Entertainment
‘Spa Weekend’s Directors Reveal the “Dark and Weird” Scene They Had To Cut From the Movie
Jon Lucas and Scott Moore are a dynamic duo. They have a long history of churning out some of the wildest, funniest comedies in the past couple of decades, penning everything from The Hangover to Four Christmases and serving as both writers and directors for both Bad Moms movies, Office Christmas Party, Jexi, and more. Add in Emmy-nominated producer Suzanne Todd into the mix, whose resume includes the Oscar-nominated Memento, Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane, and the Austin Powers films, and you have a truly unstoppable trio.
The three of them have once again teamed up for their newest project, Spa Weekend, which follows in the tradition of several of their previous films by letting the women take center stage. The movie sees a group of four very different high school friends — sensible mom and lawyer Jane (Leslie Mann), underappreciated Sophie (Anna Faris), bitterly separated Coco (Michelle Buteau), and unfiltered Mel (Isla Fisher) — going on a relaxing trip for Jane’s birthday, only for increasingly wild situations and deep-seated wounds constantly threatening to make them more stressed out than ever.
Collider got the chance to speak to the creative team behind the movie. During the conversation, they discussed the challenges of shooting elaborate stunts, finding their incredible cast, bringing back the blooper reel, and more.
‘Spa Weekend’s Directors Talk the Unique Challenges and Perks of Filming in Australia
“We like our Aussies.”
COLLIDER: First of all, congratulations.
JON LUCAS: Thank you. We enjoyed chatting with you on the carpet. That was fun.
Oh my gosh, thank you so much! I absolutely loved it. Of course, your lead cast is incredible, but I was also really struck by your supporting cast, especially the spa workers. I’m curious if you can talk about finding all of them.
LUCAS: Oh, right on. This is a great question. We haven’t gotten this question. We shot in Australia, so all the cast is Australian, outside of our lead four, and it was pretty simple. It’s just auditions. What’s interesting is that Australia has a lot of great actors, but they’re all over. The country’s enormous. There was a lot of, “We’re going to get these great actors,” but we were shooting on the Gold Coast, which is kind of far away. Anyway, there were people who were, like, 3,000 miles away who were “local Australians.” We’re like, “Oh, that’s going to be a bit of a trip for them to get to set.” [Laughs] But they were great. It’s probably one of the more comedy-oriented countries. People like comedy down there. They’re really a lighthearted culture, so finding comedic actors there was not hard.
SCOTT MOORE: It’s pretty great. All of them were super talented, like Erica and Dominic [Ona-Ariki]. Dominic had won a ton of awards, and it was weird to have this experience where you have someone who’s a day player behind the counter doing this, and then you’re driving down the street, and she’s on all these billboards. She’s in these two shows, and you’re like, “Wait, what is going on?”
SUZANNE TODD: She’s super Australian famous.
MOORE: Super famous, super talented, so it was a luxury to have so many talented people.
TODD: And obviously Isla and Adam are also Australians, so a wealth of riches there.
LUCAS: We like our Aussies.
We love the Aussies.
LUCAS: Yeah, they’re good eggs.
TODD: They really are a good time.
‘Spa Weekend’s Directors Discuss Filming Those Wild Stunts
“When I see a great stunt in a trailer, I’m like, ‘I gotta go see that movie.’”
There were some pretty elaborate stunts in this movie, from the golf cart chase to the goats on the loose. How do you approach these huge moments of physical comedy as a director and then producer as well?
TODD: Jon and Scott hate those scenes. [Laughs]
LUCAS: I actually love them! They take a lot of work. When it’s the four women sitting around a table at a cafe, you’re like, “Oh, this is gonna be a great day. This is easy. [Sing-songs] Da da da da da da ta ta.” And then you’re like, “I got to jump a golf cart over a sand dune, and it’s got to land, and the people who own the beach are not really psyched about what you’re doing.” There are a lot of ins and outs, but I love that stuff. We always talk about it in terms of, like, there are some scenes that just have to go into a trailer. And those stunts, to me, are kind of what sells the movie. When I see a great stunt in a trailer, I’m like, “I gotta go see that movie.” There’s something about the appeal of that — “someone really went for it.”
MOORE: And some, like the golf cart, you really do a lot of previs, and you really think about, “How’s this gonna work?” Some of it, like the goats or the mud bath scene, you’re like, “Just put a ton of cameras in there, and just go. See what we get, and hopefully, it’ll be something.” I remember the mud bath scene because there’s no reset in that, right? So we shot the dialogue, and then we’re like, “Okay, we’re going to get one take of you guys cutting loose.” Thankfully, Michelle could do the whole movie in one take. She’s so talented, and so funny, and so creative that we were a little stressed out during that scene, but it turned out great because she’s awesome and so willing to play and do whatever.
