Bryan Fogel and Ivan Sergei seem like best friends, I walk into the interview room and I’m immediately greeted with great energy and Max the dog, sleeping in the corner. “Jewtopia” is Fogel’s feature film as a director; his past credits include playwright, producer and author. Ivan Sergei, while not quite a household name, is soon to launch into celebrity-dom. He plays Christian O’Connell (although his name is oddly missing from the IMDB page), the love-struck gentile who pretends to be Jewish to win the attention of Alison Marks, played by Jennifer Love Hewitt.
CINEMACY: What took 8 years to finally come to this point? How was that possible?
BRYAN FOGEL: Uh, 8 years! Haha. This is something I wanted to do so badly and for me, creatively, I felt like I couldn’t move on until I got this film made. And I fought like hell to get it made.
IVAN SERGEI: Yeah, it was a play…
FOGEL: And the play and the movie are so, so different [but] the concept and the comedy is similar. I think when your will is strong enough you can get something done and that was certainly the case here.
CINEMACY: And it took you less than a month to actually shoot?
SERGEI: Yeah, 21 days.
CINEMACY: So was it like, every single day you were filming something?
SERGEI: Yeah but all the actors are really professional, they all know what they’re doing. They came to work knowing what they wanted to do… and that’s where the real fun things happened.
FOGEL: [Especially] knowing that there wasn’t going to be a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor. When I went into the edit, my director’s cut of the film was like, 97 minutes! I knew that what I was shooting was going to be in the movie…haha.
CINEMACY: Silly question, was the catering kosher?
FOGEL: No, haha. I think if you see the film, this is not a…
SERGEI: Kosher film
FOGEL: Kosher film by any stretch of the imagination.
CINEMACY: I wrote a note here, I kind of pictured it as like the new “Tyler Perry movie for Jews.” I thought it was pretty funny and such a great ensemble cast, what was the table read like for both of you?
FOGEL: The table read was the first time that I heard the movie… and everyone was just cracking up.
SERGEI: Yeah I’ve always said that Jamie-Lynn Sigler stole the table read by far, she was awesome.
CINEMACY: Bryan, what was it about Ivan that made you cast him as your leading man?
FOGEL: Ivan was just the best for the role; it really came down to that. And once I saw him with Joel [David Moore], they played so well off of each other and they looked good on camera together, it all meshed.
SERGEI: It was a compliment too, there are a lot of great people in [the film] and I’m sure it would have been great to get a big name in that role, and they probably could’ve gotten one too, so it was really a compliment for me to get it.
FOGEL: That process of when I want something and have passion towards something rather than somebody sitting on the sidelines, and Ivan, being so involved and me knowing how much he liked the film and how much he wanted to do it, on top of me thinking he was incredible, was what pushed it over the edge for me.
CINEMACY: What was it like working with Jennifer Love Hewitt?
SERGEI: I actually did “Party of 5” with her way back when… She’s an awesome girl, she’s maybe what you think she is and maybe she’s not what you think she is from her characters. We had really good chemistry; it was a lot of fun to work with her.
CINEMACY: Going into [the film], did you have any reservations about possibly offending anyone?
FOGEL: That’s been the core of “Jewtopia” along the way, if it’s not offending some people I’m not doing a good job. I think comedy in general, you either love comedy or you’re the person who gets offended by comedy. With “Jewtopia” it’s either people are like, ‘this is the funniest thing in the world’ because it’s so offensive, or ‘oh my God, this is so offensive, how could somebody do this,’ and I’m happy when people have that reaction cause that means it’s striking a chord.
Jewtopia is in theaters September 20th.
