Super Troopers made Paul Soter a big man on campus. Now he wants to graduate

If you recognize the man in the middle, you're probably stoned or in college, or both. But that's about to change. The actor, writer, and one-fifth of Broken Lizard—the comedy troupe behind such campus confections as Club Dread and Super Troopers—just took his first big-boy steps away from frat humor into the realm of civility. His directorial debut, Watching the Detectives, starring Cillian Murphy as a video clerk who falls for a mysterious femme fatale played by Lucy Liu, premiered earlier this month at the Tribeca Film Festival. Soter shot the film while editing Broken Lizard's recent opus, Beerfest, so don't expect The English Patient. But the well-reviewed romantic comedy has finally got Hollywood taking him seriously. Radar called Soter in L.A for the lowdown.

"The propositions we get out on the road are, Let's do 20 shots of Jägermeister and get back to my house and smoke bongs and watch the 'Dave Chappelle Show'"Most people know you as a member of Broken Lizard, and this is your first solo writing and directing gig. Was it tough to break away from the gang of five?
We're the kind of guys who can go off for a little while and do something like this and have it not affect the rest of the group. I think might I have missed a little editing of Beerfest, but that's about it. I just always thought it would be fun to do something where I got to really call the shots from top to bottom. Maybe that sounds like a really egotistical thing to say.

Not at all, but is it pretentious of me to describe Watching the Detectives as comedy-film noir?
I wouldn't describe it that way. It's about a guy [Cillian Murphy] who has his own video store, and he's very hung up on film noir movies. And Lucy Liu comes in and almost seems to be a character in one of those movies. It's film noir only in that it's a male/female dynamic that existed in those movies where a mysterious woman shows up and takes a guy on a series of adventures, and we're all sure that she's going to fuck him over and the guy seems to be the only one oblivious to the fact that this mysterious woman is probably very dangerous. So I decided to take the romantic dynamic out of film noir movies and put it in a modern indie comedy. It's hard to make a short description of that.

How did you come up with idea?
I'd been toying with it for a while. As a kid I watched a lot of movies, and I thought the best thing that could possibly happen is that one of those mysterious woman shows up at your door and takes you on a series of adventures and sexy scenarios. Which is a common film nerd's fantasy. I kept thinking, Well that's funny, because if some thing like that actually did happen it'd probably be very disruptive to your life. If somebody's wish comes true it can become a very unpleasant experience.

You're an actor, and you clearly relate to the video store clerk. Why not cast yourself in the lead?
I know some people get away with that where they can write, act, and direct, but it always seemed to me that if I'm going to throw myself into directing a movie, then it'd be best to not have any distraction acting in it. In fact, I did one scene and it was the only unpleasant thing on the set. I would be in my scene and trying to direct and hung up on what I was trying to do [as an actor] and not be behind the camera.

Had you ever wanted direct one of the Broken Lizard films yourself?
It's Jay's [Chandrasekhar] thing, plus it's also a pretty democratic process. The process really works the way that it is. We all go through casting together and the shot list. Most of the stuff is done with the group huddling around anyway. So I don't see why that system shouldn't keep going.

I heard Broken Lizard has a sweet deal at Warner Brothers where you guys get to develop other people's scripts?
Part of the deal we made with them on top of writing a bunch of stuff would be if we find scripts and writers we like, we sort of pass them on to the studio. So we've sold a few things to Warner Brothers, and if they get made we'll be producers on those movies.

Any projects you can tell us about?
It's hard to say at this point, because what we realized that you can set up a lot of stuff and sell a ton of scripts but every 12 scripts you set up, you're lucky if one gets made. There's one film we think might be close to that Jay's directing for Kevin [Heffernan] called the Babymaker. But that's not even close to being real.

You're married and have a baby. Does your wife ever feel weird that you're surrounded by naked boobies all the time?
She's been on set when all of these things are happening, and she sees how totally non-sexual the atmosphere is. I don't think it fazes her.

You're 38 and a hearththrob for the college-age set. Any crazy fan attacks?
Our demographic of who we run into out in the world has got to be at least 90 percent guys. The propositions we get out on the road are, "Let's do 20 shots of Jägermeister and get back to my house and smoke bongs and watch The Dave Chappelle Show."

Taken anyone up on it?
I have a couple times. A couple of the guys are single right now and they just went to Florida to do this tour of promotional appearances at bars and college towns in Florida, and the first thing you ask them is did you hook up. When we were only slightly recognizable, people hooked up more. But you almost feel like you're a freak now. You go to a college town or a college bar, and you're recognized so much that you aren't a human being anymore. Maybe it's because we're are old now. We're just kind of freakish.

But you all started as college kids doing sketch comedy at Colgate, so you've got that Animal House joie de vivre. For the aimless post-grad Radar readers, share how you segued your binge drinking into a formidable career.
It was just the five of us in New York after graduated. We were having a good time and we had nothing more interesting for us to be doing and so we kept doing [sketch comedy]. We made a short film and that got us in a position to make Super Troopers. It was 10 years of baby steps.