The Whitest Kids U’ Know On Their Last Project And Going To Mars With Sevan Najarian (2024)

Mars, a new animated comedy movie and the final project of hit sketch comedy group Whitest Kids U’Know, took over a decade to arrive at its Tribeca Film Festival 2024 premiere. After rewrites, format changes, and a long crowdfunding campaign that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, Mars sees the comedy gurus pairing up with Midnight Kids Studios to bring their vision to life in 2D. The movie is about a group of people who travel to Mars—including Kyle, who abandons his wedding after winning a flight to the Red Planet—only to find out that they’ve been duped by a billionaire.

The movie was written by Whitest Kids U’Know’s Sam Brown, Zach Cregger, and Trevor Moore, the latter of whom tragically passed away in 2021. It stars Brown, Cregger, Moore, and other troupe members Darren Trumeter and Timmy Williams. Mars was directed by Midnight Kids Studios founder Sevan Najarian in Najarian’s animated feature-length debut.

Screen Rant interviewed Whitest Kids U’Know members Darren Trumeter, Timmy Williams, and Sam Brown and film director Sevan Najarian about their journey to Mars. They discussed translating sketch comedy gold to the realm of animation, being accountable to fans, and future project potential.

Sam Brown, Darren Trumeter & Timmy Williams On An Evolving Story & Fan Expectations

Screen Rant: This movie has been a long time coming. Billionaires hadn’t even been to space yet when you started writing it. How much did the story change over the years?

Sam Brown: I think that's one of the really fascinating things. We wrote the first draft in 2012, and we revisited it every year or so and would do these full rewrites. Every time we would do one, we would realize that the sensibility has changed and there's stuff that needs to be addressed—not turned down, but just addressed in general—so much so that it sort of became the plot of the movie. I think it's one of the more fascinating things, that there are those elements where it has this misdirect. [That’s] big in sketch and comedies, but you think the movie is heading one stereotypical direction, and then there are these twists that [are] like, "No, we're being more mindful about these things." And I think that's the charm of the core of the movie.

Darren Trumeter: The film also has an eccentric billionaire, like a Richard Branson [or] Elon Musk—somebody in that ilk. The script was written a while ago, and Elon Musk's personality has been evolving over these years… it’s really interesting how these things come together. And we didn’t change that. That was written a while ago.

Sam Brown: That’s the funny thing. We had a test screening of it and people were like, "Yeah, he's a turned-down billionaire." At the time, he was a very turned-up billionaire, very eccentric, and now it's like, "Oh, the real thing is a little bit bigger than the cartoon thing we have."

Timmy Williams: All the billionaires were like, "Hold my beer," in the last five years. But also, I would say the last time I was in a room to help them with the script was 2012 or something, and there's some stuff that didn't really change.

Sam Brown: I think a big part of comedy is just context and there are some things that were like, "This is still funny, but how do we maintain the context that keeps the joke alive?"

You guys crowdfunded this through doing a ton of Twitch streams and interacted with fans the whole way. How did that closeness influence the final product?

Sam Brown: I think it just made us very dedicated to it, more than anything. We knew we owed people something. I feel like if it was just, "Oh, we’ve got to do this for ourselves," we might still be working away at it. The fact that all of a sudden, we'd committed all these people to give us money—in this economy!—meant a lot. It meant a lot that people trusted us in that way. And there definitely were times where people were like, "You guys should have been done a long time ago. Where's my movie?" It was something we took very seriously and something where we were like, "We have to finish this."

Darren Trumeter: Also, they have [made-]for-film crowdfunding websites, and if you go to those sites, there are small filmmakers just trying to raise 20k to shoot a short or something like that. And so many of them don't make it. We were able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from our fans [through] so many streams and so many little donations. [It would be] like, "Here's five dollars. It's all I have for this week. I'll talk to you guys next week--see you on the next stream." All those little things added up immensely. Like Sam said, [we’re] super dedicated to the fan base.

Timmy Williams: For years and years now, we've been very close with our fans. When we went on tour, we would often spend more time afterwards meeting and signing stuff than doing the show, and this translates to that. In a way, it's really perfect for Whitest Kids to have a movie where we're directly responsible to the fans and not going through any other studio or anything. Even just screaming in my closet when I recorded a line, it's giving it your all. It's like, “This is for the fans, baby.”

Director Sevan Najarian Talks Creating, And Learning From, The Animated World Of Mars

Sevan, how was it for you to work with these guys, who are beloved in a very specific world, and translate what they do to animation?

Sevan Najarian: My experience is to work with crazy people all the time. I’ve already, over the past two decades, learned how to deal with funny crazy people, so it was totally up my alley. Once I read the script, I was like, "Thank God it's funny, because I'm going to spend probably a couple of years of my life on this thing.”

