On the eve of filming his first movie, “The Machine,” Bert Kreischer was lying in a hotel bed in Serbia trying to go to sleep to a Joe Rogan podcast.
As a substitute of providing an ambient touch, the episode became a rallying cry for the shirt-averse comedian.
“I forgot who [Joe] was talking to but he said, ‘they don’t make f – – king comedies anymore. They don’t make hard R comedies which are gutsy, ballsy and taking possibilities.’ I used to be unaware that they stopped making comedies. I only paid attention to stand-up,” Kreischer, 50, told The Post.
“I’m in bed pondering, ‘I’m making a comedy, and I literally start shooting tomorrow.’”
He woke up his co-writer, and so they reworked the opening scene giving it a harder edge, courtesy of a vulgar C-word exchange together with his on-screen daughter played by Jess Gabor.
After studio bosses saw the brand new scene, they sent a message: “They said to go harder,” Kreischer recalled.
Going hard has all the time been Kreischer’s specialty.
Like a latter-day John Blutarsky, the Florida native attended Florida State for nearly seven years or “many of the ’90s.”
During his sixth yr there, he was the topic of a Rolling Stone profile called “The Undergraduate” which chronicled his legendary alcohol consumption and hard partying ways.
The article would encourage the 2002 movie “Van Wilder” starring Ryan Reynolds.
He had no involvement with that early aughts classic, however the “The Machine” (premiering Friday) can also be based on his superhuman boozing. It was so impressive, it won him favor with the Russian mafia.
In a now-viral tale that Kreischer told in his 2016 Showtime special, he went on a category trip to Russia in 1995, where they were chaperoned by the mob.
Despite not knowing the language, he had worked on a sentence to introduce himself to his recent minders.
But he froze when coming “head to head with an actual Russian gangster with the wife beater and the tattoos with the track pants and the cigarette … I f – – king panicked … all I said to him in Russian, in his doorway was, ‘I’m the machine,’” Kreischer said within the special.
The gangster cracked, and Kreischer introduced himself to the opposite goons. The legend of “The Machine” was assembled, as Kreischer downed vodka bottle after vodka bottle together with his illicit friends.
In his retelling, the wild story ends with a bender on a train to Moscow. After Kreischer drinks vodka all night with the mobsters, they make him rob the train, including his own classmates.
“You ever tell a story a lot, you wonder if it’s true,” he said of the Russian train odyssey. “I’ve had plenty of classmates hear the story and say it’s legitimately true.”
Initially, Kreischer was hesitant to inform the insane tale during a stand-up set, but Rogan encouraged it. He eventually gave in, and after years of perfecting it, “The Machine” took his stand-up profession to recent heights.
“I believe I hadn’t found my voice … Little did I understand it was the largest stage story I might tell in my life. I’m a great storyteller but I’m not the one who recognizes the great stories.”
Kresicher has happily milked it ever since. He used his real life story as a springboard for the movie plot, where his train robbing past comes back to haunt him and he’s kidnapped by the Russian mob twenty years later.
It was imagined as “The Godfather II” meets “The Hangover.”
While it does deliver on the laughs and misadventures, it’s also heartwarming.
At its core, it’s a movie about fatherhood, which he explores through his relationship together with his dad (played by Mark Hamill) and his fictional daughter.
“It mirrored a lot of my very own life, so I believe we got a variety of emotion that we didn’t expect to get. I cried 3 times within the movie,” he said. On the time, the daddy of two girls was clashing together with his oldest, who had discovered pot and hard seltzers.
“We were having a tough time. I used to be livid, and I used to be parenting all of it unsuitable,” he admits. He was also attempting to rectify his onstage persona together with his life as a family man.
Then the flick collided with one other little bit of reality: the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which led to a backlash against anything Russian from vodka brands to athletes.
He frightened “The Machine” can be sent to the scrap heap.
“I’m not so cautious to an absolute fault. Stuff like this doesn’t hit my radar. I just didn’t get it. It’s not a love story to Russia in any respect. Russia is in it,” said Kreischer, who took matters into his own hands.
Last November, he leaked the teaser on an episode of Rogan.
It blew up online, stoking interest, not only from devoted fans. Sony got here calling asking to distribute it.
Now, Kreischer hopes it leads a comedy renaissance on the box office.
“I do know that is unrealistic but that is my dream. I hope it does $152 million opening weekend. Mind you a Marvel film makes around $130 million. I would like it to do such big numbers that each studio is clamoring for the following one. And all my friends, guys like Tom Segura, Shane Gillis, Tim Dillon and Mark Normand, get movie deals.”
And he expects to squeeze more out of his opus.
“I hope [producers] Legendary signs on to do a Machine, 2, 3 and 4. I may have 4 Machines. It would be my ‘Rambo,’” he said, adding, “I don’t need to be an actor, I would like to be a movie star.”
