KROL TALKS POOP WITH THE MAKERS OF POOP TALK
When Poop Talk Director Aaron Feldman initially pitched his idea to make a documentary about pooping to Randy and Jason Sklar, they had the kind of reaction you’d expect: “Uhh, no thanks.”
Undeterred, Feldman suggested the Sklar brothers think it over. So, they did and met with Feldman again. The second meeting went a little better. The brothers told Feldman that they wanted to do a movie that was an “honest and truthful open discussion about the taboo of pooping.”
“We want to try to do a higher brow version of the movie. If there’s one to be done,” Jason Sklar said in our interview.
“[Feldman] said ‘That’s the kind of movie I want to make!’”
The next step was to gather interview subjects. That was a little easier. “The majority of people said yes and were totally game,” Randy Sklar said. “A couple of people were just uncomfortable talking about it, and we understood that since we said ‘no thanks’ at the beginning too.”
SKLAR BROTHERS AND AARON FELDMAN WERE POOP ANTHROPOLOGISTS
“[But] as we were doing the interviews, we were like, wait a second, maybe there is a real movie in here that has something to say,” Randy said. “This is as universal as it gets. As comedians we feel like anthropologists a little bit. We ask ‘why do we do this? Why do we do that?’ Why is it that everybody does it and yet we have such a hard time talking about it?”
Even though Poop Talk discusses a taboo subject openly, some details were too much for the film. “Adam Carolla told a story about his friend shoving poop into his ear,” Randy said.
“There were a lot of details in that story. We shaved it back to the bare minimum,” Jason added.
“That [Adam Carolla] still called that a guy a friend is beyond me,” Randy said.
But even though everyone on the planet has first hand knowledge of defecating, the Sklar brothers still learned something while making Poop Talk.
THE SHAPE OF TOILET WATER
“Some of the scientific things were great, like finding out that you poop a pound a day,” Jason said.
“I learned how wonderful a bidet was,” Randy added. “Now I got to get one.”
Randy continued: “We know we didn’t set out to make The Shape of Water. We made the Shape of Toilet Water. That’s fine and we’re good with that. But what we can do is talk about how we are alike. It’s something that everyone can relate to.”