“Splitsville” director and stars break down all those full-frontal moments and never-ending fight scene

This article contains spoilers for Splitsville.

The delightfully bonkers Splitsville explores the naked truth of adult relationships — and we mean that quite literally, since the screwball comedy features multiple full-frontal moments for one of its male stars.

The “unromantic comedy” from director, writer, and star Michael Angelo Covino (The Climb) and writer-star Kyle Marvin follows two couples as they explore non-monogamy, to varying chaotic results. It’s not Carey’s (Marvin) choice, however, since his wife, Ashley (Adria Arjona), asks for a divorce after revealing she’s cheated on him. Yet that’s not the most shocking part of the film’s opening scene, since her confession comes after she tries to give Carey a blowjob while he is driving, and they witness a brutal car crash where someone dies a gruesome death — all while Carey’s penis is on full display.

And just to remind you, this is the opening scene. Things only get wilder from there.

Marvin tells Entertainment Weekly that Jason Segel‘s infamous nude scene in Forgetting Sarah Marshall “certainly was in our mind” as inspiration when coming up with his own character’s naked breakup played for comedy.

“I think it’s hilarious,” Marvin says. “Of course this escalates, and of course this puts the character in the most compromised version of this scene, so of course we’d do it.”

“I feel like I’ve seen way more penises in movies than that,” Covino adds. “But it is a good penis. That’s one of the best breakup scenes ever.”

Marvin and Covino loved adding in multiple other male full-frontal scenes throughout the movie, like when Carey immediately panics and literally runs to his friend Paul (Covino) and his wife Julie (Dakota Johnson) for support after Ashley’s confession. Paul makes Carey strip down and get in the shower naked to check his body for ticks since he ran through lakes and woods to get to their house.

“It did serve the story for us — I’m checking him for ticks naked, and that was the most efficient way to show that these guys have been friends forever and they’re very close,” Covino says. “This is the easiest way to do that.”

“It’s something that made total sense for the scenario that they found themselves in, being naked in front of your best friend while he’s trying to talk to you about something else, and there’s no boundary between us,” Marvin adds. “And then Dakota’s character Julie comes in, and no one has any [issues] with it. It felt like interesting ways to approach nudity in a movie.”

It also set the tone for the rest of the wildly unpredictable movie, as Carey soon learns that Paul and Julie are in an open marriage. While staying at their house and struggling with his own relationship issues, Carey ends up having sex with Julie. Suddenly, Paul’s easygoing thinking about non-monogamy disappears, and he ends up in a never-ending, brutal-yet-hilarious fight with Carey, destroying his beautiful lake house in the process.

Covino reveals the extended fight scene was a direct result of Paul seeming “very evolved” while talking about non-monogamy, to show just how unevolved he actually is.

“What happens when he has to come face-to-face with his best friend and his wife having slept together, under the pretense that it’s totally fine?” Covino says. “It all falls away, and his guttural reaction and emotion just come out. We were like, ‘What if it just blew up into a fight, and it just never stopped?’ That was one of our first ideas for the film.”

“And then we just got carried away in how far we could push it,” Marvin adds.

The filmmaker-stars laugh at how they continued to escalate the scene in both the writing and filming process.

“I would write like, ‘Kyle falls through a table,'” Covino says. “And then he’d be like, ‘Oh yeah? You fall down a staircase.’ How can I hurt you? Every night we’d go to a bouldering gym, and we would throw ourselves around on these mats.”

The two performed all their own stunts for the scene, because they felt that would keep it as funny as possible.

“These guys love each other, and yet they probably genuinely want to kill each other in this moment,” Marvin says. “Playing that out and actually seeing that on camera was important to us to preserve.”

While they originally spent three days filming the fight scene, Covino and Marvin became obsessed with making it better. They would constantly return to it whenever they had extra time at the end of shoot days on location at the house.

“We would get ahead on a schedule or we’d finish a scene early, and we’d be like, ‘Let’s go do another take of that fight scene,'” Covino says. “When we finally left that house, everyone was like, ‘Oh, thank God. No more fight scene.’ They were just ecstatic it wouldn’t be on the schedule anymore.”

As much destruction the brawl wrought on the house, it took its toll on Marvin’s body more.

“It’s like a violent dance sequence where you end up with way more cuts and bruises than usual,” Covino says. “Kyle had bruises all over his body.”

That created an even larger problem, since Marvin had the full-frontal shower scene scheduled to film immediately after the fight scene.

“We did the [fight] as the first thing in our shoot, and then there’s a shower scene where I’m fully naked,” Marvin says. “I came in the next day into the makeup trailer, and I took my clothes off, and they were like, ‘What the hell is going on?!’ I was just blue, bruises all over my body, and they just had to sit there and airbrush away all these bruises off my body.”

The filmmaker-stars put their blood, sweat, and tears into Splitsville to “celebrate romance” in a modern way, Marvin explains. “I find the movie incredibly romantic, if only in the fact that it acknowledges how messy and complex and sloppy romance is.”

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Covino adds “there’s a beauty” to how messy relationships are. “So there’s a kind of positive outcome to the film, but it’s certainly not your traditional sort of romantic comedy happy ending,” he says.

As Carey, Ashley, Paul, and Julie find their way back to their original couples — after more chaos, including a stint in prison, a revolving door of other romantic partners, and a pregnancy — they don’t exactly get a “happily ever after.”

“It’s just ‘ever after,'” Marvin says.

Splitsville is now playing in theaters.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly