Sibling rivalry, family secrets and a mysterious stranger threaten to blow the lid right off a coffin in Death at a Funeral, a hilarious and darkly delicious romp featuring an ensemble cast of comedy superstars and acclaimed dramatic actors.
Based on director Frank Oz and writer Dean Craig's 2007 funeral farce and transplanted from the English countryside to sunny Pasadena, California, Death at a Funeral is a disarmingly funny look at life going on in the wake of death. 
This may just be the worst day of Aaron's (Chris Rock) life. Charged with organizing his father's funeral, Aaron has to deal with the eccentricities of his entire family as they gather to pay tribute to their patriarch. Aaron's brother Ryan (Martin Lawrence), a successful novelist, arrives from New York to the delight of the family and Aaron steams silently while Ryan hogs the limelight. To complicate matters, the alarm on his wife Michelle's (Regina Hall) biological clock has gone off and she expects him to do his husbandly duties--despite the unfortunate timing.
With his strong-willed, proper mother Cynthia (Loretta Devine) watching over his shoulder, Aaron attempts to put together a fitting memorial for his father, but his extended family undermines his efforts at every turn. As they gather together to pay their last respects to a beloved husband and father, petty resentments and lifelong feuds spill over. Confusion becomes chaos as future in-law Oscar (James Marsden) accidentally ingests hallucinogenic drugs and turns Aaron's carefully planned tribute into the worst funeral in history.
But even that pales when Frank (Peter Dinklage), a "special friend" of the deceased, arrives with some information he thinks the family would like buried along with the revered patriarch--and demands a big payday to keep it under wraps. As Aaron's attempt to stash Frank quietly away while he figures out how he's going to come up with the hush money goes terribly wrong, good behavior goes out the window (along with Oscar) in a wickedly funny, wildly inventive comedy of errors.
The film is directed by Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Lakeview Terrace) and written by Dean Craig (Death at a Funeral [2007]).

