A Fantasy Come True

More than a decade after Danny McBride and David Gordon Green graduated from what is now the UNC School of the Arts, they are still working together — and with schoolmates Ben Best and Jody Hill.

"I get spoiled," McBride said. "I don't like working with other people."

McBride and Green's latest collaboration is "Your Highness," a fantasy-comedy out next week based on a script written by McBride and Best, with McBride starring alongside Oscar nominee James Franco and Oscar winner Natalie Portman. (One ad touts their Oscar credentials, then touts McBride's credentials as president of his fifth-grade class.) Green directed the film, which is a parody of sword-and-sorcery adventure films.

"We've got a good collective of buddies that you trust," Green said. "If you don't see eye to eye with them on everything, you can figure out there's probably a pretty good reason: You're screwing up, and you've got to think about something from a different perspective."

"I've known these guys forever," McBride said. "It's always awesome when you get the opportunity to do what you want to do, and it's pretty incredible to do it with people you've grown up with."

Their collaborations started out in independent films and have led them to mainstream success. McBride's breakout role was in 2006's "The Foot Fist Way," directed by Hill, which was followed by supporting roles in such films as "Hot Rod," "Drillbit Taylor" and "Tropic Thunder." McBride gained wider attention in his scene-stealing supporting role in Green's 2008 stoner comedy "Pineapple Express" alongside Franco and Seth Rogen, and has gone on to appear in bigger-budget films, including "Land of the Lost" with Will Ferrell, "Up in the Air" with George Clooney and "Despicable Me."

Green directed "Pineapple Express" after a string of critically acclaimed films including "George Washington" (which was filmed in Winston-Salem), "All the Real Girls" (a 2003 drama in which McBride made his screen debut in a small role), "Undertow" and "Snow Angels." Last year, the RiverRun International Film Festival honored Green with an "Emerging Master" award.

Green, McBride, Hill and Best met at the School of the Arts' School of Filmmaking, where Green graduated in 1998 and the others graduated in 1999. They worked together, appearing in one another's films and helping with scripts. McBride said that his time at the school was crucial to his career.

"The beauty of School of the Arts is that it's not in New York or Los Angeles," he said. "You're in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and you're not just living and breathing the sale of movies. There's not billboards for movies outside your front door.

"It lets you kind of be around a nice eclectic group of people that you might not get in one of those big cities. And the school's affordable, so I think a broader spectrum of people are able to come here and get the education here."

Green agreed. "It was a very eclectic group of people we went to school with," he said. "Under other circumstances, we might not have even been friends. But then we start working with each other and see who's good at what and realize how all these diverse personalities complement each other.

"It was just like, everybody was different, it was a just a mess, in a beautiful way."

"Your Highness" is based on their shared fondness for big action movies they grew up on in the 1980s, such as "Krull," "Barbarian Queen" and "Clash of the Titans."

In the movie, McBride plays Thadeous, the second-born prince in a mythic kingdom. He has grown up in the shadow of his more handsome, heroic and cheerful brother, Fabious (Franco). When Fabious' bride-to-be (Zooey Deschanel) is kidnapped by an evil warlock, the brothers go on a quest to rescue her. Along the way, they join forces with a beautiful warrior woman (Portman).

The plot sounds like standard fantasy adventure fodder, but Thadeous is a sniveling, profanity-spewing cad, more prone to get stoned and chase wenches than do anything heroic. The movie has lots of bad language, raunchy humor and gratuitous nudity.

The film's budget is about $60 million, which is small for a special-effects-heavy, big-screen fantasy film, but it's three times what Green has worked with before as a director.

"The old saying is, you never have enough time and you never have enough money," Green said. "We had to be inventive and creative and figure out how to create a movie that should be budgeted at $100 million and we've got half that money to do it."

McBride worked on the script for several years.

"The first draft was just letting our imaginations run wild, and I think that thing would have come in at a $200 million budget," he said, "which was obviously outside the realm of what anyone would trust David and myself with.

"With every draft, I think we started to find the tone of what we were looking for … what's going to make sense financially, what size movie can this be so we can get out there and push it and keep it hard R and keep it crazy."

"It's a dirty movie, but I think the more people give the movie a chance and show up, they'll see there's a bigger scope to it," Green said. "There's a big adventure story, lots of great action in it, romance and love stories, great characters and creatures. … It brings out the kid in me as an adult.

"We're starting out on a gimmicky level, but we take the movie very seriously."

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