Daniel Radcliffe Swiss Army Man

Cast: Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Directors: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
Genre: Adventure, Comedy, Drama
Rated: M
Running Time: 95 minutes

Synopsis: Outrageously fun and deeply affecting, Swiss Army Man is a gonzo buddy comedy that is the feature film debut of acclaimed music video directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (collectively known as Daniels, and responsible for the visionary 'Turn Down For What" video, among many others). Bursting with limitless creativity in both form and content, Swiss Army Man goes from the absurd to the emotional to the whimsical to the profound and back again.

Hank (Paul Dano) is stranded on a deserted island, having given up all hope of ever making it home again. But one day everything changes when a corpse named Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washes up on shore; the two become fast friends, and ultimately go on an epic adventure that will bring Hank back to the woman of his dreams.

Swiss Army Man creates a world like no other"a place of pure fantastical imagination, brimming with magical realism yet featuring two characters whose dreams and fears are entirely relatable. Dano and Radcliffe both fully commit to their directors' audacious vision, and their work is exceptional, finding the perfect balance of humor and heart that drives the whole film. A celebration of all the wonders cinema has to offer, Swiss Army Man is a cultural phenomenon in the making - a surreal and wholly original examination of human vulnerability and connection that must be experienced.

Swiss Army Man
Release Date: July 14th, 2016

About The Production

Amid summer reboots, sequels and superhero tent-poles, Swiss Army Manis a brazenly original concoction exploding with imagination and whimsy and showcasing standout performances by Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe, two of the brightest young actors of their generation. Written and directed by the filmmaking duo known as Daniels " Daniel Scheinert and Dan Kwan " Swiss Army Man tells the heartfelt story of an unforgettable friendship forged in the minds of two best friends in their own right, whose music video and short film work progressed quickly into the breakout debut feature that became the talk of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Swiss Army Man won the Directing prize, catapulting Daniels to the front rank of young filmmakers pushing the boundaries of cinematic possibility.

Set in a fantastical world conjured out of limited resources and featuring a ragtag handcrafted aesthetic that places its creators in the camp of such noted auteurs as Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Benh Zeitlin (Beasts Of The Southern Wild), Swiss Army Manbuilds on the kinetic, surreal visual style of short works like 'Interesting Ball" and the wildly popular, Grammy nominated and VMA-winning clip for DJ Snake & Lil Jon's 'Turn Down For What," which employed practical effects, puppeteering and dancing to tell the infectious story of bodily pulsations run amok inside one seriously bangin' apartment complex.

Swiss Army Manis a natural extension of the frequently outrageous and visionary style Daniels developed in their short works, which garnered steam on social media and YouTube in an era when so many of us sit frozen for hours at a time peering into smart phones. Indeed, the theme of connection and friendship figures prominently in many of Daniels' projects, including Swiss Army Man, the story of a marooned young man who finds life-affirming fellowship in the company of a flatulent corpse that washes up on the remote island where he is stranded. In one of the film's most indelible and triumphant images, he rides the farting corpse on the ocean like a jet ski.

It Starts With A Single Image

Like the unforgettable central image in 'Turn Down For What" " Dan Kwan's crotch taking on a mind of its own and humping everything in sight " Swiss Army Manhinges on a similarly surreal and shocking image, one that was conceived on an airplane bound for Daniel Scheinert's native Alabama, where the duo was headed for a writing retreat some years back. A company had commissioned a short film from the rising directors, offering only a few thousand dollars for their work. 'Because our headspace at the time was in the short form, and we had limited resources, we came up with the idea of a man stumbling upon a dead body that keeps farting," Kwan explains. In a beautiful and cathartic moment, propelled by the corpses' flatulence, the living man decides to ride the corpse across the sea. 'Both of us agreed it was stupid and pointless as a short film because there wasn't enough substance there," Daniel Scheinert continues. 'We decided the only way we could bring the image to life was in a feature where we could give it that substance."

