How ‘Jackass’ Evolved: From the MTV Series to ‘Best and Last’ Movie

Director Jeff Tremaine talks the run-and-gun recklessness of the early MTV days, kidnapping Brad Pitt, and learning to work with stunt and SFX professionals.

As director Jeff Tremaine closes up shop on the “Jackass” franchise with “Best and Last,” the franchise’s final film, he reflected on its beginnings and the early days of shooting the original MTV series on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast.

“We 100 percent didn’t know what we were doing,” said Tremaine. “And there was no one telling us how to do it, and thankfully so.”

That lack of experience ended up being a superpower. Tremaine, Johnny Knoxville, and their crew would spitball a kernel of an idea, and moments later hit the road to try it out.

“I just miss how fast we moved and how recklessly we moved; it was so energetic,” said Tremaine. “ We used to all fit in the one van — I’m saying camera and cast were in one van — and we’re going out and spontaneously doing shit. Nowadays it’s 100 people, and we’re slowed down by the size of the production. Whereas the old days were just fucking come up with the idea, let’s not talk to lawyers or anybody, let’s just go, we’ll figure it out.”

To demonstrate his point, Tremaine pointed to a bit they shot with Brad Pitt in Season 1 of the MTV series. Pitt had originally agreed to be part of the prank “Night Monkey 2,” in which the “Jackass” crew put on gorilla suits and ran around in public, causing chaos.

“[Pitt] gets to the office and I pitch him, ‘Hey, I just thought of this idea: What if we kidnapped you in front of Pink’s [Hot Dog Stand in Los Angeles]. It’s always crowded there, and people will recognize you, obviously. So, we’ll just roll up in the van and kidnap you in front of all these people.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, that’d be funny. Let’s do it,’” recalled Tremaine. “We got in the van and went and did it as soon as he said, ‘Okay.’ He didn’t call his agent, a lawyer; there was nobody involved other than the reckless people that he was around, and him being reckless himself. It was so awesome.”

You can watch Pitt getting kidnapped and “Night Monkey 2” in the clip below.

The instant and unexpected success of Season 1, which aired as Season 2 was being shot, led to a loss of that spontaneity and, eventually, to the MTV series ending after Season 3.

“MTV got scared of us,” explained Tremaine. “Senator Joe Lieberman made an example out of us because some kid got hurt in Connecticut, and he was like, ‘MTV is a bad influence on kids. They’re doing this reckless shit.’ And so MTV put safety restrictions on us that never were there from the beginning.”

Tremaine said the biggest factor in the end of the “Jackass” TV series was MTV having an OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) representative vet what they were shooting to determine if it was safe.

“We were not trying to be safe,” laughed Tremaine.

To capture the absurdity of OSHA’s influence, Tremaine pointed to how in Season 1 Steve-O jumped off a ladder into a kiddie pool filled with elephant poop. “And now [OSHA] is saying, ‘You can’t jump off a three-step ladder.’ I’m like, ‘We just jumped off a 12-step ladder into shit, now you’re saying, ‘Oh, the shit has to be chemically tested.’ None of this makes sense.”

At this point, the “Jackass” cast were all celebrities, and Hollywood viewed Knoxville as a movie star they were trying to cast in studio films. The transition from MTV series to Paramount feature film made logical sense, but it wasn’t an easy adjustment.

“It’s called ‘Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems,’” said Tremaine. “The biggest change was you had more people involved. There was a better budget, but it was a slower process. We had to learn how to do it a little more professionally.”

Tremaine said that he and Knoxville now look at the first film, “Jackass: The Movie,” and find it “soft.” On the third film, he figured out how to fully leverage the more professional filmmaking apparatus.

“It wasn’t until ‘Jackass 3’ that we actually hired a stunt guy to analyze what we’re doing,” said Tremaine. “For Paramount it was to make it safe, for me it was like, ‘Oh, he can help figure out how to make things work.’ Because when we build that shit, 99-percent of the time it doesn’t work.”

The best example of this is the difference between “Poo Cocktail” in the MTV series and the sequel, “Poo Cocktail Extreme,” in “Jackass 3. In the original, Knoxville got into a full porta-potty, which was promptly picked up by a garbage truck and flipped upside down. It embodied the homemade, backyard-stunt quality that defined the TV show. When they brought the stunt back for the third film, it marked Tremaine and the franchise’s full embrace of what was possible working on the scale of a major movie.

“Steve-O wanted to have [the porta-potty] fall off a bridge on a bungee cord, and then it was trying to figure out how to practically make that happen,” recalled Tremaine. “And our [Stunt] guy suggested, ‘Actually, if we brought cranes out, we could bungee it up, instead of down, and then we can control it more.’ Meaning, we get better footage. And so that became the most epic thing we’d ever done at that point.”

“Poo Cocktail Extreme” led to another important lesson — just because something was more professional, it didn’t mean the “Jackass” humor of the reckless crew “doing stupid shit,” and often failing, would be lost. If anything, it was even more on display, and in high-definition.

“There’s so many funny things about that to me [about ‘Poo Cocktail Extreme’]. Steve-O puts protective eyewear on, pinches his nose shut with the swimmer’s [nose clips], puts ear protection in, but just doesn’t think to cover his mouth,” laughed Tremaine. “And there he is with his mouth open and the zero gravity shit flying out. It was amazing, and it was in 3D.”

In the later films, the workflow changed. Tremaine and the professional crew could test out the stunts without the cast — Knoxville never wanted to be part of tests. The other big adjustment was hiring Jem FX and Tremaine’s collaboration with special effects supervisor Elia Popov.

While on the podcast, Tremaine broke down the “Escape Room from Hell,” one of the big set pieces in “Best and Last,” to explain how Popov’s special effects not only sold the pyrotechnics for camera, but also the cast — the sparks from the electric chair convincing Ehren McGhehy he might be killed.

“The electric chair did shock the shit out of him, but he didn’t know the sparks and all that [were special effects],” said Tremaine. “ I think we scrambled his brain; he was being shocked by all the sparks; he blacked out in fear, ‘Oh my God, I’m dying. I’m dying.’”

As the stunts got more elaborate, Tremaine and crew have also learned, and relearned, the importance of getting the narrative setup and arc of a big set piece right.

“It’s a little complicated in writing those ideas,” said Tremaine, using the human puppet show in “Best and Last” as an example. “I was sure it was going to be a huge runaway hit when we put them in a marionette puppet show. They’re hanging there, and then we torture them. But one of the flaws of that bit is that it didn’t really go anywhere. It just starts off bad, and it just stays the same level of bad all the way through.”

The puppet show was saved, according to Tremaine, in the editing room. Specifically, using a camera pan to the audience, revealing a smiling Sean McInerney (“Poopsies”) clapping. One of the film’s running gags is McInerney’s protruding lips, a result of injections he receives from a plastic surgeon early in the film. Poopsie’s smile was the beat of visual humor that gave the bit the tonal shift that was missing from its initial narrative construction.

Regardless of how much the series evolved and grew, Tremaine said the key was its North Star never changed: “The motivation is to make just us laugh; that’s the most important thing. If we gauge it funny, then it’s a success to us, and hopefully that translates to the audience.” And that line of what the “Jackass” crew found funny was the axis upon which the franchise changed from film to film.

“We almost never made a second movie because Knoxville was in his head, like, ‘How are we going to top that?’ Thinking that way, intentionally trying to top something, you’re going to fail with that,” said Tremaine. “I would always try to calm his ass down, and say, ‘Listen, man, all we have to do is be funny. If we make something funny, people will like it. That’s it. Make it simple.’”

To hear Tremaine’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.