Here is my Q & A with Author Tucker Max that was published in the Daily Gamecock.
The Daily Gamecock’s Mix Editor Colin Jones: When did you first start writing about your experiences?
Author Tucker Max: I started writing about 2001 and it was just e-mails to my friends. They loved it, started forwarding them to other people and it just kind of blew up from there.
DG: I’m sure you get this question a lot but are all of your stories real?
TM: Yeah, how do you make this s–t up? What are you, 26- 27?
DG: 21.
TM: So you’ve been drinking for a while, you’re hanging out. Don’t you have basically the same type of stories? To me, the question isn’t are they real, the question is why was I the first to write all this s–t down? Cause it’s all the same s–t we all do, I just write it down first.
DG: You don’t seem to shy away from any topic, do you?
TM: No, why would I?
DG: Why do you always seem to end up in these crazy situations?
TM: I mean, you know how it is. You go out drinking and enough crazy s–t just finds you, but then you make a decision that’s like ‘am I going to back off and say ‘OK that’s too much’ or are you going to say ‘f–k it, let’s see what happens.’ And I’m just very risk-taking and to me it’s like, “alright let’s see what happens.”
DG: Do you have a process to your writing? Friends? From memory? Voice recorders?
TM: It’s a combination. On my iPhone, I have a voice memo thing, so if I say something funny I’ll put that in, or I’ll send myself an e-mail or I rely on friends and whatnot. But generally if I remember just one turn of phrase that triggers a series of memories. Or I’ll be like ‘dude what happened” and he’s like ‘oh you don’t remember this.’
DG: You first started the site in 2002, how did this eventually transfer into the book ‘I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell’?
TM: The publishers came to me actually. I put the site up, and it kind of blew up and got a ton of attention and everyone loved it. And so publishers are no different than any company, and they saw I had an audience and so they were like ‘lets do your book.’
DG: How exactly would you describe your style of writing?
TM: Warren St. John wrote an article in the New York Times that said that me and a couple other authors invented a new genre called ‘Fratire’ which is unapologetically men being men. It’s not necessarily defined by a style, but more by a viewpoint. Because stylistically. I think my style is very sparse and very raw and focused on what’s funny and what’s entertaining, ’cause it started as e-mails to my friends, and you can’t B.S. your friends.
DG: What would you say your out look on life is?
TM: I hate to sound cliché about it, but life is a lot of fun if you just let yourself enjoy the fun s–t. So many people I feel like, and I was being guilty of this at times, do the things that they think they’re supposed to, but not the things they want to do. And I just said f–k it at one point and said I’m going to do the things I want to do and be the person I want to be.
DG: On your Web site you say that John Kennedy Toole’s “Confederacy of Dunces” is your favorite book. Who else influences your writing?
TM: I think Chuck Palahniuk. Another big one is P.J. O’Rourke who did “Give Peace a Chance,” and “Parliament of Whores.” O’Rourke is one of the first writers to kind of combine pop culture comedy with serious topics. And Palahniuk writing is very terse, short and focused on the message. John Kennedy Toole is just brilliant. If I could write a paragraph as well as him, I would be happy.
DG: Moving onto the film, how did the idea to turn ‘I Hope They Drink Beer In Hell’ into a movie come about?
TM: It was always an obvious extension because you read the stories and you think this would be kind of funny. We started as a T.V. show, [producer and co-screenwriter] Nils Parker and I did, and we couldn’t really get the creative control we wanted. So we realized the only way we could get it done was as a movie.
DG: Was it difficult transferring your stories into a screenplay?
TM: Yeah, it was f–king hard. You see a really well-made movie and it looks simple and easy and breezy. That’s kind of the mark of a good movie is that it looks easy, but it’s really hard to take all these different events and all these different jokes and make them quick and immediate and important to the audience. When we dove into it, it took us a good two years. Being funny is easy for us and the characters are already there. The hard part was making it work in story format. It was important to us to make a movie with a real story that wasn’t just joke, joke, joke, joke.
DG: So what stories did you decide to combine to create the movie?
TM: The Austin Road Trip story is the real backbone of it, because that’s just a funny story and it’s really cinematic. And everything else we used to kind of plug holes. We’ve got a really good bar scene, and we were like ‘well I’ve got this and I’ve got this.”
DG: What’s next for Tucker Max?
TM: In the next 30 days I have to release this movie. If I live past this, I don’t know. God willing if the movie does well, we’ll do sequels and then I have another book [A--holes Finish First] coming out early next year. It’s different stories, but it’s absolutely the same idea and same concept. I’m not going to change that. There will be a time to change that, but it’s not now.