Anchoring their stories with an absurd central image, the Daniels creatively challenge themselves " and their audience " by locating the humanity in images that would otherwise simply shock or jolt. At the heart of their music video for Manchester Orchestra's 'Simple Math," centering on a car accident in the woods, a simple story is elevated through cause and effect and a kind of innate human connection to an explosion of feeling that verges on the transcendent. 'We like to knock our audience around with stuff they don't expect because everyone is so media-saturated now," explains Daniel Scheinert. 'They go in with their walls up and we're there to tear down those walls." Adds Dan Kwan: 'Deep down we are very earnest storytellers " we love when we watch something and it breaks our hearts. At the same time, we're terrified of the emotional shit, so we bury it in absurdity and the things we love."

Finding Humanity Inunexpected Connection

Swiss Army Mantells the story of Hank (Paul Dano), a castaway stranded on a desolate shore who's on the cusp of taking his own life. He finds companionship in the form of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe), a bloated corpse that washes up offering renewed hope in ways Hank never expected. The duo's profound and unexpected connection, tested by their efforts to survive in the wilderness, advances to something resembling love. They become symbiotically entwined, sustaining and enriching each other until civilization threatens this newfound friendship. 'Every day I would turn up on set wondering how the hell Daniels were going to bring their amazing script to life," Daniel Radcliffe admits. 'And every day they would find some surprising, often deceptively simple way of doing things. One of the great joys of making this movie was watching my co-directors bring their images to life on set."

The film locates its swooning humanity in, of all things, farts. 'We were fixated on the idea of this farting corpse and expanded the idea into an exploration of things humans are ashamed of," explains Daniel Scheinert. 'We took a perverted little kernel and came up with a skeleton to support it. Along the way we discovered something personal and human that wasn't so perverted " the notion that everybody farts, and it's OK. When you make something that ordinarily might push people away but instead pulls them closer, it becomes life affirming."

At its heart a bromance " or a buddy movie where one half of the duo happens to be dead " Swiss Army Mantakes the joy of connection to profound and often dizzying levels with its intoxicating creative energy centering on human connection. 'It's a movie about universal love," insists Daniel Scheinert. 'We wanted to explore something broad and simple without using labels to describe it." Adds Dan Kwan: 'It's about two characters who need something " or someone " and they find it in the middle of nowhere. Hopefully audiences come to question their own tastes after they watch our movie."

Swiss Army Men : Buddies In Real Life

The actual connection between Daniel Scheinert and Dan Kwan also developed unpredictably. The duo met in an animation class they took in college " and they didn't like each other at first. Daniel Scheinert was vocal and opinionated whereas Dan Kwan was introverted and guarded. 'We were opposites," insists Dan Kwan 'with very judgmental first impressions of each other." But over the course of two semesters, the pair came to respect each other's differing approach to creating, finding a common ground in their mutual love for the perverse and unexpected. Adds Daniel Scheinert: 'It was like, -Oh, you make perverted things too. Cool!'"

Their creative partnership took shape over the course of the following year. Both Daniels made projects on their own " Dan Kwan has an animation and design background while Daniel Scheinert hails from the world of comedy, improv and theater " but they discovered that special magic ensued when they worked together. 'It became this organic process where we collaborated more and more until somebody paid us and we had to figure out how to divide up the work and money," Daniel Scheinert explains. 'Before we did our first paid music video, we did eight little things where he directed it while I shot it, or I edited it and vice-versa."

In quick succession, the duo directed music videos for bands including Joywave, Passion Pit, Battles, Foster the People, Tenacious D, The Shins and Manchester Orchestra, whose 'Simple Math" clip ultimately earned several MTV Video Music Awards nominations. (Two of Manchester Orchestra's members, singer-songwriter Andy Hull and lead guitarist Robert McDowell, would go on to score Swiss Army Man). 'Music videos were our film school and we learned so much working on them together than we ever did in class," says Dan Kwan. 'A lot of it was learning from each other because we had such different skill sets." To their delight, the 'Simple Math" clip pushed the relatively unknown duo into the big leagues.

From Turn Down For What To Swiss Army Man

Daniels were at the 2014 Sundance Screenwriting Labs when they submitted their pitch for the 'Turn Down for What" clip that would effectively explode their careers, resulting in 400 million YouTube views, an MTV VMA Award, a GRAMMY nomination and praiseworthy tweets from Katy Perry. That pitch " 'humping your way through the floor at a party," essentially " became a direct response to the surreal experience of working on a nascent version of Swiss Army Man in Utah with none other than Quentin Tarantino, one of the mentors in the lab. 'Our pitch was about turning off the brain from thinking so much and letting the id take over," Dam Kwan explains. 'It was something cathartic for us to put down on paper during a crazy creative period."

The video became one of the most viral clips of the social media age, garnering Daniels international renown. 'We cast ourselves and our friends in it and filmed it over a couple of days in which Daniel (Kwan) repeatedly got the shit kicked out of him," Daniel Scheinert explains. Adds Kwan: 'We were pretty sure it was going to be the last thing we ever did because it was so stupid." Ultimately, the video helped get Swiss Army Manmade. 'It was the perfect storm of getting the Sundance Labs stamp of approval and releasing an extremely successful and very perverted music video," Daniel Scheinert explains. 'Finally we got up the courage to ask, -Will you please pay for our very perverted movie?'"
Weird Wins: Casting Hankandmanny

After the script was finalised, Daniels began searching for the right actors to fill the roles of the indelible duo at the heart of Swiss Army Man. They were searching for kindred spirits, creatively, and found them in the unlikely combination of Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe, who had grown away from his Harry Potter roles through unconventional indies and Broadway musicals. 'The trick for us was finding people who could sing, who everyone said was nice to work with, and who we thought were talented," Daniel Scheinert explains.

Paul Dano was first on that list. Already a seasoned veteran who has played memorable roles in Little Miss Sunshine, There Will Be Blood and Love & Mercy, Paul Dano was no stranger to daring, adventurous and off-kilter parts. 'Hank was not a conventional type of role for him but Paul Dano saw the character as an interesting left turn," Dan Kwan explains. 'It served the movie to have this great dramatic actor placed in the middle of our nonsense." Adds Daniel Scheinert: 'Paul Dano became a close friend because deep down he's a weirdo too. All three actors in Swiss Army Man" including Daniel Radcliffe and Mary Elizabeth Winstead " had to take a huge leap of faith in order to put up with our weird creative process."

That process entailed shooting for several weeks in separate redwood forests in Northern California, requiring a physical commitment on the part of Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe that was frequently gruelling. 'It was probably the most physical experience I've had as an actor " and not just carrying Daniel Radcliffe around through the forest," Paul Dano insists. 'It was the combination of the terrain, the action, the humour and the emotions. Daniels brought so many wonderful ideas to the movie. More than a few scenes we looked upon almost as dance pieces."

Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe knew each other slightly before signing on for Swiss Army Man, but they knew upon reading the script that an intimate relationship was essential on and off camera. 'Luckily we got along well off screen," Paul Dano explains. 'We both wondered how the Daniels were going to pull off all this crazy shit when we first met up in New York City to prepare. That was part of the excitement of making the movie." On set, Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe became comfortable holding each other and being physically close " if not actually entwined " for extended periods of time. 'Because there are only two people in the bulk of the film, we had to rely on each other constantly. There was a lot of room for play and friendship, for us to challenge each other and have fun together."

Weird Wins: Casting Hankandmanny

Daniel Radcliffe had to grow comfortable playing a corpse who gets kicked around for much of the story, requiring an elaborate life cast to be fashioned from his body to be used for the fabrication of stunt dummies. But the doubles were seldom used during filming, with Paul Dano preferring to carry Daniel Radcliffe's actual weight, and Daniel Radcliffe determined to perform his own stunts. Before Skyping with the world-famous actor prior to casting Manny, the directors worried Daniel Radcliffe might not sign on because of the rigorous demands of the role. 'But Daniel Radcliffe's first question to us was if he could do his own stunts," Daniel Scheinert admits. 'On the Harry Potter movies, they let him do many of his own stunts and he really missed that."

