Editor’s note: Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore and speak with them about their upcoming film, “Miss March.” The duo wrote, directed and starred in the latest offering from Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Nate Knife: How did this film come to be?

Zach Cregger: Somebody wrote the script for us, with the characters basically as Zach and Trevor, and brought it to Fox basically with the intention of us rewriting it. The premise was basically coma, wake-up, girlfriend, playmate, go get her back. That’s pretty much the only thing we kept from the original script…

At first, it’s like, there’s roadtrip comedies, well, there’s a lot of them. And we weren’t wild about taking our first foray out into films as doing a roadtrip sex-romp comedy, but you know, the idea of being able to rewrite it was good…

So [Fox] let us do it, and we took a crack at it and tried to make it as crazy as we could…We changed all the characters around. In the first script, the characters were both horndogs, so we changed Eugene to be the conservative, abstinent guy. It was pretty fast, actually. We pounded it out, they said sure, and it was pretty painless to get it off the ground.

Trevor Moore: We wanted Tucker and Eugene to come from opposite ends of the spectrum… We wanted to say that by putting an over-emphasis on sex, you can damage relationships, no matter how that over-emphasis plays out.

So both of the characters have sex up on this pedestal, one from a conservative point of view and the other from a very promiscuous point of view. And it ends up being equally negative. Eugene, because he’s terrified of sex, it gets in the way of his relationship. But then on the other side you have Tucker who probably has met the person that’s right for him, and he can’t accept it because he feels like he hasn’t lived enough. He doesn’t have as many notches on his belt as he thinks he needs.

NK:You wrote, directed and starred in the film. What are some of the challenges that go along with that? Any benefits?

ZC: The benefit of directing a film you wrote is that you get to preserve what you wrote and make sure it’s executed how you think it should be. So that’s great! And acting is fun, so that’s good too.

But, it’s a ton you have to take on. You’ve gotta have your hand in so many pies…I think we do it fine, but sometimes it’s difficult to make sure the performances are what they need to be.

But I think we got fine performances, especially because since we wrote it we knew before we showed up exactly how every line needs to be said. We’re real specific. We don’t improvise on set. We know exactly how things should sound.

TM: As a control freak, it’s great because you’re in there doing everything. I think it’d probably be more fun not to do everything.

The challenge is it’s such a fine line between doing a TV show and doing a movie. You get the tone wrong, or you get the wrong percentage of stupidity, the wrong percentage of thought, and it becomes something completely different from what you want.

When you’re trying to hit this stupid yet thoughtful contradiction, you have to be really careful with the percentage, or rather the recipe. That’s the benefit, making sure you have your ingredients right.

NK:What did you do to try and set your film apart from other hilarious sex-romps?

TM: We tried to do the opposite ends of the sex spectrum. You don’t often see a character that is afraid of losing his virginity in a movie. If it’s a virginity story, it’s like you’ve got to lose your virginity by prom or have a contest with your friends to see who can lose their virginity first. That I think is a very common attitude. But equally common I think is knowing you want to lose your virginity and that it’s probably time, but you’re terrified of it. You don’t really see that much in films. With the TV show we like to do a lot of complete 180-degree endings where the last thirty seconds of the sketch will change everything. And while we didn’t do a lot of that in the movie, when writing the movie we tried to bring in that element of surprise.

NK:What are your major influences as filmmakers?

ZC: For this movie, we thought about “Raising Arizona” a lot. That movie had two things going for it that I think we wanted to hit. One was the motion and the momentum of the story. And there’s also this pseudo-reality it creates. It still felt like a real world, but it wasn’t the real world that we live in. Everything the Coen brothers do is gold.

NK:In a project like this that needs to have wide appeal, how do you balance out the

story-driven humor with poop jokes? Is there a specific formula you use?

ZC: That would be interesting. I bet you could do that.

TM: I don’t think it’s really “story versus joke.” We try to fit as many jokes as possible in the movie, but every scene has to move the story further and you don’t want to forget what it’s about. And if you can actually get the audience invested into the characters, the jokes will hit harder.

Comedy is all surprise. If you can get somebody actually thinking about the story for a second and then hit them with a joke, then it’s going to be more of a surprise. So I don’t think they oppose each other. There’s a fine line, since the movie is about Playboy and essentially pornography and sex.

It probably doesn’t look like it when watching it, but there was restraint. We didn’t want it to be like “Porky’s” or something that’s completely blue. We consciously tried not to have any masturbation jokes because that’s so easy when you’re talking about Playboy…There’s actually no sex in the movie. There’s nudity, but it’s not just for nudity’s sake.

I think we did show restraint, which makes the outrageous moments that much more outrageous.

NK: What message do you hope audiences take away from this film?

ZC: I think it’s about what Trevor mentioned earlier. There are two unhealthy ways to look at sex, and these two extremes are not good. You need to find a more realistic middle ground.

TM: I hope they walk away thinking, “I’m going to see that again with all my friends.” And I’m going to buy the

DVD and Blu-ray.”

NK: Where do you go from here? Any other projects in the works?

TM: We may do another season of the show. We find out tomorrow.

ZC: We’re writing a Whitest Kids U Know movie.

NK: Craig Robinson is pretty cool. What was it like working with him?

ZC: He’s really funny, he’s great. He just came in and nailed it in the audition. As soon as we saw his audition, we decided to just cast him. He didn’t require really any direction, he just showed up on set and we’d say “go” and he’d go.

And I love that he’s in this as this character. In so many of his movies and on “The Office,” he’s low key and dry and low energy, and it’s cool to see him do this movie where he’s just explosive. And it’s cool that he can do both.

TM: You think he’s cool but no.

NK: Is there anything you want to add about the film? Anything you want people to know about it?

ZC: Good clean fun for the whole family!

TM: Kids, sneak in. Um…well, no don’t sneak in. That doesn’t actually help out the box office. I’d say, theatet managers and owners should lighten up and let kids into it.