, Seth was like, ‘Wait a minute. Why don’t I have a pair?’”
Photo: Glen Wilson/© Universal Pictures
This close-up of Zac Efron’s eyes was used in his initial introduction sequence, which Stoller later omitted from the movie: Meant to be intercut with Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne getting ready for bed, the scene would have tracked Efron in piecemeal close-ups as he strolls through a party. “You’d see his bicep, his chest, his eyes, his hand running through his hair — and as he walks through the fraternity, you meet the guys through his perspective,” explained Stoller. “I ended up having to cut the entire sequence because I realized the point of view of the movie was from Seth and Rose’s point of view, and because the audience got party fatigue. We had to cut it so there could be more of a build.” Perhaps it was for the best, considering how odd it was for Efron to shoot those objectifying close-ups. “Zac was like, ‘This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever had to do,’” said Stoller, laughing. “I’d say, like, ‘Okay Zac, look super-sexy!’”
Here’s another moment captured while shooting that cut sequence, but fear not: The final film still includes plenty of Efron beefcake. “I’ve worked with a lot of pretty people,” said Stoller, “and he’s one of the few people I’ve worked with where I would go up to him and give him a note and I would get so lost in his eyes that I would forget the note I was going to give him. He’s just so good-looking that it’s kind of intense.” Did the presence of Efron and the equally dreamy Dave Franco have Stoller and the other crew members questioning their heterosexual bona fides? “I mean, come on: At the end of the day, we’re all bisexual,” laughed Stoller. “A hundred years from now, there’s not gonna be gay or straight. There’s gonna be everything.”
Photo: Glen Wilson/© Universal Pictures
Baby Stella is played in the film by 7-month-old twins Zoey and Elise Vargas, whom Stoller snapped here on their last day of shooting. “What you don’t see is everyone in the cast crowded around their stroller, saying goodbye,” said Stoller. “I think Seth and Rose started to get a little bit of baby fever from working with them.” The twins were so good-natured on set that it actually posed a problem. “There was a scene where the baby needs to cry, and I couldn’t make the baby cry,” recalled Stoller, who enlisted the twins’ father to help. “He said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll give her a favorite toy and then take it away.’ So then he did it, and Zoey started to cry … and then she stopped, looked around, and smiled again.”
At one point in the film, Rogen’s and Byrne’s characters dress their baby up as Breaking Bad’s Walter White for a calendar shoot, and there were many more pint-size antiheroes where that came from. “This one is supposed to be Dexter,” said Stoller. “It doesn’t pop quite as quickly as Breaking Bad, and it was hard to get the idea across, so we kind of bailed on it. We shot her as Dexter, as Scarface … but once you understand what they’re doing, you don’t need to see any more of it.”
Stoller and Efron are seen here in hysterics while shooting the movie’s final fight, and though their expressions appear too big to be believed, “I look so lame in this photo that I think this is a legitimate moment,” said Stoller, sheepish. Not that he’s above staging an on-set moment for the movie’s press kit: “When the photographer is nearby, I like to say, ‘Quick, get a photo of me looking into the camera,’ because I’m never looking into the camera. Christopher Nolan looks into the camera, but I think most directors don’t, so whenever you see a picture of a director looking at the camera, it’s fake.”
Photo: Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures
Comedian Hannibal Buress (flanked here by Stoller and cinematographer Brandon Trost) gets big laughs in a small role as the movie’s lackadaisical Officer Watkins, and he’s not the only notable comic name who did a day or two on the film. “I think every part should have a funny person in it,” said Stoller. “Every character, no matter if they have one line or a bunch of lines, should be really funny. In this movie, Jason Mantzoukas has only one line and he destroys. We could have cast a day player, but it wouldn’t have been as funny and you wouldn’t have had that memorable moment.”
The movie’s biggest sight gag involves a hidden airbag blasting someone into the ceiling, and here, we see Ike Barinholtz, Stoller, and Seth Rogen gathering to admire their handiwork. “I had two Michael Bay moments on this movie,” said Stoller. “One was that, and the other is when we crashed the cop car.” Still, Stoller will readily admit that Bay’s knack for large-scale mayhem far outclasses his. “By the way, how is it awesome that Transformers 4 has a robot riding a robot? Crazy!” he said, before musing, “Robots riding dinosaurs … there’s no advantage there.”
