Shooting The Shark Tank Scenes For Nate Bargatze's The Breadwinner Was No Easy Feat [Exclusive]

While Hollywood often tries to reflect people, places, and things lifted from the real world, sometimes getting permission or spending the money for the rights to depict those things can be expensive. That's why you'll often get fake stores or brands that are clearly meant to be proxies for real life locations like Costco or Barnes & Noble or brands like Nintendo or Apple. How many times have you seen a fake search engine meant to represent Google or a social media site that looks like Facebook? 

But sometimes, studios and filmmakers don't have to tiptoe around the real thing, and comedian Nate Bargatze's new family comedy "The Breadwinner" was able to use the popular reality competition series "Shark Tank" to set the stage for the entire movie.

In "The Breadwinner," Bargatze plays a father who suddenly finds himself having to keep up with the meticulously organized lives of his three daughters (Stella Grace Fitzgerald, Birdie Borria, and Charlotte Ann Tucker), courtesy of a system established by his aspiring businesswoman wife Katie (Mandy Moore). In fact, part of that carefully organized system, The Starminder, is exactly why Katie is appearing on "Shark Tank," forcing her to leave Nate to figure everything out in her absence. It's a modern "Mr. Mom" with Bargatze's comedic sensibilities front and center, and even though it gets a bit silly at times, it's a harmless, enjoyable family comedy.

We spoke to "The Breadwinner" director Eric Appel (who also directed the superb "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story") about bringing this "Shark Tank," sequence to life, and it basically required him to write and shoot a real segment for the show, complete with the actual set, stars, and crew. But it certainly wasn't easy. 

In order to shoot on the actual "Shark Tank" set, the crew for "The Breadwinner" waited until an actual day of production on the series was finished. Per Eric Appel:

"It was incredibly challenging. We shot on their set. We piggybacked onto one of their actual 'Shark Tank' shoot days. In the middle of production, we all flew out to LA on a Friday night, and we shot on a Saturday after they wrapped. I sat there and watched. I got to watch real 'Shark Tank' deals happening, which was really fun. And then the way that we wrote it, there's a lot that you don't see. We basically wrote an entire 'Shark Tank' segment."

The stars of "Shark Tank," including "Marty Supreme" co-star and possible vampire Kevin O'Leary, Mark Cuban, and Lori Greiner (who also appears again later in the movie), needed to deliver written lines rather than just react to the pitch they were being shown, but Appel found a loophole that offered a bit of a cheat:

"The Sharks are all holding paper and clipboards. I'm like, they can have their lines in front of them. I'm like, I could give them the scripts. Nate and Mandy have to be off book, but we can give the Sharks their scripts."

Appel and his crew had a pre-meeting before the actual shoot, and they breezed through the footage they needed of the "Shark Tank" cast with the help of the show's actual director. "We just did five takes with the Sharks, start to finish," Appel recalled. "We shot it with 13 cameras. Ken Fuchs, who's the director of 'Shark Tank,' he was in the trailer doing a live line cut that we could all watch in real time, and we ran it like a real 'Shark Tank' segment."

Even though the "Shark Tank" cast had plenty of scripted lines, Appel also encouraged some improvisation to make things feel like a real segment from the show. This required Mandy Moore to absorb a bunch of detailed information about The Starminder product that Katie is trying to get off the ground. The filmmaker explained:

"I gave Mandy a bunch of information about the Star Minder, the product that she made. I'm like, 'Here's what your sales are. Here's how much it costs to produce these.' And I told the Sharks, 'Act like this is really 'Shark Tank.' When you're looking at these products, ask the questions that you would ask if she was really coming in.' And they just came off a full day of shooting. So, they're grilling Mandy on this fictional product."

The set-up worked so well that it actually made Moore, one of our best musicians turned actors, as nervous as anyone who's actually going on the show. "A lot of that stuff that you see in the movie is from Mandy's first take, because she actually had the butterflies and the real nerves of going out there and getting grilled by the Sharks," Appel noted. As the filmmaker recalled:

"There's a steady cam that walks out with her that has her going down the tunnel. That show moves like clockwork. They've been doing it for so many years, that naturally she is the most nervous out of anyone because she's in this brand-new environment. And I feel like that magic really got captured. It really feels like 'Shark Tank.'"

The result is an amusing sequence where Bargatze gets to be silly and mocked by the "Shark Tank" cast, and Moore gets to pretend that she just landed a new business deal, setting the table for all the shenanigans that follow.

"The Breadwinner" is playing in theaters everywhere now.