How the ‘Bad Trip’ Team Brought Those Hilarious Pranks to Life

“The thing about comedy is the more serious you play a ridiculous situation, the funnier it is,” says Eric Andre. The same could be said of the hard work that went on behind the scenes to bring some of Bad Trip’s best antics to the screen. 

This hidden-camera prank comedy follows two best friends who bond on a wild road trip as they pull real people into their raunchy, raucous antics. Andre produced and wrote the story for the comedy, in which he stars alongside Lil Rel Howery, Tiffany Haddish and Michaela Conlin. 

Indeed, an incredible amount of effort – from brainstorming, engineering and staging, through filming, editing and reshooting – went into creating Bad Trip’s funniest moments. (No spoilers, but imagine a night out at the local country bar or a trip to the zoo gone very, very wrong.)

“A lot of times, the idea starts as one thing but as we make it, it evolves into something completely different,” says producer Jeff Tremaine of the process, which saw the return of several of his key crew members from Jackass and Bad Grandpa.

“The best pranks are the ones that at first sound crazy and seemingly impossible to do,” explains director and producer Kitao Sakurai. “Jeff was really instrumental in taking those crazy ideas and bringing them into a more realistic space.”

“The ideas come in and then we have to figure out, ‘How can we really pull this off?’,” says

Tremaine. “It’s fun, but it’s also very hard: ‘How are people actually going to react when they’re presented with this? Where are we going to put the cameras? How are we going to hide those cameras?’ A lot of thought goes into it.”

“The process of doing this movie was unusual,” recounts Sakurai, who typically filmed two scenes a day. “We’d shoot for three weeks. Then we would stop and edit and look at the footage. We’d find out what we needed – what was working, what wasn’t working, what we needed more of – and then shoot for another three weeks.”

For Sakurai, that “process” was akin to reverse engineering. “We’d get something really great, but then we needed some setup for it so we would go back and do a totally different prank that would set up that scene.” 

“Even the pranks that work, you have to shoot a number of times,” adds Tremaine. “You also have to keep going until you get the perfect reaction with each prank.”

To get the perfect shot, many of the pranks seen in Bad Trip also required extensive (and unusual) preparation. On set, this included hiding GoPros, masking robotic cameras as security cameras and even creating fake walls (aka ‘Hides’) with mirrors for the camera operators to hide behind.

“A traditional movie has one or two, maybe four cameras rolling, max. We’d have 19 cameras rolling, hidden microphones everywhere, and earwigs in our ears,” explains Andre. “It’s like a CIA operation, if the CIA were really into dick jokes.” 

Bad Trip premieres March 26 on Netflix.