Another challenge for Daniel Radcliffe was making a concerted effort not to play something resembling the living dead. 'When you have a talking, moving corpse, the first point of reference for anybody would be a zombie," Daniel Radcliffe explains. 'Manny is not that at all. -Magical dead guy' is the description I came up with, which made the character feel more free." After devouring the script, Daniel Radcliffe set about bringing to life his dead character's brimming humanity. 'He's this strange angel who comes to rescue Paul Dano's stranded character," Daniel Radcliffe explains. 'Manny is the incarnation of kindness and curiosity, starting off in a childlike place and aging quickly and rapidly as he learns about the world over the course of the movie. He undergoes a recognisably human crisis where he doesn't know what the point of anything is. One of the beautiful, tragic things about this movie is watching Manny's innocence destroyed gradually."

Daniel Radcliffe marveled at working with Paul Dano and the Daniels, whose small crew was comprised primarily of regular collaborators from the music video world and friends the duo had worked with dating back to college. Swiss Army Manwas worlds apart from the size and scale of the Harry Potter movies that launched Daniel Radcliffe's career, but a close-knit sense of family prevailed on both sets. 'I've been lucky in my career to work with mostly collaborative directors," Daniel Radcliffe admits, 'But Daniels take it to an entirely new level " this was one of the most fun jobs I've ever done." Most appealing to the actor was the refreshing lack of hierarchy on the set, in addition to the film's crackerjack art department, comprised of production designer Jason Kisvarday, art director David Duarte and set decorator Kelsi Ephraim. 'It was one of the most impressive teams I've ever worked with in terms of what they did in the time they did it, with limited resources," Daniel Radcliffe admits. 'Most of our sets were built in the forest. Everything you see in the movie was constructed from materials Daniels and their crew found in the woods."

A Sonic Challenge For Manchester Orchestra

Central to Swiss Army Man's spirited, kinetic energy is the film's unique score, composed by Manchester Orchestra's Andy Hull and Robert McDowell and intended to reverberate from the mind (and mouth) of Hank, who is stranded in the wilderness and forced to create his reality out of little more than sticks, garbage and a flatulent corpse. Prior to production, Daniels approached the Atlanta-based musicians about contributing music to their feature debut. The band submitted songs in the spirit of the script, to the delight of Daniel Scheinert and Dan Kwan, who in turn issued to their musical friends the same kind of creative challenge they impose on themselves during the shaping of their own works. Using 'limited resources" as a guiding force, Andy Hull and Robert McDowell were given the task of composing a score devoid of musical instruments, using only sounds the body could make, or ones that existed in a natural environment like a forest. Until the film's closing scenes " which erupt in traditional orchestration " the score is almost exclusively minimalist and a cappella. 'The premise of the movie was always about this guy in the woods and we ourselves intended to use only what was available to us there," Daniel Scheinert explains.

Dan Kwan had been a fan of Manchester Orchestra since college and knew that Andy Hull and Robert McDowell would be the right people to score Swiss Army Man. 'Andy Hull is really good with his vocal melodies and harmonies; he has great control over his voice," Dan Kwan insists. 'The movie was going to require nothing but vocal harmonies, and Robert McDowell had the technical chops. Between the two of them, they made a really efficient and talented musical team." Andy Hull and Robert McDowell jumped at the challenge of creating field recordings with such scant resources. 'We knew how to make music with instruments, but it was intriguing to us to conceive orchestral-sounding music with only our voices," Andy Hull admits. Adds Robert McDowell: 'It was exciting to learn how to complement another piece of art with something that sits in the background. But Daniels wanted us to go big and let the music overtake key scenes. Finding the push and pull as we set about building these grand musical moments was a true artistic challenge."

Indeed, that spirit of collaboration, challenge and connection comes to define Swiss Army Man on virtually every level of its production, from Daniels' initial conception of the farting corpse to the bond developed on set by Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe to the Manchester Orchestra's memorable mouth-based musical score. It's a movie that delights in duos and duality, one that feels gleefully whittled out of Daniels' existing bag of fantastical wood chips. 'It's not really a coincidence that a directing duo made a buddy movie," Daniel Scheinert remarks. 'When you make a movie that's this insane and other people love it as much as you do, it's a special feeling. That kind of connection is difficult to forge, but it's magical. We wanted to make a movie filled with weirdos because deep down everybody's a weirdo."

Swiss Army Man

Release Date: July 14th, 2016