Interview: Jorma Taccone on ‘Over Your Dead Body’
There’s a point early on in Over Your Dead Body where it feels like you’ve got a handle on it. And then it pivots. And then it pivots again.
By the time it’s done, what starts as a relationship drama has spiraled into something far messier, bloodier, and far more unpredictable.
Directed by Jorma Taccone, the film follows Dan and Lisa, played by Jason Segel and Samara Weaving, who retreat to an isolated cabin under the pretense of a romantic reset. What neither of them knows, at least initially, is that the other has arrived with the exact same plan: to kill their partner.
It’s a setup that already feels volatile, but the film doesn’t stop there. Their carefully laid plans unravel when a group of dangerous outsiders crashes the weekend, pushing the story into something closer to full-blown chaos. What follows is less about who gets out alive and more about how far each character is willing to go. Against each other, against the intruders, and against whatever version of themselves they thought they were holding onto.
“It kind of goes from suspense thriller to home invasion and it just ramps,” says Taccone of the film. “So to me, it was getting that speed, which I really like, so that it just goes and goes and goes and it continues to be surprising, which I think is one of the engines of the script. And it’s really fun, especially for how well-versed everyone is in this day and age about knowing what they expect to come next and then subverting that. So that’s one of the engines of the script.”
That constant escalation is baked into the film’s structure. It doesn’t sit in one genre for long, and it doesn’t really want to. It’s also something Taccone is consciously carrying over from its source material. Over Your Dead Body is a remake of the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, directed by Tommy Wirkola, and that sense of tonal whiplash is part of its DNA.
“And that’s very much baked into the original film… so keeping that structure that really supplies all the surprises of that,” Taccone continues. “And then to me, tonally, it’s a big shift in this movie from the original in that I really wanted the characters to be a bit more redeemable and earn the ending of them sort of finding each other and being broken down to their base elements and then building themselves back out again.”
But what separates it from feeling like a series of tonal swings is the way Taccone approaches the characters at its center. Even at their worst, there’s something recognizably human underneath the violence.
“To do that, I feel like humor really binds it all together,” he says. “And my humor is very, very similar to [writers Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney‘s] humor, who are the guys who did this version of the script, and there’s a lot of crossover between us. We worked really symbiotically well together in terms of what we wanted to do and scenes that I was rewriting. It was a great process, but it really is that I think just tonally with the stuff that we do is so similar.”
That push and pull runs through Segel and Weaving’s performances, both leaning into the absurdity of the situation while grounding it in something more lived-in. Around them, the film builds out a supporting cast that only adds to the unpredictability: Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, Paul Guilfoyle, and Keith Jardine all stepping into a story that’s constantly shifting beneath them.
It’s also a balancing act that comes with a built-in expectation. The original film doesn’t exactly hold back. Taccone isn’t interested in softening that edge, but he is interested in reshaping how it lands. “I wanted it to both feel like it’s honoring of the original and has teeth the way that any European film really goes there, but at the same time is palatable enough and the characters are likeable enough,” Taccone says. “And I don’t mean that as a pejorative. I want to like these characters a little bit. They’re dark. They’re wanting to kill each other, and it goes there for sure. But it was this blend of those honoring and also changing in ways that I felt like just was more my style.”
That blend is what gives Over Your Dead Body its edge. It’s constantly moving, constantly reshaping itself, but never losing sight of the emotional core underneath the chaos. Even as things spiral, there’s a sense that it knows exactly how far to push. And for Taccone, that comes back to the process itself. The layering, the collaboration, the accumulation of detail over time.
“It’s so funny because ten years just goes, right? I’ve had a kid—two kids—since then, and your life just… you say ten years, I was like, damn,” he says, reflecting on the gap since his second feature, the musical comedy and cult classic Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. “But I’ve done a lot of stuff in between, like doing a lot of TV, and there was a moment where I was telling people I did this Knuckles TV show… it was such a weird musical episode and it was so full of creativity that I was like, God, I want to get back into longer form stuff, because you can just add so much.”
That instinct, to keep building, refining, pushing, extends to every part of how he works. “What I love about filmmaking is that you have all these talented people that you’re collecting and then stealing their fucking talent and then claiming it as your own,” he jokes. “But then obviously within pre-production to production to post-production, you’re just always adding on to it.”
It’s the same mentality that defined his earlier work, even if the tone here is something else entirely. “One of the things that I think people really respond to in the stuff that we do is that even if you don’t like it, you can probably tell that we cared a lot, almost too much,” he adds. “And I want to always be able to put that level of detail into it, because you want to be making films that people want to see multiple times.”
And it’s safe to say that Over Your Dead Body very much feels like one of those films.
Over Your Dead Body is now playing in theaters.