How did you get Werner Herzog to agree to be involved in ?Incident at Loch Ness??
To be honest with you, if you?re going to make a movie about a filmmaker making a movie, Werner is the most obvious choice. I wish I could take credit for it but he?s had more movies made about him than probably any other director. He?s not as famous as Francis Ford Coppola but he has had? Between ?Burden of Dreams,? which is one of the most famous documentaries ever made probably - which is about him making ?Fitzcarraldo? - to ?Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.? There?s actually an outtake on the DVD where he says, ?I think it?s unhealthy to have more films made about you than you?ve made films.? So in that sense, he actually was the only person whose myth as a filmmaker is as explorable as Nessie.
To me, it was him or no one.

Otherwise I would have made someone else up. Also, I happen to be friends with him and working with him at the time that I came up with the concept. It?s one of those things where the two evolved together.

Did he immediately take to the idea?
Immediately. He immediately said yes. The moment I said, ?You know, I?m thinking about doing this hoax about the Loch Ness monster,? and kind of gave him the idea that he would play the head of this crew going out to look for it. I said, ?I?d like you because people will believe.?

One of the things I always wanted was to be able to lay the kind of groundwork in the media that we show in the film. I don?t know why, but I just thought it would be fun to have - for people who would be interested - like all the footprints of the fake movie within the movie in the actual media, in the actual world. And in order to do that I needed someone with Werner?s status, and the fact that nobody questioned for a second that Werner would make a movie about the Loch Ness monster.

That wouldn?t be true if I?d gotten some other director where people would have been like, ?What? No way is he doing that.?

How much of this movie is scripted?
Almost all of it is improvised. I had an outline for the movie that was about 25 or 26 pages long that told me what every scene was. But really almost 100% of the dialogue was improvised. Most of the scenes, I would just put two people together and say, ?Okay, here?s what you?re doing and here?s what you?re doing. I need you to get to this point. Now go.? And then they would do it a couple of times. It was done a lot like the way, from my understanding, ?Curb Your Enthusiasm? is shot. I mean, it?s improvised but with a detailed outline.

Did any of your actors or crew members take it a different direction than you expected them to?
Sure. The best example I can give is David Davidson. I never intended the captain to be such a big character. I thought he would be kind of in the background but he was so compelling. The guy?s not an actor. None of these people are actors and David was cast sight unseen. We just called him up and we didn?t have someone to play a captain who could also [be a captain]. We needed someone who could fit both roles because, literally, there wasn?t enough room on the boat. So we needed someone actually steering the ship in real life.

When I met him I was like, ?Wow, this guy is incredible. He?s so deadpan. He?s going to be great.? And as the dailies started to come in, we realized he?s so good. He was very nervous about it but he didn?t realize how good he was. I feel like he could be on the ?The Office? or something. He?s really that solid an actor. His part just kept getting bigger. Everyday I?d watch dailies and be like, ?More David. More David.?

There was a lot of stuff like that where people like Gabby [Beristain] or Russell [Williams] were just much more adapt than I thought they would be at this type of acting and so their parts ended up getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

And obviously everyone had to be in on the joke from the beginning.
They had to. We did multiple takes and if I said to you, if I didn?t tell you we were doing a movie the first time I said to you, ?Okay Becky, now say what you just said again,? you?d be like, ?What? What do you mean ?say it again??? That?s what?s funny. If you think about it, since everything is done with multiple takes, basically there?s not a moment in the movie that isn?t scripted because when you have to repeat your lines and repeat what you just did, you no longer are in the moment.

PAGE 3:Zak Penn on the Loch Ness Locals and the DVD