Jackass team: Why Bad Grandpa should have been a 'terrible idea'

You’d think performing pranks was the best part of the job for the ‘Jackass’ boys. Turn up, roll camera, go and cause some mayhem.

Only it takes far more planning than you might think, as the ‘Bad Grandpa’ team revealed to us in at an exclusive Q&A event:

“It’s a terrible idea to do this movie,” admitted director Jeff Tremaine, who helmed all three ‘Jackass’ movies, as well as the original MTV series. “One, you have an eight-year-old boy [co-star Jackson Nicoll]. Two, your star has to go through four hours of make-up. Three, you’re shooting hidden cameras. We had to think of everything with hidden cameras.”

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Star Johnny Knoxville, who plays cantankerous prankster Irving Zisman, said he’s too aware that “everything can go wrong” to find his own performance funny when filming.

“When I first started doing pranks I laughed on a couple of them, and we lost the footage,” he said. “When I’m doing pranks everything can go wrong. Anything can get upset in the process… I’m not in a very funny mood.”

Watch the highlights of our ‘Bad Grandpa’ event above, and see an exclusive new clip from the film, here.

The pair also opened up about how they carefully target their hilarious candid gags at people they “wouldn’t suspect to be ‘Jackass’ fans.” Jeff revealing that “We’ve got our little moles in the shots where if I sense someone in the background is about to [interrupt], slowly and quietly they’ll tap that person on the shoulder and walk away. So we can keep filming what we’re filming. Get the people that are potentially going to bust it out of the picture.”

[Cringe your way through the Bad Grandpa trailer]

Despite massive media exposure, and now his own movie, Johnny also boasted that the now infamous Irving definitely still had room for a sequel:

“You would just have to schedule more time, because you’re going to get discovered more,” he said. “But there are pockets of town that you can always hit that I think you could score.”

‘Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa’ is out now in the UK.