Interview: Hot Rod's Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, And Akiva Schaffer

On July 24th, I had the chance to sit down with Hot Rod and Lonely Island trio Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer. You can tell instantly that these three guys have been friends since 7th grade. They play off each other like they've been doing it for many years. The interview was probably the funniest roundtable I've done to date. These are not the type of guys who answer questions with any bit of pretension. They know who they are, they know why they are here, and more importantly they know how to tell a funny story.

You can listen to the full roundtable interview below. After the jump we have included a time-coded chapter listing, so that you can skip to the good parts. I highly recommend the story of The Whoopee Boys poster/screening, which begins around 23 minutes in.

00:02 Discussing The Hotel Water Bottles that look like the Plutonium containers from Back to the Future

00:20 The Emmy nomination for "Dick in a Box"

01:00 Learning from the Short Films

01:20 Hollywood: We call it "tinseltown"

01:40 Learning how the Hollywood Crew works

02:45 The SNL Schedule vs. The Hollywood Schedule

03:40 The Location of Lonely Island

04:15 The Dramatic One: Jorma Rents Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

05:00 Late Arrivals

05:15 Responsible for the Rise of YouTube

06:40 Growing up in Berkley with a Sense of Humor

08:00 Before Lonely Island: "We call ourselves the Dudes now, back then we called ourselves the Fellas. A lot's changed!"

09:20 Finding a Cast: The Difficulty of Low Budget Short Films vs. Hollywood/SNL: "On the Movie set it was a lot easier to get our actors to show up because they were contractually bound and paid."

10:40 Lack of Resources Sometimes Spawns Creativity

11:05 The "Cool Beans" Scene: "I think we lost a few people on the crew that day!"

12:00 Finding the Scene in Editing

13:15 The Cool Beans Scene is the Most Liked and Most Disliked Sequence at Test Screenings

13:45 The Influence of the Movie "Rad": "It's nothing like E.T. But we wanted it to have that tonal quality of the movies from our childhood."

14:40 1986: The Best Year of All Time "Until 88"

15:20 Andy's Dream of Being on Saturday Night Live

16:30 Getting You Ass Kicked By Ian McShane

17:00 Fight Training

17:40 Stunt Training: "I was on the bike a lot but I never got airborne"

19:20 The Origins of Hot Rod

20:00 What's Next?: Back to SNL at the end of September

20:20 Staying Together as a Team

21:00 Originally Written for Will Farrell

21:45 The March/Riot Sequence

22:20 The Soundtrack is Getting Released

22:45 The Soundtrack: Essentially Europe's The Final Countdown Album

23:30 The Story of the The Whoopee Boys Poster

27:55 The SNL Writing Process