It was interesting to dive right in because they gave me so much creative freedom. We created the characters, and I don't think there were any notes on it. It’s fun to work with people that don't necessarily have a visual sense when it comes to cartoons. It just made me have a lot of control, which was very odd to have, especially around a bunch of very funny people. I'm usually the one sitting back and listening and laughing, but this time I had to actually do some work.

But they started off with a great foundation with the script, and it made it easy for me to make. I'm servicing comedy, and they already had the comedy set. They've been doing it for years, and all I had to do was make sure that their voice translated to a cartoon. Cartoons are all about dumbing things down and making it simple-looking, and I think I did a pretty good job of making it look dumb.

Did you feel a lot of pressure knowing that they had been writing this since 2012?

Sevan Najarian: The only pressure I had is [that] I've heard a lot of stories about sketch groups making films. Kids in the Hall made Brain Candy and it failed, and Mr. Show made Run Ronnie Run, and that failed. I heard a lot of horror stories about the directors that worked on those movies that made [them] fail. I felt like I was going to put on some really big shoes, and I didn't want to be the one to make a movie fail that a sketch group had been working on for a while.

It was definitely a big challenge to think, "Wow, I'm in that succession of sketch shows making films. This might just be an extra failure on my resume.” But I feel like there's something different about this movie. Something clicked, everything came together, it was perfect timing, and it all worked out. I think it's a great movie, and I don't usually say that about stuff I make. I usually wait for the audience to react to be like, "Oh yeah, it was a great movie." This time, I actually have an opinion, and it's a great movie. I would watch this. This is totally up my alley. I love making things that I would watch, and this is definitely something I would watch as a fan.

Timmy Williams: And that fits with how we always did things, because way back when we started writing sketches and stuff, it was like, "Hey, if it doesn't make all five of us laugh, we shouldn't do it."

Sam Brown: It's much easier to concentrate on entertaining the people in the room and translating that to a bigger audience than it is to try and think of entertaining the world.

Sevan, this is your first full-length feature. What would you do differently next time?

Sevan Najarian: I guess I would ask for twice as much money for the budget and twice as much time on the schedule, because that's actually what happened. I'm used to doing shorts, and I'm used to doing a series of shorts, like 10 episodes [of] five to 10 minutes each. That takes about the same time to make as a feature, but budgeting and managing shorts is so much easier than a full feature that takes way long. I'm used to making something [where] the next month, the audience sees it, [there is] instant feedback, and I know what to change on the next episode based on the feedback. But this is something entirely different—working on it for several years and nobody's really seen it. There really is no feedback besides ourselves.

It was just a matter of using the money that we had to make as best of a cartoon as we can. We really tried to push it, and by pushing it, it really broke at the seams, but I think it really shows how well we were able to utilize the money we did get [to] make a beautiful film. But yeah, I would definitely ask for more time, if anything. I could still be working on it right now.

Mars Will Have Easter Eggs Galore

Is there any aspect of this that all of you are most excited for people to see when it’s out?

Sam Brown: They're all spoilers. That's the thing.

Darren Trumeter: I know what you’re trying to say, but you can’t say it.

Sam Brown: There are two things I want to say, but they’re both big spoilers.

Sevan Najarian: There are a lot of Easter eggs, and I think the fans will be very surprised to see a lot of things, and happy, and probably annoyed by some of them.

Timmy Williams: You always hear people be like, "Comedy's had to change," and stuff like that, and we've seen fans directly being worried that we're going to be watered down or something with this. That’s not the case with this movie. I'm really excited for them to see it be like, "Oh, this is still these crazy people making things."

The Future Of The Whitest Kids U' Know Is... Crashing Zach Cregger's Horror Movies?

I saw a quote from Zach Cregger who said this was going to be the last thing that comes out under The Whitest Kids U’Know name, which makes sense, of course. But have you all talked about ways you might collaborate moving forward?

Sam Brown: Timmy and I were chatting about this question and yeah, as Zach said, this is the last thing that's Whitest Kids, because I don't think anything that we make that didn't involve Trevor we could call Whitest Kids. Not legally or anything, but that's what it feels like. But I also think it would be crazy to not consider myself extremely bonded to this collaboration. Even though there isn't a direct thing that we're all like, "Oh, we’ve got to work on this together," I am excited for the day when I can work with these three other people on something incredibly stupid.

Timmy Williams: I'm going to continue the collaboration by just continually texting Zach to put me in his horror movies.

Sam Brown: Yeah, that's another plan. We're going to try and get fake names and we're going to try and sneak on set. We're just going to try and get in there somehow, and that's how we're going to keep it alive.

About Mars

Kyle is a man whose whole life is laid out before him. One night, he sees an ad for billionaire Elron Branson’s contest to travel to Mars on the maiden trip of his new Mars Voyager. Kyle sends in a submission video and, to his surprise, wins. This would all be great for him except the luxury accommodations are merely a facade, the other space travelers are insane, and they all get stranded on Mars with no way home.