The Oral History of ‘Wedding Crashers’

How does it feel having worked on this generation’s Animal House?’
There have always been plenty of movies about getting married — from Father of the Bride (the original and the remake) to The Graduate to The Wedding Singer to My Best Friend’s Wedding. But until Wedding Crashers, there weren’t any with a bromance at their core—exploring just how fun, crazy and intense the close friendship between two men can be.

Opening in July 2005, Wedding Crashers now can be seen as a bridge between eras of R-rated summer comedies. In previous years, films like American Pie and There’s Something About Mary had done big business with date-night crowds, generating huge laughs from their raunchy exploits. But Wedding Crashers — directed by David Dobkin and starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson — moved away from the gross-out humor of its predecessors to tell a slightly more sophisticated story about needing to grow up and embrace adulthood. Of course, that didn’t preclude the film from offering a treasure trove of nudity, F-bombs and—in one scene co-starring up-and-comer Isla Fisher—a memorable midnight rape of one of the main characters.

Earning more than $200 million, Wedding Crashers remains one of the most commercially successful R-rated comedies of all time, popularizing the bromances that have flourished in the last decade (The Hangover, I Love You, Man and much of the Judd Apatow canon) and helping foster an atmosphere in which female characters can be as interesting as their male counterparts. Writing in Salon, film critic Stephanie Zacharek observed, “Wedding Crashers may be the most optimistic Hollywood comedy of the year, because it restores at least some dim hope that directors, writers and actors with actual brains in their heads can somehow triumph over unimaginative studio execs.”

Maybe just as importantly, the movie spoke to something inherently true about the conflicting emotions that accompany every wedding — how they generate such joy while also eliciting anxiety, and how they bring feuding in-laws, horny single guys and weepy bridesmaids all together under one roof. Lots of men laugh at Wedding Crashers because of Vaughn and Wilson’s antics, but they also quietly relate to the characters’ slow realization that one stage of their life is ending — and they’re not quite sure if they’re ready for the next.

MEL spoke with Wedding Crashers’ filmmakers, cast and crew to get a behind-the-scenes account of what went into producing a classic comedy. And we talked about everything: whose audition was the funniest, what scene had to be reshot to ensure they didn’t get nailed with an NC-17 rating and how they feel about accusations that the movie is homophobic. Even better, they finally give some hints about what’s going on with the long-awaited sequel.