Ben Falcone Talks ‘Thunder Force,’ Comedy Writing + Finding Your Community

The following interview for Backstage’s on-camera series The Slate was compiled in part by Backstage readers just like you! Follow us on Twitter (@Backstage) and Instagram (@backstagecast) to stay in the loop on upcoming interviews and to submit your questions.

Ben Falcone knows a thing or two about comedy. He studied with legendary troupe the Groundlings in Los Angeles, is married to frequent star and collaborator Melissa McCarthy, and has made a name for himself behind the camera with hits like “Tammy,” “The Boss,” “Life of the Party,” and last year’s “Superintelligence.” Falcone’s latest film, Netflix’s “Thunder Force,” has the writer-director wading into new territory: superheroes. As he tells it, finding the balance between action and humor was just a matter of knowing what he didn’t know and surrounding himself with people who could fill in those gaps. And with an all-star cast that includes McCarthy, Octavia Spencer, and Jason Bateman, Falcone surely was in good company. 

The inspiration for “Thunder Force” came from an unlikely place.
“I was reading an article about the owner of the L.A. Times who was in the pharmaceutical field and became a billionaire—and sort of very quickly became a thing of like: Well, Octavia is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and she could easily play that kind of energy of somebody who figures everything out and can save the world. And I was actually walking to work, and I just sort of came up with a really quick thought, conceptually of what it could be, and then I spent the rest of the walk sort of trying to poke holes in it. And then I couldn’t poke that many holes in it. What I liked about it was it’s a story about friends, and it’s a story about love and relationships. And then also it’s a super fun comic book comedy, which is something that appeals to me, too. So that was basically the germ of it, and I pitched it to Melissa, and I pitched it to Octavia, and pitched it to Netflix, and we were pretty quickly moving from there.”

In the audition room, Falcone is drawn to actors who are comfortable in their own skin.
“When I’m looking for people, I just want someone who’s comfortable in their own skin, and more or less like somebody you would want to interact with at a bar, or at a coffee shop. And then they do a really great job. So when things are other than that, meaning somebody comes in and they really want to make a statement just with their personality—you can tell that someone’s like, ‘I just want you to notice me before the audition starts’—I think that can be a little off-putting, at least for myself or most of the people that I know. At the end of day, you’re interviewing for a job, right? So you wanna make sure that, whatever the external pressures are that you’re putting on yourself, or that the world is putting on you as well, that you just wanna make sure that you would be fun to hang out with and work with.”

“Thunder Force” taught him to lean into what he doesn’t know—and to find the people who do.
“We’ve done fight sequences and some action stuff in our comedies, but this was a whole new thing. So you learn that you need an amazing stunt side, you need [previsualization], you need tons and tons of visual effects. So basically, what we did was we went in saying: We want it to live in this world, and we’ve never made anything like that. We went to Netflix and our producers and we were like, ‘We need help.’ And our director of photography, Barry Peterson, is great at that stuff. He would be the person that we leaned on the most, just to say, ‘What can we do here? How can we do it?’ It’s important to know what you don’t know and be willing to learn.”

Falcone’s background as a performer has shaped how he works as a director.
“I’m very aware as a director of what actors are having to do, even though I’m not as good of an actor as so many of the people that I’ve worked with. So it’s actually nice, they have a lot more tools, and I’m like, ‘Use your tools! I don’t have them! Try it!’ So that’s a shorthand for me, for sure. I’ve learned what I need to keep improving at, and hopefully have improved at, is the camera-side. Because the people that come from the camera-side, they might be like, ‘Oh, I can make this submarine look amazing,’ but they don’t know how to talk to the people who are the captains and the people in the submarine. We’re all works in progress.”

Falcone’s advice for actors is to always be creating something between jobs.
“I always ask people, ‘Can you write?’ Because you can write anytime, anywhere, you can set your own schedule, you can keep doing stuff. And you know, instead of just auditioning and being frustrated with not getting more, make something. Make a thing with your friends. Put something together. I think it’s so easy to say, ‘I can’t do it, it’s hard, it’s this, it’s that,’ which is very true. But if you’re doing shows, safely making material with friends and collaborators, I think that’s always a stronger way to go than just to feel frustrated.”

He received important advice early on in his career: “Find a community.”
“We were family friends with Michael and Summer Mann, and she took me out to eat in L.A. and she said, ‘Find a community.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ And she was like, ‘It’s really hard, it’s really hard.’ And she was very honest with me, because I was, like, 20 years old and just trying to figure it out. And she just said, ‘Find people who have similar interests, who have similar creative paths, because that’s who you’re gonna actually end up working with.’ And she was so right. I actually got the same advice in the Groundlings when I started earlier, one of my teachers said, ‘Look around, look to your left, look to your right. These are the people that are gonna give you your first paying job.’ And sure enough, now it’s so many years later, that was in the late ’90s so that’s 20-something years later, but you’re talking about people who are showrunners, and really, really successful actors and writers.”