LUCAS: I will say, one of the challenges of working with women — the only one — is hair. You can’t fuck up someone’s hair. If you mess up my hair, you wash the mud out, and you’re shooting five minutes later. Michelle has beautiful long hair, and you cannot mess that up.
TODD: Michelle’s was the toughest reset of all four.
LUCAS: It’s like a three-hour reset.
MOORE: Especially if you put mud in it.
LUCAS: So we’re like throwing mud around like, “Oh my god. How are we gonna do this?”
TODD: But I feel like we also had a little PTSD because we had some mud in a scene in Bad Moms Christmas. We had a different mud bath scene that was equally hard to crack the logistics of the mud. Mud is harder than you think — the movie version of mud.
LUCAS: It worked out, but to Scott’s point — largely because Michelle nailed it in one. If she hadn’t — if she wasn’t doing it the way she was doing it — it would have been a long day. It would have been really bad.
‘Spa Weekend’s Directors Are Bringing Back the Blooper Reel
“We did argue a bit about whether it’s hacky to have bloopers.”
I feel like we’ve really lost the art of the blooper reel, so I was so excited to see that during the credits.
LUCAS: We’ve been talking a lot about the bloopers. Maybe it’s time to bring bloopers back.
I agree! Why do you think it’s gone away?
LUCAS: I think people see it as hacky, and they’re not wrong. It’s a little hacky. There’s a period where, like, every movie did it.
TODD: It was done a lot.
LUCAS: I think the first one I ever saw was like the Jackie Chan movies when I was a little kid, and he would, like, die. He’d, like, fall off a train, and you’re like, “Oh my god.” And then he’d pop up and be like, “Ha ha ha ha!”, and you’re like, “Is he okay? Have we lost Jackie?” I love that stuff. I think that stuff you watch when you’re a kid, you never really shake, do you know what I mean? It’s always in you. We did argue a bit about whether it’s hacky to have bloopers, and the answer is yes, it is hacky, but we love it.
MOORE: We just had so much good stuff that we couldn’t not share it with the audience.
LUCAS: Those girls breaking? I mean, there’s so much stuff. And frankly, there’s some stuff that we didn’t put in the bloopers, or we put it in originally, and they were just too disgusting or crazy. I can think of two moments.
TODD: Not to really just talk about Isla.
LUCAS: [Laughs] Why do you think Isla? Why would you say Isla’s name? We’re like, “This is hilarious. The crowd is gonna eat this up.” You get all the way through your movie, you’ve worked so hard on the movie, and you get to the end of the test screening, and there’s one joke at the very end that they’re like, “No, that’s not okay. I want to take my mom to this movie, and I can’t do that if [this is in there].” You do find that, even though the bloopers are pretty fun and a little more outrageous than the movie, there are lines. There are certain things that audiences are just like, “Dude, come on — let us drive home in peace.”
Can you share them with the class, or is this sworn to secrecy?
TODD: We call these movies lightly R-rated, right? We’re staying away from the harder R-rated.
LUCAS: Find me outside. I’ll tell you all the stuff we can, but I cannot do it on camera.
I feel like the bloopers also showed that there was a lot of improv in this movie. Do you feel like you hire actors who are naturally skilled at improv?
LUCAS: Yes, 100%.
Okay, I didn’t know if it was a coincidence or if you looked for that.
MOORE: We love working with actresses or actors who can riff, who have comedic timing, who can generate comedy, and who can ad lib. Because there’s nothing better than that. It feels real. It feels funny. And we tend to shoot the script once — we’re like, “Let’s just put it on camera” — and then we allot time for them to riff, and run, and dodge, and weave, and do whatever magic it is that they do. That’s often where you get the best stuff.
LUCAS: We were just writers for like 10 or 15 years before we started directing, and when we made that transition, a lot of directors told us, “When writers become directors, they’re often so excited that they finally get to be in charge that they’re like, ‘You have to say it exactly. I wrote a period, and you gave that a semicolon.’” And actors are like, “What is going on?” So we really didn’t want to be the directors who were obsessed with their own writing. All the best jokes in all of our movies — I’m not saying this to be humble — literally are [improvised]. We started with something we had, so it wasn’t like we weren’t part of it. But often the best stuff is like, we had this idea, and then someone came in, either put a spin on the ball, or added something entirely, or said it in their own little weird way that makes it funny. We’re especially conscious of not being too precious with the words.
