EXCLUSIVE: Eric Appel Talks Bringing to Life Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

Director and co-writer, Eric Appel has a brand new movie coming out, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Starring Daniel Radcliffe and Evan Rachel Wood, Appel teamed up with “Weird Al” Yankovic to tell a parody on the life of “Weird Al”.

Appel opened up about bringing the movie to life, Yankovic’s life, and so much more with BB. Check out what he had to say below.

How did this movie come to be?
“This whole project started as a fake movie trailer that we made over a decade ago for Funny or Die. And traditionally the subject of the biopic has been dead for 20 years, so it’s a little harder to fact check. So, I was like, ‘It’ll be really funny. I think it would be great to do a fake biopic trailer about a real person who is alive now and then just completely make the story up’.
I had never met Al before. We have a mutual friend in Patton Oswalt, and I reached out to Patton and I said, ‘I have this idea. I feel like it’s kind of an idea that Al may want to do himself or something. I just want to get his blessing to do this.’ Patton wrote me back and he said, ‘I spoke to Al. He actually loves the idea. He wants your email address.’ And later that day I’m at a coffee shop with ‘Weird Al’ watching biopic trailers on a laptop. That was sort of how this whole thing started.”

Were there things before you started writing the script that you knew you wanted to highlight in this movie?
“Well, working off that trailer, at first, we were trying to just reverse engineer a movie starting with a fake trailer that was made 10 years earlier. Then we veered away from that. And really, we were really open, and the story just took us to different places. Obviously, we had the songs that we wanted to highlight, the Dr. Demento relationship. But the way that we portray those things is not actually the way that they happened. I was saying, ‘I think I’m the first director in the history of biopics who had to do absolutely no research about my subject.’ Because we’re like, ‘Let’s get creative with it.’ I mean, obviously as a fan I knew a lot about Al going into it. We had the freedom to see where the story took us and we wanted to highlight the tropes and the story beats that you’d see in a traditional biopic, but take those in surprising directions. This didn’t feel just like a direct parody of a specific biopic, but more a satire of an entire genre that it’s full of surprises.”

Can you talk a little about the film premiering at TIFF earlier this year?
Eric Appel: “It was an incredible experience getting to premiere it in that room with all those people, and the excitement to see it. The reaction was better than we could have ever asked for. I mean, it felt like being at a ‘Weird Al’ concert really. It was just wall to wall laughs. Yeah. It was so amazing just to be in that room.”

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story will be released to Roku tomorrow, November 4.

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity