Twenty years in the past, Johnny Knoxville and the remainder of his Jackasses made an explosive big-screen debut with the arrival of their first characteristic movie. And we imply actually explosive. Launched in theaters on Oct. 25, 2002, Jackass: The Film kicks off with the complete forged of the MTV collection hurtling down a steep hill in an enormous buying cart, with smoke bombs going off throughout them. It is a sequence straight out of a $30 million motion film, relatively than the measly $5 million that Paramount spent on the reality-show–based mostly movie.
“That was the one time we ever felt like we have been making a film for positive,” Jackass star, Stephen “Steve-O” Glover, instructed Yahoo Leisure throughout a latest dialog about his new memoir, A Onerous Kick within the Nuts. “The entire course of of constructing the primary Jackass film felt largely like the way in which we made the TV present — it was sort of slap-dash. As soon as all of us laughed, we knew that we received it.” (Watch our video interview above.)
In reality, as Steve-O reveals, the opening sequence was the very last thing they filmed for the film. All the different stunts — together with “Alligator Tightrope” and “Wasabi Snooters” — have been shot within the on-the-fly method of the TV present. The enormous buying cart run was overseen by author/director Spike Jonze, a longtime behind the scenes inventive pressure on Jackass. “We rolled down that hill for 2 or three days,” Steve-O remembers. “Our consideration span for filming Jackass within the early days was each bit as brief as the eye span of our viewers. It was very troublesome for us to get into that repetition.”
Talking of inauspicious, Steve-O discovered one of many film’s stunts so onerous, he flat-out refused to do it. That may be “Toy Automobile Up the Butt,” which might have required him to do precisely what the identify implies. It is the primary time that he ever backed out of a stunt, which he now says was “epic in its personal approach.”
With Steve-O out, Ryan Dunn stepped in and shoved a condom-covered toy automotive up his rectum, earlier than heading off to a really confused physician for an X-ray. “I received all this nice footage backing out of it,” he remembers. “And the way in which it performed out for Ryan, there was nothing that could possibly be modified to make it any higher. That was probably the most iconic, unimaginable factor we ever filmed.” (Dunn died in a automotive accident in 2011.)
Out of gratitude for his service, Steve-O deliberate to pay tribute to Dunn in Jackass Ceaselessly, the long-awaited fourth Jackass characteristic that premiered in theaters earlier this yr. “I considered backing out of the stunt, and the way Ryan wasn’t right here to movie the fourth film,” he says. “I spoke up saying that Ryan stepped in to place the toy automotive his butt after I backed out. And now that Ryan’s not right here, I wanna step up and simply take it to an entire different stage — put one thing up my butt that is simply unbelievably epic.”
However regardless of his ardour for the concept of an anal tribute, Steve-O says that he was finally overruled by the remainder of the Jackass gang. “As a result of I mentioned that, I nearly disqualified myself from having the ability to do it,” he says, laughing. “That is the way in which to get out of a Jackass stunt: by expressing that you simply need to do it. It takes all of the enjoyable out of it for the director.”
— Video produced by Olivia Schneider and edited by Yelizaveta Katsnelson
Jackass: The Film is at present streaming on Paramount+
