When they release Baby Mama in 2008, it was the culmination of a lot of sisterly comedy work from Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. The two met cutting their comedic chops in Chicago with various improv groups and then gained wilder fame as a part of the Saturday Night Live team in the 2000s. During that time they’ve also hosted the Golden Globes and it’s generally believed that these two are a comedy duo that belongs with some of the industry’s best.
They are back with Sisters, a film that features the pair as siblings who have to return home because their parents are selling the house where they grew up. Instead of wallow in their soon to be ripped from their past homestead, the two decide to stage one last party to salute their younger days as each has major reservations looking to the future.
We caught up with Fey and Poehler at the Sisters press day and before we looked forward, we got them to look backwards. “We were the only two women on our first improv team together in Chicago. I think that’s where it started to work,” Fey said of those early days.
They shared not only a comic timing, but their appreciation for everything seemed to be parallel. “I think we learned pretty quickly we liked the same things. We liked speaking the same way. So much of comedy in the beginning is finding your tribe, because no one’s very experienced. No one feels funny. You end up searching out people who like the same things as you or that get you. That was pretty quick,” Poehler added.
In Baby Mama, Poehler had the joy of playing the unwound one while Fey got the job of playing the “straight” woman. With Sisters, they changed it up (a bit). The sisters return home and throw that aforementioned party and since Fey’s character was the one who let loose back in the day, they agree that she will be the party mom and Poehler’s character will have a chance to be fancy free for once. Up until that party point, Poehler is kind of the straight one. Fey believes it makes for an interesting dynamic.
“When you have a part for someone who is sorta tightly wound in the beginning and then go crazy, you cast the person who is better at going crazy. I just knew that Amy could play the back half of that better,” Fey said.
Poehler was drawn to the overall message of the movie and how definitions of people in terms of how you see yourself and how others perceive you can alter, change and then turn again.
“The film is about dealing with people who knew you when and the good and bad of that, because people have an idea of you. Can you change that story about yourself? Or are you just stuck always being this kind of person? We’ve all worked with people that we’ve known for a really long time. So, it was really easy to play old friends obviously because we all are, but it’s cool to watch all of us, and hopefully in the future until the robots kill us, to see the different versions of us as we grow and change,” Poehler said.
As was previously mentioned, something that is a priceless element of good comedy is having a team that has a shorthand. So, it is hardly a surprise that Poehler and Fey turned to some fellow SNL veterans to fill out the cast and make that Sisters party scene truly hysterically pop.
“There’s a bit of a shared vocabulary. I would even go a bit farther than SNL, but in the improv community there’s a sense of like a well-run emergency room. If you see a well-s run emergency room, there’s not a lot of freaking out because you just don’t have the time. You don’t take up a lot of time talking about how something’s not gonna work or you can’t do it. You just do the best you can in the moment and you wish for the best and you’re around people that hopefully are more skilled and better than you at what they do,” Poehler said.
“That’s just a tonally thing we’re all used to. We like working and feeding off of each other. There’s not a lot of ball hogs on our team. We all took great pleasure in other people’s jokes and there wasn’t a lot of feeling like we were competing against each other. We were feeding each other ideas and thoughts. That always makes for certainly a better experience but often times a funnier film.”
As you can tell from our Top 10 Comedies of 2015, it was a great year for women in comedy. Clearly these two are more than a little proud of their cohorts. “It’s really exciting always when new voices become commercial. It means there’s an audience for them. I still think that stories told from a female perspective are really interesting because there haven’t been as many. We’re not treading the same stuff. There’s still such a spectrum of stories told through the lens of female characters that are really interesting because frankly they’re newer and untapped,” Poehler said.
“Were excited to tap dat aspect of Hollywood cinema.”