‘Spa Weekend’s Directors on the Movies That Scarred Them for Life
“Please don’t watch it.”
One of my favorite moments in this movie is when Jane walks in on her young kids watching Pulp Fiction. Is there a movie you remember watching way too young that either scarred you or inspired you?
LUCAS: Everyone does, by the way. Every single human on Earth, especially nowadays, has seen something where you’re like, “Why was I allowed? Who thought I was allowed to watch that?” I saw Hot Dog. You’re too young. You’re very young. Do you know the movie Hot Dog?
I don’t. I’ll look it up after.
LUCAS: No, don’t. Please don’t watch it. Hot Dog is a very ‘80s skiing movie. It’s a sex comedy, and everyone just has sex. It’s one of those very ‘80s…I’m not sure there’s even a plot. Maybe there’s a ski race at the end to give yourself a third act. It is just sex, and I watched it when I was, like, seven because I was like, “Oh, skiing.” And my parents are like, “Go ahead — enjoy Hot Dog.” And I was like, “[gasps] Oh, is this what adult life is like? Is everyone just fucking?” The whole movie is just like sex. That was one of those movies where I don’t remember anything about it other than the second I got out, I was like, “I should not be watching this.” That’s why Pulp Fiction was perfect because that’s, to me, the most ‘you really don’t want your kids to watch this.’ Your children should not watch the Gimp. They’re not ready for that yet.
MOORE: I’m glad you flagged that scene because it’s one of my favorite shots: the kids’ faces, right when she comes in, their eyes are like, “What is going on?”
TODD: Mine would definitely be a scary movie from when I was young — maybe Halloween or something. There was a guy with a knife, and then all I could think the whole night was that the guy was outside my window. I was up for days, terrified.
LUCAS: Premature horror. When you’re not ready for horror, and you’re too young.
TODD: No, because, of course, I thought it was real. I was too young to watch that. I was like, “Oh, there are guys with a knife outside my window.”
‘Spa Weekend’s Directors Reveal the Scene They Had to Cut
“Audiences were like, ‘This is not funny.’”
There is so much editing and shaping of a movie that happens with the writing, then the filming, and then the editing. What is the biggest change from the first draft of the script to what we see in the final cut?
TODD: There are three versions of a movie: there’s the version they write, and then you shoot it, and everything changes, and then you take everything that was shot, and you go into the cutting room, and everything changes probably as much again. It’s almost three completely different things. Especially in comedy, as [Jon] pointed out, we always try to build the time for the girls at the end to have improv. And the guys, in addition to the script that they write, they write an entire book of what we call alts, which are at the ready. You have the funny version, and then you have 17 other funny versions. There’s so much material from where you started with the script to when you get into the cutting room that it’s just about this finesse of what joke leads into the next joke playing bigger. It’s probably more complicated an editorial than people think.
MOORE: We make these movies for the audience. We love test screening because you’re like, “Okay, let’s see what jokes are working and what jokes aren’t working.” It’s not like, “I love that joke, so I’m gonna put it in the movie.” There was actually a whole scene that we shot at a funeral, which we thought was hilarious — it was sort of dark and weird — and audiences were like, “This is not funny.”
LUCAS: The first note on that test screening was like, “The funeral scene isn’t funny.” I’m like, “Look at that sentence. Of course, it isn’t! What were you thinking?”
TODD: It wasn’t a funny funeral — it was funny things that happened at a funeral that were funny to us, but it didn’t seem as funny in screenings.
MOORE: Test screenings are important because we want to know what people think of the movie, and it was very clear that they did not like that scene.
TODD: They didn’t want to laugh at the funeral.
LUCAS: I’m always jealous when directors do these things, and they’re like, “I’m cutting in my head the whole time. I know the whole movie while I’m shooting.” I’m like, “That’s so cool. That would be so nice. I don’t do that.” [Laughs] We shoot everything, and we really hope there’s a movie in there at the end. I think that’s the difference between comedy and most other genres. I think in other genres, you kind of do have to know every beat, because there’s not as much room, but the tone of the comedy in this movie can get broader or more dramedyish, depending on how you cut it. There are lots of different zones — the comedy world is pretty wide — and which jokes and takes really affect it. So I never know. I exude confidence on set like, “We got this,” but in my head I’m like, “I don’t know. I think we got it. I don’t know. We’ll find out in like six months.”
Spa Weekend is now in theaters.
- Release Date
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August 21, 2026
- Runtime
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97 minutes
- Director
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Scott Moore, Jon Lucas
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