Daniels Narrate a Scene From ‘Swiss Army Man’

A man makes friends with a corpse in “Swiss Army Man,” the not-easy-to-classify debut feature from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, professionally known as Daniels. When the film played at Sundance, it became known mostly for its flatulent corpse character. But it has since gone on to receive positive reviews in limited release. It expands to more theaters July 1. In one scene, the main character Hank (Paul Dano) tries to get his corpse friend, Manny (Daniel Radcliffe), to recall the joys of living by creating a makeshift bus and taking him for a ride.

In an interview, the directors discussed this scene and answered questions about the film. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Could you tell me a little bit about the scene?

Daniel Scheinert: A lot of times we say this movie is about a suicidal man who must convince a dead body that life’s worth living. In this scene, he’s trying to do just that and explain to this dead body what life is like. So here he is talking about a bus, of all things.

Where did you shoot it?

Scheinert: We built this bus set in an actual ravine in the woods in South Bay, San Francisco. It was important to us that we actually go out into the woods and make this movie and fake it as little as possible. We got to live the life that these characters were living.

Daniel Kwan: We got really lucky. We knew we wanted to be in the woods, but then also we needed to do a lot of things production-wise that normally you aren’t allowed to do in beautiful places. We got in contact with someone who owns some private land and they had this plot filled with redwoods and streams, mostly untouched. They were nice enough to let us spend a couple of weeks on their property.

Could you talk about the bus set?

Scheinert: We actually made it out of sticks and garbage. A lot of this set was built from what we found on location. It also incorporates the song “Cotton-Eyed Joe” which we prerecorded so we could make the scene kind of like a music video.

The film involves flatulent corpses and other items that might not appeal to some audiences. Are you just really into gross things?

Scheinert: Not really. Our process as filmmakers has become this therapeutic exploration of our weirdest ideas. Whatever the weirdest thing is that makes us laugh, we think, why don’t we explore that and try to find out why we came up with that? So our movie is full of things we don’t like. We don’t like corpses or a cappella music or fart jokes. So we made a movie about it to try to figure out why those things repel us.

Kwan: It’s sort of like a weird empathy game where you try to find a connection with things that you can’t imagine how to connect with.