Director’s Cut, A ‘Scary, Funny, and Very Meta’ Film by Penn Jillette and Adam Rifkin

Director’s Cut is “a crazy idea for a movie” that Penn Jillette is making with director Adam Rifkin. In it, “nice guy” Jillette wants to play a bad guy (“I want to be a monster. I want to be the nightmare.”). He says it’s “scary, funny, and very meta. I want a movie that gets my blood racing, makes me laugh but also gives me something to think about, with maybe a little sexy thrown in. Hollywood doesn’t make many movies like that.” He is currently crowdsourcing funds for it on Fund Anything and stars in the campaign’s engaging video.

I pitched “Director’s Cut” around Hollywood and the suits seemed to like it. They had little tweaks and polishes and little dumbing down here and there and maybe . . . well . . . maybe . . . someone else should be the bad guy. Maybe a bigger star or someone who hadn’t been so nice and polite on TV recently should be the bad guy. But what about my personal goals? What about me wanting to be a bad guy?

“Director’s Cut” has already started. Being part of making this movie is being part of the movie and that’s the idea of the movie. Get it? You will. Oh, you will. With crowdfunding the movie is happening now, and for a few bucks – you’re in it, you’re part of it. How creepy and groovy is that?

On Huffington Post, he writes:

I hear you ask: “Why don’t you just take all your own dirty Vegas money and make your own Penn Bad Guy movie? Well, I did that with my last two movies: “The Aristocrats” about dirty jokes, and “Tim’s Vermeer” about my buddy painting a Vermeer in a warehouse in Texas. There were no investors, there was no studio, there was no crowd-funding – we just made those movies with our own money. By “our own money,” I mean money people gave us for doing our Penn & Teller magic show in Vegas. We paid for these projects with money we got from people paying for our last projects. That’s a fine way to do it. “The Aristocrats” did well and “Tim’s Vermeer” looks like it’s going to do very well, but my money is still tied up in that. I don’t have enough of my own money to make “Director’s Cut” right now.

Penn sent Neil Patrick Harris a disturbing gift to help him be a bad guy:

David Copperfield looked Penn up in the dictionary under “bad guy”:

Trey Parker & Matt Stone of South Park briefly “smack talk” Penn in this video:

video 1 via Fund Anything, video 2, 3, and 4 via Huffington Post