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JACK BLACK:
“I wanted to do this movie mainly because I wanted to work with Jared Hess, a great director – loved Napoleon Dynamite. I called him up and said, ‘Hey, let’s party.’ And he said, ‘That’s a coincidence, I’ve wanted to party with you. I’ve always been really obsessed with Mexican wrestling, would you want to do a movie where you’re a Mexican wrestler?’ I was like, ‘If you are at the helm my friend, I will go with you.’”
JARED HESS:
“In the little time that we had before we began shooting, we did a lot of rehearsals just to try out different things. Jack’s such a good guy, he really doesn’t have an ego, his personality just lends itself to an open environment for ideas.”
BLACK:
“I did a lot of wrestling in preparation. I had a real Luchadore pro who taught me all the moves, his name was Tom, and he said that I was a natural. I don’t know if he was just trying to pump up my confidence, but I believed him. It was not easy, there were a lot of days when I [needed] a deep tissue massage.”
HESS:
“I’d never shot wrestling sequences before. I had a really good stunt choreographer who choreographed the fights. We’d written the fights down and tried to be specific about what happened in them. It was the first time I was working with multiple cameras, but I had a lot of help to figure it out.”
BLACK:
“There was a benefit in having the mask, not only did I look like a kick-ass superhero, but also it was easy to slip in my fat stuntman. [he laughs] I did probably 95%, maybe 92% of the stunts.”
HESS:
“We tried out a bunch of different costumes with Jack, ultimately we decided on the tights that go above the navel, which just seemed to work. It kind of felt a little bit like Adam West in the old Batman series.”
BLACK:
“The wrestlers were mostly sweethearts. I was worried going into it, ‘Man, I’m going to be wrestling real Luchadores, that have not acted in a movie before and are going to treat me like one of the wrestlers, and I’m going to break my neck. I’m a sweet, delicate, Hollywood comedian.’ But it turned out that I was kick-ass, and there was nothing to worry about. I didn’t hurt anyone but myself. I hit my head [under my eyebrow] on a metal chair when I was diving at my opponent, and I needed stitches.”
HESS:
“That was a bad day, but he was a trooper and got stitched up and was back four days later to wrestle again. That guy uses his eyebrows as an actor more than anybody, so it was kind of traumatic at the time, but he got through it alright.”
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THE CONCEPT:
