“We can’t really tell you what the fuck it is”: Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher take a bite out of their deranged debut ‘Pizza Movie’
Having cultivated a sizeable online audience over the last two decades, Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, the duo collectively known as BriTANick, which, yes, is a Titanic pun, have taken the next step in their career by writing and directing their first feature, Pizza Movie, releasing on April 3rd, 2026.
On paper, it sounds like a relatively straightforward college/stoner comedy; Gaten Matarazzo’s Jack and Sean Giambrone’s Montgomery ingest a mysterious drug known as MINTs that they discover in their dorm, and find themselves facing the daunting task of travelling down two flights of stairs to collect the pizza they’ve ordered.
However, and we can’t stress this enough, things get weird. How weird, you might ask? Well, there are exploding heads, time loops, body-swapping shenanigans, a band that plays ‘vomit-core death opera’, a mysterious hallucinatory figure known only as Juan, an entire subplot revolving around a delivery drone called Snackatron, psychedelic asides, fourth-wall breaks, and much more, with McElhaney and Kocher leaving virtually no stone unturned.
Naturally, when Far Out spoke to the pair about Pizza Movie, among other things, the burning question was also the most pertinent: What the actual fuck? “That is the intention,” McElhaney laughed. “We’re trying to get people to have that reaction,” with Kocher suggesting that it goes on the poster. We’re not against it, to be honest: ‘What the fuck [complimentary]: Far Out Magazine‘ has a nice ring to it.
“We can’t really tell you what the fuck it is,” McElhaney elaborated. “Because we’re quite sure something’s wrong with our brains, and we decided we needed to put it into film form for the world to see in perpetuity.” As for Kocher, he felt like he was in a constant back-and-forth with the what-the-fuckery on display in Pizza Movie.
“Throughout the edit process, you get so close to the story, and you’ve seen it so many times, and we’ve had moments where we’re like, ‘Too generic and normal,'” he said. “And then, we’ll take a month away from it or something, and then watch it again, and I’ll be like, ‘What on earth was I thinking? This is insane!'”
That process of revisiting their first full-length flick during post-production raised some other questions for Kocher, too, namely, “What is this movie we made? Why did we do this? And what did we do?” That’s coming from the guys who wrote and directed it, and even that undersells the madness that unfolds throughout Pizza Movie‘s lean, mean, and consistently batshit insane running time.
However, they say good things come in pairs, and that’s true for BriTANick. Not only did their debut feature premiere at South By Southwest on March 13th, but Over Your Dead Body, the Jorma Taccone-helmed action comedy thriller starring Jason Segel and Samara Weaving, which they wrote the script for, premiered 24 hours later, so it was an understatement to call it a big couple of days.
Ask them if they intentionally staked out those 48 hours to announce themselves as feature filmmakers, and they’ll answer with tongue in cheek. “This is the plan since we got out of college,” McElhaney smiled. “In 20 years, we’re gonna have a great weekend in South by Southwest!”
Kocher, though, was more demurring. “If we had our druthers, we would have spread this past weekend out over the past seven years, when we weren’t doing anything at all.” Obviously, that’s not true, with BriTANick performing live, uploading sketches to their popular social and YouTube channels, and sticking their fingers in various pies, but it’s all started coming together in a filmic sense.
At various points, McElhaney and Kocher have been creators, comedians, live performers, actors, and Saturday Night Live writers since launching their double-act in 2008, when they were still students at New York University, but the long-term goal has always been to establish themselves as bona fide filmmakers.
“We’ve been trying to make a feature since we started, and we’ve always wanted to be taken seriously in this realm”
Nick Kocher
“And we’ve loved doing sketch, we’ve loved writing for TV,” Kocher added. “We love doing voiceover, and acting, and sitcoms, and all the things we’ve gotten to do, but this has always been our Everest to climb, so to do it and to feel like we’re being taken seriously feels really good.”
“I went to film school, and Nick went to acting school,” McElhaney took over. “Both of us were at NYU. And, you know, you want to make a feature immediately when you get out of film school, but you don’t have any money or connections or anything.” That led them first to sketches, which they viewed as “mini films” that allowed them to gain an understanding of the process, but they got there eventually.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is, any young filmmakers who are frustrated they’re not making their first film, just keep at it,” he encouraged. “It takes a minute to sort of get the groundswell around you ready for it. But, yeah, we were always aiming toward this.” It wasn’t without its fair share of trial and error, with Kocher detailing how they finally made it to Pizza Movie.
“For a while there, it seemed like the path would be TV, like, there were a lot of internet sketch groups who were getting TV shows, and specifically on Comedy Central,” he added. They were “really focused on that for quite a long time,” which included writing a pilot for the channel that wasn’t picked up, but despite getting waylaid along the way, their eyes remained on the feature-length prize.
“I think we could have made a movie a lot earlier had we really been determined to just write that feature screenplay, and it’s hard to make that leap and, like, plunge into something,” Kocher admitted. Now that they’ve officially “broken the seal and we’ve made one movie, it’s now clear to us that it’s possible.”
Beforehand, there was always the issue that had plagued countless aspiring filmmakers: “I don’t want to spend all this time writing a feature script if it’s not going to get made.” They know that “getting over that hurdle is really, really hard,” but now that they’ve done it, they’re ready for what comes next.
Having always viewed features as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it must have been strange for BriTANick to have reached it twice at the same time, with Pizza Movie shooting at around the same time their script for Over Your Dead Body went into production.
“There was this sort of it rains/it pours moment, where Nick and I are like, ‘Man, we’ve been trying this for so long, and now both are happening at the same time, and it’s a little bit unwieldy,” McElhaney noted. “But I guess it’s a good problem to have,” while Kocher appreciates the illusion it created: “It makes us seem much more productive than we actually are.”
He’s kidding, of course. “People always tell us, ‘You guys work so hard,’ and we’re like, ‘We do,'” McElhaney elaborated. “We feel lazy all the time, but sometimes when things come out, especially all at once, people just look at that moment and go, ‘You guys must be always overworking yourselves.’ And the truth is, we overwork ourselves in very specific slivers of our lives. And we really overwork ourselves in those moments. And then we walk around board around Los Feliz, Los Angeles, trying to figure out what to do next for the next eight months.”
Adding another fascinating wrinkle to the story, their film wouldn’t have happened were it not for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Or, as Kocher put it, “It’s about 100% of the reason that Pizza Movie exists.” BriTANick performed there for the first time in 2022 as a bucket list-type thing, since they “didn’t think it would be advantageous for our career at all.”
And yet, it changed everything. “We thought, ‘This is so far from LA, none of the execs will come and see these shows,'” he guessed, only to be proven wrong. “Oddly enough, more executives came to see our show in Edinburgh, Scotland, than they would have if we were doing the same show in downtown LA, like, they could have driven 15 minutes and seen it there.”
The most important of all was Billy Rosenberg, Hulu’s senior vice president of comedy. He saw their show at Edinburgh’s Assembly George Square, loved it, and came forward with a proposition: “If you guys have an idea for a high school or college comedy, I can probably get it made pretty easily.”
Fortunately, McElhaney and Kocher already had the seed of an idea for a story that unfolded in “an apartment building for 30-year-olds,” but after moving it to a college dorm and envisioning a much younger cast of characters, the ball toward Pizza Movie had finally started rolling.
“If that had not happened at the Fringe, we still would have had the greatest time and probably made our lives performing at the Fringe every year,” Kocher added. “We were kind of settled into the fact that we were like, ‘Alright, Hollywood has said no to us over and over again. Maybe we should just try live performing.'”
That’s what they did, returning to the Fringe for the next two years, which has become their “favourite place.” Even if BriTANick aren’t performing, they’d happily return annually as punters, calling it the backdrop to “the greatest comedy in the world,” where even a show held in front of ten people can be “the greatest thing you’ve ever seen.”
But back to Pizza Movie, which was originally conceived as a “Lord of the Rings parody” short film that treated a simple-sounding quest as an insurmountable odyssey. When Jack and Montgomery watch a helpful instructional video about the drug left behind by their dorm’s former incumbent, Sarah Sherman’s Frankie, they discover that the high will progress through several distinct phases.
That gave McElhaney and Kocher a basic structure they could work from, even if the ideas are anything but basic. “From there, we just had to start connecting them and creating these characters,” the former said. “You know, we didn’t know there was a butterfly that Montgomery owned when we first started writing.” There is, and his name is Lysander, but we’ll get to that later.
When they settled on the college’s RAs, led by Jack Martin’s Blake, as their erstwhile villains, they had another idea: “Maybe make them a parody of Hans Landa from Inglourious Basterds, that would be funny,” McElhaney recalled.
“Everything sort of comes piece by piece, and by the end, we look at the movie, and we’re like, ‘How do we write this? What is this?'”
Brian McElhaney
To heap even more pressure on themselves, Kocher revealed that they needed a watertight structure, which isn’t something you say often about no-holds-barred comedies like Pizza Movie. “We love call-backs,” he shared. “Constantly, when we’re writing, we’re thinking of how some throwaway joke that we find funny can come back in a way that is integral to the plot.”
“It’s the type of movie I like to watch, it’s definitely the type of things we like to write,” but it wasn’t easy. Quite the opposite, in fact. “It’s very, very difficult, and it takes a lot of work to do that, because it’s such a house of cards when you’ve got everything linked together in that way, but then when it all works, it’s so satisfying when these things come back that you weren’t expecting to come back in big ways.”
By design, Pizza Movie is intentionally tropey and formulaic, hitting all the beats you’d expect from the college/stoner comedy, but that was all part of BriTANick’s master plan, luring the audience in with the promise of familiarity, before pivoting off in completely unexpected directions.
To use a prominent example from the film, Matarazzo’s Jack is introduced as something of a social outcast, who’s become a target for the jocks, bullies, and popular subset. So far, so standard, but the reason they hate him so much is that he got the football team shut down after inadvertently causing the entire squad to be registered as sex offenders, which is nothing if not a novel approach to the setup.
“As you can tell from this movie, we really like to go crazy and big and weird and put insane ideas out there,” Kocher said, underselling things. “And sometimes, if the core of the idea itself is too crazy, you can really lose people. What was important to us is that we wanted to have a very simple objective and plot that people could latch onto.”
If they had that, which in Pizza Movie‘s case is the quest to pick up the pizza they’d ordered, and “if there are these familiar things, people will go with us for the bigger, crazier swings that we make.” To that end, the directors intentionally crafted the opening scenes to look like something audiences will recognise.
“We wanted to almost lull people into a false sense of security with the first act of this movie,” McElhaney interjected. “It’s shot more simply. It’s a little more basic. It’s, you know, a friendship, there’s bullies, there seems to be a crush, there’s a little bit of scatological humour. We wanted people to feel like, ‘Oh, I’ve kind of seen this before,'” and then they pull the rug right out from under them.
Pizza Movie is nuts, and it’s nuts enough to make you wonder how its writers and directors even devised some of its more preposterous gags and set pieces, but having been friends and collaborators for so long, the biggest issue isn’t knowing when the line has been crossed, it’s agreeing on where the line is.
“Into the edit, we’re debating, ‘Is this too crazy? Is this not crazy enough?'” Kocher offered. “You really can never know fully. What we tend to do is, if we both are excited about something, it’s going to be in the movie, and that’s enough. When you work with a partner, there is an inherent kind of filtration system. Because it’s a true 50/50 vote.”
If one of them doesn’t like an idea, then it doesn’t make the cut, “even if the other one thinks it’s incredible,” and when McElhaney and Kocher are tossing these ideas back and forth, “every single permutation of that will happen” until they reach a common ground, although Kocher does appreciate that “our tolerance for crazy, weird ideas is higher than most people’s, so I tend to listen to it.”
If something sets off the ‘too crazy, even for them’ alarm, then they understand it stands a lesser chance of landing with a general audience. Still, the experience of watching Pizza Movie and everything it entails, which is a lot of weird and crazy shit, was enough to wonder what the writing process is like for BriTANick, since all of these bonkers ideas have been discussed, debated, and structured into a screenplay.
“The process is insane,” McElhaney aptly replied. “Nick and I argue like crazy when we write; we were rewriting huge chunks of this weeks before we started shooting, we were really making some major, major changes. And then as we’re shooting, we’re making a lot of changes. So it’s like the writing process is never-ending. It is ceaseless, especially with a comedy.”
As much as he admires people like the Coen brothers, who “finish the script and go, ‘OK, we’re shooting this, don’t improvise, this is it,'” it’s a process he can’t wrap his head around: “God bless them, and I hate them.” That’s not the way he and Kocher work, and to give you an indication of both how they work and what Pizza Movie entails, McElhaney offered an insight into the creative sessions.
“The first drug trip has to be crazy, so what can it be? Maybe it’s heads on hands,” he regaled. “The second drug trip, we want to do a Groundhog Day thing. How do we make them go back in time? What’s a visual image to make sure this timeline ends? Maybe their heads explode. Juan, why did that happen? I won’t tell because it’s a spoiler, but that was just a dumbass pun I came up with one day, and we were like, ‘I guess it has to go into the movie.'”
That’s how they do it, even if they admit it’s “maddening to hear in a list” when laid out in front of them. “There’s no secret sauce to writing it,” Kocher added. “We basically just try everything in the script phase, and in the edit phase, we will try every single permutation of the scene to see what’s best.”
As we mentioned earlier, and promised to return to, Montgomery does indeed have a pet butterfly called Lysander. Why is that important? Well, in the spirit of Pizza Love‘s ongoing sense of what-the-fuckery, the insect gets a hero moment and a monologue in the third act, with their voice provided by a most unexpected guest star.
“Yes, Lysander the butterfly is voiced by Daniel Radcliffe,” Kocher verified. “It was a character in the script, there was maybe one word the butterfly actually says. And then, in the edit, we discovered the room for this big monologue that we would have. And so then we thought of Daniel Radcliffe for it, and we’re kind of thinking, ‘There’s no way he’ll do it.'”
Fortunately, they had some mutual friends, albeit ones who also told them, “He’s not going to do it, guys.” However, you should never underestimate the former Harry Potter’s fondness for being in weird movies, and after he was sent some clips from Pizza Movie and snippets of the script, he was in. “I’m definitely doing this,” Radcliffe told them. “And he came in, and he was really enthusiastic, and did an incredible job.”
“I think Gaten might be heading for a career like that, too,” McElhaney suggested. “The fact that after Stranger Things, he pivoted to this was really a boon for us. And I think he wants to do everything from Broadway to indie films that make him laugh. Daniel, he’s that kind of guy. So we got lucky in that he said yes to getting in a recording booth for 30 minutes for us to do this.
Having spoken about him earlier and discussed his role as Pizza Movie‘s chief ball-roller, producer Billy Rosenberg also went on record to mention McElhaney and Kocher in the same breath as Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger, two filmmakers who also started their careers in sketch comedy before becoming acclaimed auteurs, and if that brings with it any pressure, BriTANick aren’t showing it.
“Why would Billy say that? My god!” the former laughed, while the latter took it in a similar stride. “I would like to not be compared to some of the best filmmakers on the planet,” before McElhaney theorised that “Reddit is gonna have a field day with that; they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh, really?'”
