Making of "Kendall the Knight" - Written By A Kid Ep 7 Behind The Scenes

DAVE SHERIDAN: I have no idea what I just did.
I don't know what this really is.
I was wearing a knight's outfit, and a guy was telling
me to jump around and eat sandwiches.
Apparently some kid told this story.

CALEB EMERSON: The thing that attracted me so much is that
it was so gleefully violent and perverse, which is very
much my style.
The kid, Kiernan, who's telling the story is a genius,
and he's so animated and excited with
everything he's saying.
He's just going, "And then they smacked each other, and
they struck him, and he hit him, and he fell over!"
And he gets so excited of telling the story of these two
guys that are just beating the hell out of each other, but
they're kind of friendly towards each other, and they
take water breaks together, and take a nap.
And everyone pees in the story, too, which I thought
was hilarious.
And then out of nowhere Kendall, the hero, has a pet
wasp which flies around and it poops explosions.
So, there's poop, and there's pee, and there's violence, but
it's all done with a great big smile.
Well, there were a lot of production challenges, because
he never really describes the location.
I was sort of picturing it out in the middle of nowhere, so I
needed somewhere that was really kind of vast and
pretty, but that we could set up a production for a day.
So there was this location called Singing Springs in the
Angeles National Forest, where I'd filmed a few times before.
It's a couple that owns this huge chunk of land.
There's a creek there, there's mountains.
It's totally beautiful.
CALEB EMERSON: The heat was hot.
JEFF LEWIS: It feels like about and 89 to a 93.
That's Fahrenheit.
CALEB EMERSON: And I had these poor actors running around in
velvet tunics and basically huge frying pans.
They're wearing steel chest plates, back plates, covered
head to toe with things that when they sit out in the sun
for five minutes, you could fry an egg on them, literally.
JEFF LEWIS: This is my fort, held by one woman.
CALEB EMERSON: The first person to be cast was Kendall.
Lourdes, who is my production designer, she came over one
night to go over some of the stuff I needed her to make,
and I said, who do you know?
Who can you think of that would be good in this?
And she said, I know Dave Sheridan.
And I said, oh, that would be awesome.
And the good thing about him is he's a total goofball.
He's always playing a spaz in these movies, but he's also,
like, really handsome.
I emailed him, and I said here's this project.
Would you come do this for a day?
And he said, let me look at it, and he saw Kiernan's
interview, and he said, yeah, count me in.
JEFF LEWIS: I play a character named Xornmetal, and I'm a
knight, and it's all a kid tells me what I do.
CALEB EMERSON: We didn't have a Xornmetal yet, and Kim said,
how about Jeff Lewis?
Right at first, I was like, that's not
really what I was picturing.
I was picturing Xornmetal being this big, scary,
terrifying monster of a guy.
And I said, but Jeff would be really funny.
Because Jeff's really funny, he's got a great look.
So I went to go take the picture of him, because I had
to go get the cardboard cutout made, and I brought the
costume as it was.
And I was going to pin it.
And I had him put it on, and it was way too big.
It's like wobbling on him, and it's shaking, and everything's
too big, and the tunic's too big, and the
helmet was too big.
And he just looked hilarious.
So I said, I'm just going to leave it like that.
That was a great suggestion, to use Jeff, and he was great
to work with.
So the two of them together were quite a combo.
The biggest challenge creatively was figuring out
how to do all the crazy stuff he pulled out at the end, like
the wasp, and the castle exploding, and the wasp stings
Xornmetal's armor, which makes the armor explode.
Figuring out a way that would work and be funny, and that I
could actually pull off in not a really long time was
challenging, but I think I came up with some
good ways to do that.