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
How did an acclaimed 2007 British farce set in the English countryside find new life three years later as a comedy about an African American family in Pasadena, California?
Two words: Chris Rock.
When Rock saw the original film during its theatrical release, he instantly recognized its potential. "It was really funny," says Rock. "There weren't a lot of people in the theater, but we were all laughing our heads off. Death and funerals are something everyone relates to and the comedy was good."
Death at a Funeral began life as a British release that made a splash at the Aspen Film Festival, winning the prestigious Cinemax Award. Directed by Frank Oz (Bowfinger, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) and written by Dean Craig (executive producer of the American production), the film attracted a small but enthusiastic audience in the U.S. and garnered wide praise from critics.
Rock had the idea to remake the film with an American cast.  "It seemed like we could make a different movie and the same movie at the same time," he says. "It had a lot of parts, so we would have a chance to cast a lot of funny people.
Transforming a British farce to American madcap mayhem could be tricky, but then again, coming up with a good script is the biggest challenge on any project, according to Rock. "I always tell people, write the movie you want to write and greed will get it made," he says. "Trust me, between the agents, the manager, the studio and whoever else, greed takes over and the next thing you know you're making a movie. And I mean, greed in a good, Gordon Gecko way, not in a bad, somebody-trying-to-take-advantage way. Just, 'hey man, this is too good an opportunity to let pass.'"
William Horberg, executive producer of the first film, signed on to produce with Rock. "Death at a Funeral was well reviewed during its original release, but didn't attract as much of an audience in the US as it deserved," he says. "We knew that when audiences got in front of it, they really responded. I received a call from a friend who represents Chris Rock asking if I'd have lunch with Chris. I didn't know what the agenda for the lunch would be. He told me that Death at a Funeral was one of his favorite comedies of the last couple of years, and said 'I've got to be honest with you. I'm the only black man in America that's even heard of that movie. I know it's fresh and I know it's recent, but I think it would be a fantastic idea to remake it.'
"It was kind of an epiphany," says the producer. "We talked at length about what it would mean to transplant it onto American soil and how that would change it. Chris and I both liked the same things about the film, so we were looking to preserve as much as reinvent. The film's structure, which was perfectly worked out in the original by Dean Craig, is something we fought hard to preserve and honor. Chris helped create the American voice of the piece by finding the right jokes and language and intonations for these characters."
Horberg was an invaluable resource as Rock worked with screenwriter Craig to adapt and develop the script. "Bill really understood the movie," says Rock. "We had some ideas that had been proposed before, and he was able to say, no, we tried that in the first one and it died, so don't write those scenes. He understood the importance of doing it on a sound stage as opposed to doing it in a house. He understood which moments the audience would really go crazy for and which moments wouldn't work as well as they could."
Finding the American voice for the film was Rock's first priority. "Sure, we all speak English," he says. "But their English is a lot different than our English. The British ask a lot of questions. 'Is the tea okay?' We tried to take all the Briticisms away without losing the essential humor. It was a big job. You think it's a few words at first and then you realize a lot of these phrases sound odd coming out of an American's mouth."
In the end, the filmmakers changed very little of the film's plot and characters. "The bones of the movie are pretty much the same," says Rock. "I don't look at it as a remake. It's more like a cover song. When you hear Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" next to Jimi Hendrix's version, they're the same song, but they're totally different."
Horberg continues the musical metaphor. "We've got a strong story that an audience connects with and responds to," he says. "Then we were given the freedom to play with that form. It's almost like a jazz player riffing on a standard song."
When the time came to select a director, Rock returned to a man he worked with early in his acting career: Neil LaBute. Over the last two decades, LaBute has built a stellar reputation as a director of highly personal, often controversial dramas, such as In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, as well as an established voice in contemporary American playwriting, with acclaimed stage works including the Tony-nominated "Reasons to Be Pretty." 
Rock says the secret to being a good producer is to hire your own boss. "If the person you hire is really working for you, you hired the wrong person," he says.  "We knew that Neil LaBute would take charge. He knows exactly what he's doing. We haggled over the script a bit, but once we agreed on that, it was his show. He was the general and I went where he told me to go."
LaBute's pedigree was helpful in attracting top talents, including Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan, Loretta Devine, Danny Glover, Columbus Short, Keith David, Peter Dinklage and Zoë Saldaña. "Neil's a formidable playwright, filmmaker and screenwriter," says Horberg, "He'd worked with Chris quite memorably and successfully in Nurse Betty and he'd also worked recently with Screen Gems on Lakeview Terrace, starring Samuel L. Jackson. In Death at a Funeral, Neil found the balance between allowing these bright, improvisational comedians to have their moments, while keeping it all grounded in reality and emotional truth."
After years of dramatic successes, LaBute was eager to take on a straight up comedy. "I'd been looking for something for several years," he says. "It can be hard for people to think of me and comedy together, and this was the perfect opportunity.
"It was nice to try and find that inner comedian in myself," says LaBute. "I think I don't necessarily do that as a writer. It's hard to sit at a table and tell myself 'be funny, you're writing a comedy.' It's much easier when you've got all these funny people around you, and you're truly collaborating with them."
His reputation as an actor's director was one of Rock's primary reasons for hiring him. "He's a taskmaster and a perfectionist without being annoying about it," says Rock. "I've been in a bunch of movies, but I've only starred in a few. I knew he would be really helpful to me in building a performance."
The director agreed that, with a story as strong as the original, there was no need to reinvent the wheel. "The script really worked," he says. "We didn't try to change that dynamic, but we had some new ideas. There were certain characters I felt were a little short-changed by the screenplay, because there are so many characters, and there's only so much time in a movie. We tried to give more to do to certain people.
"Just by having new actors in the roles makes it work differently," says LaBute. "But we all wanted to get to the same place in the end. The ride ends in the same place, but the getting there is a little different. The very reticent English family who has all these crazy things happen to them has to kind of come out of their shell. The family in our story is already sort of out there. They don't really want to see each other, so it's a different dynamic. It starts at a higher level and then boils over to a much higher level before we all end up back in the same place." 
The director likens having Horberg and actor Peter Dinklage, who reprises his role from the original, as having a pair of military advisers to keep him on track. "They went through that experience and could say 'oh, this is how we did that. I remember now that we should watch for this landmine. Over here is success!'" 
"Comedy is so specific," adds LaBute. "You have to make a whole group of people laugh with one moment. But in reality, what makes people laught is so subjective. You know, somebody can trip over something and you feel terrible, somebody else watches it and they laugh."
LaBute says he was able to translate much more of what he's learned as a theater director to this character-based piece than he has on previous films. "The emphasis on personal dynamics made it a lot like a stage play," he says. "It's very much bound to one area for almost the entire piece, so it was like moving people around a stage. I shot more on a soundstage than I've ever shot before, which made it feel like we were coming home every day. Those things made it feel like a new experience, and I like that idea of keeping myself open to new opportunities."
"Expect to laugh," says La Bute. "We take a sacred cow, the funeral, and lampoon it a bit. It's a funny take on family dynamics at a moment of real stress. It's also a meditation on what it's like to have siblings and how a house can be torn apart by an event like a funeral. We took normal situations and made them completely abnormal and it's fun to watch that play out on the screen."

FILLING THE PEWS
With over a dozen meaty roles to cast, the makers of Death at Funeral brought together a collection of top comedic talents and skilled dramatic actors to play the extended clan at the center of the story. Finding a way to make those disparate talents work together was the director's job. "It's a challenge to make any cast work," says LaBute. "You rarely have a lot of rehearsal time. Some of the actors came for the first time on the same day they started shooting. In this film, many of the characters are related, so you want to make it feel like they're a family, even though they've just met." 
The work ethic required to make it all come together began at the top of the food chain with producer and star Chris Rock. "Chris understands comedy," LaBute says. "He knew how to get a funny cast together, and he trusted me enough to say I want you to do this." Read more

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FUNERAL
Death at a Funeral was shot on Sony Studios' Stage 23 after seven days of exteriors filmed on location in South Pasadena. Over the years, Stage 23 has served as the shooting venue for a series of films for Screen Gems. It was originally built as a Spanish-style apartment building for Quarantine, became a traditional home in The Stepfather, a modern home in Obsessed, a nightclub in Takers and, following Death at a Funeral, it became an apartment building for The Roommate and a burlesque club for Burlesque. Read more

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
NEIL LABUTE (Director) received his Master of Fine Arts degree in dramatic writing from New York University and was the recipient of a literary fellowship to study at the Royal Court Theatre. His film credits include In the Company of Men, which won the New York Critics Circle Award for Best First Feature and the Filmmakers' Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, Possession, The Wicker Man, The Shape of Things, a film adaptation of his own play and the thriller Lakeview Terrace, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington.
LaBute's extensive list of stage plays include "Bash: Latter-Day Plays," staged in New York in 1999 and London in 2000, both directed by Joe Mantello; "The Shape of Things," which LaBute wrote and directed for London and New York in 2001; "The Distance from Here," which ran at the Almeida Theater in London in 2002 (directed by David Leveaux) and in New York in 2004 (directed by Michael Greif); and "The Mercy Seat," written and directed by LaBute in New York in 2002.
In 2004, the MCC Theater performed five of LaBute's one-act plays, collectively titled "Autobahn." MCC also staged LaBute's play "Fat Pig," directed by Jo Bonney, later that year. In 2005, his play "This is How It Goes" premiered at New York's Public Theater, directed by George C. Wolfe. Later in the year, the play debuted at The Donmar Warehouse in London, directed by Moises Kauffman. At the same time, LaBute's play "Some Girl(s)" premiered on London's West End, directed by David Grindley.
In 2005, LaBute directed the premiere of his one-man, one-act play "Wrecks" in Cork, Ireland. In 2006, "Some Girl(s)" made its New York debut at the Lucille Lortel Theater. MCC Theater staged and Jo Bonney directed. In October 2006, LaBute once again directed "Wrecks," this time for the New York premiere at the Public Theater. In 2007, MCC premiered a new LaBute play, "In a Dark Dark House," directed by Carolyn Cantor.
LaBute's most recent play is "Reasons to Be Pretty," which MCC staged at the Lucille Lortel Theater in NYC and was directed by Terry Kinney. The play (with the same director and cast) made its Broadway premiere (and LaBute's) in February 2009. Additionally, Labute's "Fat Pig" ran concurrently in London at Trafalgar Studios on the West End, with the playwright himself directing.
LaBute is the author of several fictional pieces published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar and Playboy, among others. A collection of his short stories was published by Grove/Atlantic in 2004.

DEAN CRAIG (Written by / Executive Producer) Based in London and Los Angeles, English screenwriter Dean Craig's first feature screenplay Caffeine, was produced independently in the US in 2005, and starred Mena Suvari, Katherine Heigl, Breckin Meyer & Mike Vogel.
His second feature, Death at a FUneral, was released internationally through MGM in 2007. The cast included Matthew Macfadyen, Keeley Hawes, Rupert Graves, Kris Marshall, Ewen Bremner, Daisy Donovan, Alan Tudyk & Peter Dinklage, and was directed by veteran filmmaker Frank Oz. It went on to win audience awards for Best Film at the HBO US Comedy Festival in Aspen, Best film at Locarno International film festival in Switzerland, and Best film at the Provincetown Festival, and achieved considerable international critical and commercial success, reaching no.1 at the box office in several countries around the world, including 5 weeks at the top in Australia.
As well as being made as a Bollywood film (Daddy Cool), Death at a Funeral has also been remade as a US version, produced by Sony Screen Gems, starring Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Danny Glover, Luke Wilson, James Marsden, Zoë Saldaña, Peter Dinklage and Tracy Morgan, and directed by Neil Labute. It is set for international release in April 2010.
Since becoming a professional screenwriter, Craig has been commissioned to write several US and UK feature film projects including Down and Dirty Pictures, an adaptation of the acclaimed expose of the independent film industry written by Peter Biskind; Asshole, for Warner Brothers, Affected  Provincials  Companion  for Jonny Depp and Graham King, The French Exchange, for Pathe, Moonwalk for Partizan films, and Florence of Arabia, an adaptation of the book by Christopher Buckley, produced by and starring Charlize Theron.
He has also worked in TV both in the UK and US, writing "American Cop" for Fox television, and was the sole writer of "Off the Hook," a seven part comedy show for the BBC, which aired in September/October 2009.
His latest original screenplay, A Few Best Men, is set for production in 2010.

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