“Those guys are a massive inspiration to us; we’re huge fans of their work,” Kocher acknowledged, with a caveat. “I think, to me, it seems like we’re in our feature path doing something very different. But I definitely appreciate the compliment. Absolutely.”
“We’ve never discussed going horror before,” McElhaney continued. “I mean, it’s not really our style. Perhaps there’s something, more of a horror element, that we find later on in our careers. I think what I do like about the comparison is the idea of going from comedy to something richer and deeper and more, I guess, acknowledged, taken seriously. I would love to have that trajectory of our career.”
On one hand, they “love that comparison from Billy,” but on the other hand, “there is something that does scare me a little bit about people setting expectations too high.” Speaking of high expectations, we jumped back in time to BriTANick’s first-ever live performance as a comedy act at San Francisco Sketchfest in 2008, where they got a surprise they never could have imagined.
As if the nerves weren’t high enough for their first time taking the stage in front of a live audience, with their entire comedy career extending to a handful of “three short video sketches” that they’d only shown their friends, they discovered at the last minute that the act playing immediately after them was an up-and-coming unknown by the name of Robin Williams.
Even getting accepted to the festival was a big deal, with a catch. “‘Yeah, these are great, come do a 30-minute live show,'” Kocher remembered being told. “And we did not have a 30-minute live show.” For McElhaney, even being asked felt like they’d won an Academy Award, because they were still college students at the time, which gave them their first taste of validation.
“Then we wrote that show, and then performing for Robin, he sort of showed up at the end as a surprise appearance and performed after us, and spoke to us afterwards, and said we gave him hope for the future of comedy. It was a very auspicious beginning,” he put it lightly. “And then, we put our first two sketches online the next morning. It was a pretty crazy 24 hours that made us feel, ‘OK, maybe we’re on the right path.'”
Being endorsed by a talent of Williams’ calibre will have that effect, and as formative an experience as it was, Kocher was glad he didn’t know beforehand: “As Brian said, Robin Williams was a surprise guest after us. Had we known the week before that we were going to be opening up for Robin Williams, I would have been in the hospital with a panic attack!”
From their very beginnings to an entirely hypothetical future, now that they’re feature filmmakers with a debut under their belts, if McElhaney and Kocher were handed a theoretical blank cheque and given the chance to make anything they wanted, one of them stumbled on their dream project a lot quicker than the other.
“What a good question, that I want an hour to think about before I answer,” Kocher said. “I have an immediate answer,” McElhaney jumped in, revealing to Far Out that if he was given carte blanche to direct any movie of his choosing, he’d dive straight into a big-screen adaptation of the satirical musical, Urinetown, which sounds on-brand for BriTANick.
“I was like storyboarding it out when I was a teenager in high school, and I’ve always wanted to turn that musical into a movie,” he admitted, saying he was “absolutely obsessed” with the production, set in a dystopian future where private toilets are banned and a corrupt corporation controls the use of public amenities, from the first time he saw it.
“It’s sort of an ultimate goal of mine,” he went on. “I don’t know if it’ll ever happen, but it’s a musical I love so much, and shooting a stage musical to screen is very, very hard, but when it’s done well, it’s so perfect. It’s like one of my favourite things that you can do filmically. And I think that musical is such a special comedy musical that’s so dark and so poignant at the same time. And I just have big ideas for it.”
As for Kocher, he did come up with a few of his own. “I’ve always wanted to do a western, I think that would be really, really fun,” before aiming bigger. “I mean, part of me, this would be a real crazy thing, but doing a Mission: Impossible movie, I think, would be so fun. Actually, I’ve got my answer; I want to do something in the Fast & Furious world.”
He might have to wait a while, though, since the franchise is only 11 instalments deep, and Kocher said he’d “love to do Fast & Furious 32, and just go nuts with it.” Urinetown seems more likely to happen, but either way, they’re feature-length filmmakers now, so the world of cinema is their oyster from now on.
